WACO, Texas (ABP) — Church planting is too big a job for just seminary-trained ministers, conference leaders told a group of Baptist church starters. “Some of the best church planters in the world today are not ordained pastors,” Charles Brock, a 20-year veteran church planter in the Philippines, said during a three-day event sponsored by the Baptist General Convention of Texas.
LOS ANGELES, March 1 (Compass) — Five of seven Christians arrested in December and January for alleged “cult” activities and detained under Brunei’s Internal Security Act have been released. It was not known if any conditions were attached to their release, which occurred during the week of February 12, but they were reportedly told not to leave the country or talk about their detention, according to a source who did not want to be identified.
SANTIAGO, Chile (Compass) — The issue of religious discrimination is in the public spotlight in Chile, due to the case of San Pedro de la Paz, a town some 300 miles south of Santiago. There a Baptist lawyer named Raul Romero has filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Education and Gospel Task Force for Chile because of evident acts of religious discrimination against evangelical students in the community schools.
ANHUI
“Here we only have one registered church, which is packed out with people standing in the courtyard. However, since the church was opened, none of the accounts listing all the believers’ donations have ever been made public to them. The pastor has dismissed several Christians who originally were responsible for the finances. He also hands over the donations to the Religious Affairs Bureau to use. Not long ago, several elderly believers formed a church, but the Three Self pastor asked the Religious Affairs Bureau not to grant them a license and called the police to come and arrest them. Can such a church be blessed by God? How can it cause the gospel to spread?”
— Letter from a Christian in Anhui dated March 29, 2000
HONG KONG (Compass) — Zhang Rongliang, also known as David Zhang, is at large in China despite receiving a three-years’ hard labor sentence in December 1999. Reliable reports from central China say he was able to buy himself out of jail. But Born Again movement leader Xu Yongze remains incarcerated, despite having completed his three-year sentence on March 15, and 10 more house church leaders were arrested in southeast China in May.
Under the cover of “theological construction,” or making theology compatible with socialist society, liberal leaders of the Three Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM) and the China Christian Council (CCC) have launched a wide-ranging attack against evangelical theology in China.
ISTANBUL, June 8 (Compass) — In a long-deferred judgment handed down June 5, the Sohag Criminal Court ruled Coptic Christian villager Shaiboub Arsal guilty of the 1998 double murder of his cousin and another young Copt in southern Egypt’s El-Kosheh village.
Paul Crouch got it wrong. In fact, Christian leaders only get it that wrong once or twice a decade. The last time a Christian leader visited China and swallowed and disgorged official propaganda so obligingly for his Chinese hosts was Dr. George Carey, the current Archbishop of Canterbury, in September 1994.
LOS ANGELES (Compass) — Cuban government authorities closed a Baptist church in a Havana suburb on Easter Sunday. Members of the church must comply with the April 23 closure order or face fines or a court trial for contempt, said a pastor of another denomination who spoke on condition that his name not be used. He said that the closed church is affiliated with Cuba’s Western Baptist denomination, a sister denomination of the Southern Baptist Convention in the United States.
ISTANBUL, February 6 (Compass) — Instead of convicting the Muslim murder suspects accused of killing 21 Christians in last year’s El-Kosheh massacre, a judge in southern Egypt has accused the local Coptic clergy of responsibility for the three-day rampage.
DALLAS (BP)–The Baptist General Convention of Texas is openly discussing whether or not to sever ties with the Southern Baptist Convention and leaders have raised the possibility that the BGCT could create a new Baptist denomination at its annual meeting in October.
WASHINGTON (BP)–Religious leaders issued two documents April 17 rejecting radical environmentalism and supporting a biblical approach to ecological stewardship.
(AgapePress) – One of the biggest cities in the United States has voted to cut its ties with the Boy Scouts. In a unanimous vote last night, the Los Angeles City Council said it will no longer support the Scouts because of the group’s exclusion of homosexuals and atheists.
(AgapePress) – The national spokesman for the Boy Scouts of America says his organization will continue to stand up for values, despite recent decisions in the nation’s two largest cities.
“It is obvious that PFLAG has a NAMBLA, North American Man Boy Love Association, problem.”
Washington, D.C. Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, Chairman of Traditional Values Coalition, is appalled to learn of the immoral and illegal lifestyle of the crusader leading opposition to the Boy Scouts. On Monday, August 21 protestors in Toledo, Ohio assembled outside the Erie Shores Boy Scouts of America offices to take part in a national demonstration schedule for 36 locations around the nation. The processional was lead by John Hemstreet, President of the Toledo chapters of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) and Scouting for All; an organization dedicated to forcing the Boy Scouts to accept homosexuals.
Baptist Press) — George Walker Bush was sworn in as the 43rd president of the United States Jan. 20 and began his first full day of his presidency with a prayer service at Washington’s National Cathedral and a declaration of Jan. 21 as a National Day of Prayer and Thanksgiving.
AgapePress) The California State Board of Education has voted in favor of pushing homosexuality on children and teachers in public and private schools.
SAN FRANCISCO (BP)–A statewide day of prayer and fasting has been called in California for supporters of a proposition that would legally define marriage.
HIGHLAND, Calif. (BP)–Pro-family and religious groups across California are claiming victory after voters overwhelmingly approved a measure to legally define marriage as only “between a man and a woman.”
HIGHLAND, Calif. (BP)–Pro-family and religious groups across California are claiming victory after voters overwhelmingly approved a measure to legally define marriage as only “between a man and a woman.”