SOVIET UNION
Return Of Trumpet Call
Christian rock artist Valeri Barinov has re-formed his band, Trumpet Call, and is renewing earlier efforts to gain government permission for the group to perform publicly.
Barinov, 42, served a two-and-one-half-year sentence in a Soviet labor camp after being charged with trying to cross the Soviet border illegally. Since his release last year, Barinov has helped organize a religious youth club among Baptists in Gatchino, near Leningrad. More than 30 people attended the club’s first meeting.
Before his imprisonment, Barinov and his band secretly recorded a Christian rock opera, titled The Trumpet Call. He is known outside the Soviet Union in part because copies of the recording have been distributed in the West.
After he was released from prison, Barinov petitioned the Soviet government for permission to emigrate to the West with his wife and two daughters. But permission was denied on the grounds that he has no relatives abroad. Earlier this year, religious and political leaders in England announced a campaign to bring the musician and his family to Great Britain.
CHINA
Woman Of The Year
The Chinese government has named world-renowned scientist and physician Xiu Rui-Juan “Woman of the Year” for the third year in a row.
Xiu, 50, is vice-president of the Chinese Academy of Medical Science in Beijing and heads the academy’s Microcirculation Research Center. An outspoken Christian, she was once ridiculed in the lecture hall where she now teaches medical students, according to Baptist Press.
Xiu grew up in Zhucheng, where she and her family were close to Swedish Baptist missionaries. During the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, radicals persecuted religious believers, intellectuals, and the well-educated, among others. Xiu was forced to work as a farm laborer, and later as a poorly equipped rural doctor. But when China began its current struggle to modernize, she was invited to join the medical academy in Beijing.
“I never denied my faith or my background,” she says, “a fact that has caused me many difficult moments and suffering. Now the difficult times are over, and we thank God for freedom and for our country’s openness to the world.”
ZIMBABWE
White Bishop Resigns
The last white bishop in Zimbabwe’s Anglican church has announced he will resign next month. Bishop Robert W. S. Mercer, 51, said he is not “disgruntled,” but that he has “run out of ideas” for church growth.
“What matters are fresh energy, imagination, and initiative for a diocese which faces exciting challenges and opportunities,” he said. “I have run out of ideas.”
An Anglo-Catholic and a member of a monastic order, Mercer has been one of the most outspoken opponents of women’s ordination in the 65-million-member worldwide Anglican communion. A native of Zimbabwe, Mercer served as a parish priest in South Africa until that country’s government ordered him to leave 20 years ago.
Mercer returned to Zimbabwe, then the British colony of Rhodesia, where he served as a priest in Salisbury (now Harare) until he was consecrated as a bishop in 1977. After he retires on May 1, he said he will spend a year at England’s Resurrection Monastery, but has no plans beyond that. He is expected to be succeeded as bishop by a black churchman.
INDIA
Heroin Addiction Grows
The rising incidence of heroin addiction is challenging cultural traditions and family life in India, according to a report in the New York Times. It is estimated that 500,000 to 1 million Indians have become heroin addicts during the last five years.
“It is not a problem of the affluent,” said Amodh Kanth, a police official in New Delhi. “It has gone to the slums and the rootless migrants.”
Heroin is easily available in India, which harvests the world’s largest legally grown opium crop. (Opium is used by several Hindu groups in the country.) Heroin addiction became a problem in the early 1980s after major drug dealers decided to create a domestic market in India. About 2.7 tons of heroin were seized across the country last year, among the biggest hauls in the world. Heroin users can receive a 10-to 20-year prison term and fines of up to $17,000.
ROMANIA
Rejecting Church Officials
The Romanian government’s Department of Cults has blocked the appointments of several Baptists elected to fill area church leadership posts, according to Keston News Service. The state also blocked the appointment of a man elected as a delegate to the nationwide Baptist Union Congress, due to be held later this year.
The government refused to approve the appointment of pastor Vasile Talos as president of the Bucharest Area Baptist Association. Two other pastors were not allowed to serve in area posts in the Bucharest association. And a pastor from the Oradea area was not allowed to serve as his area’s general secretary.
Area Baptist associations held elections last fall, with little state interference. Several widely respected pastors were elected to area posts, and at least one candidate considered to be progovernment was defeated. With the recent state disapproval of the church appointments, the associations are expected to hold new elections. The triennial Baptist Union Congress cannot be held until the government approves the appointments of all area elected officials, who attend the congress as delegates.
