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Sad news from Alaska
Monday night, 19-year-old James Cunning attended an Assembly of God revival meeting. By midnight, he was still thinking about what he'd heard, and decided to go for a walk down a bike trail in his Anchorage neighborhood. Then he came across two other men, about his age, and started telling them about God. "Jesus loves you and he has a plan for all ya'll," he said.

The two men seemed interested at first, Cunning said, until one of them punched him in the face.

The other one then pulled a gun, asked "Where's your God now?" and shot him in the arm.

Cunning says he understands his attackers. When he moved out of his parents' house at age 14, he says, "I got into the gang-banging, the drug-dealing and all that other stuff." But six months ago, he returned home to reunite with his family, and earlier this month he found Jesus. And ever since, he says, he's had to talk about it.

"It's like this feeling you get inside," he told the Anchorage Daily News. "It comes from the heart. I feel like I've got to let people know there's hope."

Sadly, it was only the first story of religion-related violence in the area this week. Yesterday in Big Lake (about 44 miles from Anchorage), pastor Phillip Mielke shot and killed two men he caught robbing his church, Big Lake Community Chapel. The area has been plagued by break-ins this winter, but this was apparently the first to target a church.

Local residents say the burglary wasn't only immoral and illegal, it was stupid. "That's got to be the smallest church in the Valley," Helme Blank told the Daily News. "There's maybe 50 of them. That's why they call 'em poor as church mice."

Baptist missionaries won't resign
The six missionaries told by the Southern Baptist Convention's International Mission Board to either resign or be fired for "clearly and publicly stat[ing] positions contrary" to the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message say they won't quit, reports Associated Baptist Press.

"We cannot resign," Rick and Nancy Dill, missionaries to Germany, wrote in a letter to IMB president Jerry Rankin. "We are guilty of no misconduct or false teaching, and have been accused of none." In a letter last fall refusing to sign the faith statement, the Dills explained, "Our authority is the Bible, and no man-written document."

Similarly, Leon Johnson, who serves in Mozambique, said that Rankin's statement that he and his wife teach a message contrary to Southern Baptist doctrine is untrue. "I challenge you to produce one piece of evidence to substantiate this statement. … We already stand accountable to Southern Baptists. Signing a document will not make me more accountable."

The six missionaries expect to be fired at the May 6 meeting of IMB trustees.

Shorter College officially leaves Georgia Baptist Convention in wake of ruling
Shorter College's dispute with the Georgia Baptist Convention took a significant turn Wednesday as a judge ruled it could transfer its assets—worth about $50 million—to a new private foundation. "The ruling signaled a victory for the college in a long-running dispute with the Baptist convention over funding and selection of trustees," says the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, but the Baptist Press reports that the Georgia Baptist Convention saw victory in the judge's ruling "that Shorter College's board of trustees must still be elected by the Georgia Baptist Convention."

No one believes this is the end of the story. The case is almost certainly going to the Georgia Supreme Court.

Persecution:

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April (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47