ISRAEL
Signs Of Hope And Concern
While Secretary of State James Baker was on his diplomatic mission to Israel last month, his wife, Susan, met with religious leaders and peace activists at Saint George’s Anglican Cathedral in East Jerusalem. The group, including Palestinian Christian leaders Elias Chacour and Bishop Samir Kafity, shared their concerns about the situation with Mrs. Baker and then held an interfaith prayer service.
Life for Palestinians has gotten “infinitely worse” since the Gulf War, says World Vision’s Jerusalem representative, Bill Warnock. Christian church services have been interrupted, and during Easter some Palestinians were prevented from attending special worship services. Lands belonging to a Christian village north of Ramallah were confiscated by Israeli officials, presumably to be used for a new Jewish settlement in the West Bank, Warnock reports.
Palestinian Christians were encouraged by an Easter-week visit from Alex Awad, pastor of the East Jerusalem Baptist Church. The Palestinian pastor, brother of Bethlehem Bible College president Bishara Awad, has not been allowed into Israel since he was asked to leave in March 1989. A third brother, Mubarak, was deported from Israel for political activities. Alex said an Israeli official promised a final decision on his case within a month of his return.
WORLDWIDE
Pentecostalism Flourishes
Pentecostal and charismatic churches worldwide now count 382 million members, or one of every five Christians. They gain 19 million members per year, and they donate $34 billion to Christian causes. Those figures, published in the International Bulletin of Missionary Research, document the tremendous growth of the Pentecostal and charismatic movement, which many missiologists say is the most significant missions development in the latter half of the twentieth century.
According to researcher L. Grant McClung, the movement includes more than 11,000 Pentecostal and 3,000 independent charismatic denominations, covering 7,000 languages. Two of every three Pentecostals live in Third World nations.
SPAIN
Church And State At Odds
Church-state relations have reached an all-time low in Spain, once Western Europe’s most Catholic country, where church leaders and government officials have clashed over a variety of public policies. The latest dispute came over a government program to make condoms available to school-children between the ages of 14 and 19. The Spanish Episcopal Conference condemned the government for promoting “collective sexual disorder” and gained the backing of Pope John Paul II in its objections.
The church has also been at odds with Spain’s socialist government over increasingly liberalized policies on birth control, sex education in schools, abortion, and divorce, and the suppression of religious education in schools. About 80 percent of the population is identified as Catholic, but less than 30 percent regularly practice their faith.
Further disagreements between church and state seem inevitable, as there are demands for a new law to permit free abortion up to the twelfth week of pregnancy (current law allows abortion only in cases of rape, severe deformity, or risk to the mother’s life). The church also faces the possible end next year of more than $150 million in government subsidies to dioceses.
KENYA
Missionary Killed
Southern Baptist missionary Lynda Bethea, 42, was killed, and her husband, Ralph, was injured when they were attacked March 27 by robbers on a road near Kijabe, Kenya. The couple was traveling to the Rift Valley Academy, a missionary boarding school in northwest Kenya, to meet their two older sons and return with them to their home in Mombasa. Two other Bethea children had remained in Mombasa.
Ralph Bethea told Kenyan police that he and his wife stopped their car at about 11 P.M., less than a mile from the academy, to assist a man lying across a rural road. At least three other men armed with iron bars and a gun emerged from the bush, demanded money, and attacked the couple. Lynda died at the scene from severe head injuries. Police arrested four suspects the next day.
PEOPLE AND EVENTS
Briefly Noted
Died: Samuel Odunaike, long-time president of the Association of Evangelicals of Africa and Madagascar and chairman of the Nigeria Evangelical Fellowship, on April 11, due to pneumonia with complications from diabetes. He was 57. Odunaike, an ordained layman in the Foursquare Gospel Church, was a prominent contender for the presidency of Nigeria in elections to be held next year. He also served on the executive committees of the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization and the World Pentecostal Conference, and was a regional vice-president for World Vision International.
Approved: Privately owned religious broadcasting in Great Britain. Parliament recently passed legislation opening the airwaves; prior to the action, church-related programming was limited to a weekly one-hour BBC time slot and other small, local broadcasts. Only one Christian radio operator, United Christian Broadcasters, and one Christian television operator, Vision Christian Network, are currently licensed in the United Kingdom.
