C. S. LEWIS
Kilns Restoration Work Progresses
Seventy volunteers completed substantial restoration work in a five-week period ending August 5 at the Kilns, the Oxford home of C. S. Lewis from 1933 until his death in 1963.
After further repairs next July, the 12-room home will open as a residence for Christian faculty on sabbatical or graduate students doing research work, says J. Stanley Mattson, president of the C. S. Lewis Foundation in Redlands, California.
Mattson led a diverse group of Lewis lovers—who all paid their own airfare, food, and housing costs—this summer in beginning to restore the Kilns to circa 1940 condition: replacing the tile roof, installing new windows, reopening fireplaces, refinishing hardwood floors, replastering walls. With the volunteer efforts of people such as a California surgeon, a Canadian schoolteacher, and a carpenter from Lewis’s Anglican church in Oxford, $85,000 worth of repairs were accomplished for $25,000. Another $13,000 is needed to pay off debts.
Much work remains for next year, including garden landscaping and converting a garage into a study library. Mattson expects more volunteers next year because of the December release of Shadowlands, a movie about Lewis directed by Richard Attenborough and starring Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger.
ISRAEL
Jerusalem Prayer Goes High Tech
From the same company that started a fax line to the Wailing Wall now comes a prayer line to Jerusalem.
In a joint venture with Bezek, Israel’s state-run telephone company, a Christian newspaper, the Jerusalem Christian Review (JCR), instituted the Jerusalem Christian Review Prayer Line this summer. The line is averaging 200 calls per day.
People from around the world now may phone 011-972-232-3232 to pray with Christian volunteers in Jerusalem. The phone call costs $1.99 per minute, 24 hours a day.
The service provides an opportunity for “a stronger bonding between the Christian community of Jerusalem and their faithful brothers and sisters worldwide,” says Israeli cabinet member Moshe Shahal.
RELIGION LAW
Russian Parliament Limits Freedoms
President Boris Yeltsin has rejected a proposed Russian Parliament amendment to limit the 1990 Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Organizations, but lawmakers have countered with an even more restrictive bill.
The Parliament, on July 14, voted 166 to 1 to prohibit independent activities of foreign religious organizations and their representatives who are not Russian citizens (CT, Aug. 16, 1993, p. 44). Yeltsin, under pressure from the West, including 170 U.S. members of Congress who sent a letter urging him to veto the bill, returned the proposal to Parliament on August 4 with several changes.
But on August 27, Parliament sent a revised version containing new restraints and elevating religious organizations that keep “the traditional confessions of Russia”—namely the Russian Orthodox Church—to special status. The 60 million-member Russian Orthodox Church, which has complained of the proselytizing efforts of such groups as the Mormons and Unification Church, is putting pressure on Yeltsin to sign the new law.
“This version of the law the Parliament has passed appears even more restrictive of foreign religious groups,” says Peter Deyneka, head of Russian Ministries, in Wheaton, Illinois. The new law would force missionaries to obtain special government approval to be in the country; allow the government to close churches; and make conversion by “coercion” to another faith a crime.
PEOPLE AND EVENTS
In Brief
The Conservative Congregational Christian Conference (CCCC) has commissioned its first resident missionaries. Bob and Marilyn Wilber will be “fraternal workers” on the islands of Ponape and Chuuk in Micronesia. They were missionary educators in Nigeria with SIM from 1966 to 1973. For the past 18 years, Bob Wilber has pastored a CCCC church in Perry, Michigam.
• The Evangelical Alliance Mission (TEAM) has named Bible Christian Union president George Murray as its next general director. Murray will take over the duties of Richard Winchell of the Wheaton, Illinois-based TEAM beginning in August 1994. Winchell will remain on board until then.
• Albania has approved the right of Evangelical Brotherhood, a coalition of Protestant churches, to own property and hold public meetings. President of the new group is 73-year-old Ligor Cina, who spent several years imprisoned as a persecuted Christian. Muslims, Catholics, and members of the Orthodox faith have had such legal rights since Albania ended official atheism in 1991 when Communist rule ceased.
