Operation Mobilization (OM) has announced plans to purchase a new ship to replace the ill-fated M.V. Logos, which ran aground earlier this year near the southernmost tip of South America. OM officials say news of the Logos’s misfortune resulted in widespread sympathy and financial support.
“From the moment the news broke our offices have been inundated with phone calls from both the media and anxious supporters of the Logos ministry,” said Peter Maiden, OM’S associate director. “Gifts large and small began to arrive almost immediately.” OM’S leaders say they will replace the Logos with a bigger and more efficient vessel.
The Logos was operated by OM as a worldwide evangelistic ministry, OM’S founder and director, George Verwer, recently announced that negotiations are under way with Chinese authorities to obtain permission for the sister ship, Doulos, to dock in Xiamen in China next fall.
TRENDS
Military Spending Soars
World military spending reached a high of $900 billion in 1987, according to a report by Ruth Leger Sivard, a former official with the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. According to Sivard’s analysis, the world now spends about two-and-one-half times more on militaries than it did in 1960.
Arms spending by the United States and Soviet Union totals more than $500 billion. The U.S. spends 6.4 percent of its gross national product (GNP) on defense, while the Soviet Union spends 11.4 percent of its GNP. Yet military spending in the Middle East accounts for 18 percent of that region’s GNP.
Sivard also reports that 22 wars were going on in the world in 1987, more than at any other time in history. Cumulative recorded deaths in these conflicts now stand at 2.2 million—more than 80 percent of them civilian.
VATICAN
Pope Blames Superpowers
In his seventh encyclical letter, Pope John Paul II accused the superpowers of playing out their competition in the Third World and thus reducing developing nations to “parts of a machine, cogs on a gigantic wheel.” He also characterized both capitalism and Marxism as “imperfect” systems “urgently in need of radical correction.”
An encyclical is the highest form of papal teaching. This most recent one, entitled “The Social Concerns of the Church,” was intended to provide an authoritative Roman Catholic analysis of contemporary global politics.
Though the document noted improvement in the area of human rights, it contended that relief-and-development aid to poor nations inflicts tremendous ideological pressure on those nations. The result is often internal conflicts that result in civil war.
In a brief reference to the church, John Paul said the needs of the poor must come before “costly furnishings for divine worship.” He also suggested that churches may need to sell such adornments in order to provide food and shelter to the poor.
MOZAMBIQUE
Churches Get Books
World Vision International will begin providing books, pastoral libraries, and qualified leaders to growing congregations in war-torn and drought-ravaged Mozambique.
In spite of discouraging conditions in the Southeast African nation, the Christian community reports steady growth. But congregations there often must share only one Bible and hymnal, according to Chuck Stephens, a World Vision staff member who has lived in Mozambique since 1985. World Vision’s new program of assistance to churches is an extension of their food and humanitarian aid program that has been conducted there since 1984.
UPDATE
Ordination Fight Continues
With the Anglican Conference of Bishops just around the corner, 44 bishops from around the world issued a statement against the ordination of women. The declaration warns that ordination of women to the priesthood and the episcopacy threatens the future of the worldwide Anglican communion.
The document has been under preparation since last summer when 12 British and American bishops met in London and discussed the issue. Its drafters say they hope it will “provide a focus for traditional Anglicans” in advance of the Lambeth Conference of Bishops, which opens in July in England. In defense of their position, the bishops say ordination of women is “inconsistent with the tradition of the church since New Testament times and is opposed by the greater part of the church today.”
PEOPLE AND EVENTS
Briefly Noted
Diagnosed: As suffering from leukemia, Bishop Festo Kivengere of the Anglican Church of Uganda; he has received treatment in London and Nairobi, Kenya. When told of his condition, which is described as “terminal,” Kivengere said, “I consider it a rare opportunity for a brother to know that his time is limited in this world so that he can plan and pray and look up into heaven.” Many consider Kivengere the leading black evangelist of Africa today.
Launched: The Korean Partnership Missions Fellowship, a new effort by Korean evangelicals to establish a missions policy independent of Western mission societies. Sun Hee Kwak was elected chairman, and Myung Hyuk Kim was elected general secretary of the group, which encompasses six denominations.
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