World Scene: January 10, 1994

PEOPLE AND EVENTS

In Brief

Wycliffe Bible Translators linguist Chuck Walton, who was abducted from his home November 14 by five armed Muslim extremists in the Sulu Islands, was released unharmed on December 7. The Philippines government negotiated with a splinter group of the Moral National Liberation Front for Walton’s release. Walton, 60, of Philadelphia, has been with Wycliffe in the Philippines since 1963 and had been working on the Pangutaran Sama language.

• The Far East Broadcasting Company board of directors in La Mirada, California, has selected Bill V. Tarter to succeed Robert H. Bowman as president of the radio ministry. Tarter, the son of missionary parents, spent most of his youth in India. For the past six years he has been Latin American director for World Concern in Haiti.

• Gilles Bimazubute, executive secretary of the Burundi Bible Society and recently appointed Parliament deputy speaker in the three-month-old democratic government of President Melchior Ndadaye, was taken from his home October 21 and shot dead. Ndadaye also was murdered in the military coup. Bimazubute, 56, was a Roman Catholic.

• Dallas evangelist Ramesh Richard held the first cross-denominational Christian evangelistic campaign in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in November. The International Bible Society sponsored the meetings on the multiethnic Indian territory island complex in the Bay of Bengal.

• Arsonists set fire to the Baptist church in Komsomolsk in eastern Siberia on October 16, burning the building to the ground the same day two Romanian Bible institute students arrived to disciple new converts. The students had been sent by God’s Love in Action, a ministry of San Antonio evangelist Sammy Tippit. Tippit held a crusade in Komsomolsk last July, and attendance at the Baptist church had risen to 500 from 40. Some Orthodox church members had protested the crusade.

• Sixteen teams of Israeli government archaeologists began scouring the Judean Desert near Jericho in November in an effort to find new Dead Sea Scrolls before much of the region is turned over to Palestinian control as part of the Israeli-Palestine Liberation Organization accord.

• OMS International and the Korean Evangelical Holiness Church have dedicated the Moscow Evangelical Christian Seminary, with a student body of 48.

PALESTINIAN ACCORD

Awad Goes Home to West Bank

In a tangible sign of the new possibilities created by Israeli-Palestinian rapprochement, the Israeli government in November granted Palestinian Christian Alex Awad a tourist visa. Awad, who has been denied entrance to Israel and its occupied territories since 1989, will be able to apply for a work permit once he has returned to that country.

“This is breakthrough news for us,” Awad says. “Now we can go and resume our ministry.” He plans to return to a small Baptist congregation in East Jerusalem he once pastored. He also taught at Bethlehem Bible College—founded by his brother Bishara Awad—five years ago before the Israelis made him leave the country. Awad has worked as a United Methodist missionary in Texas the past four years. He credits the Methodist church and about 100 members of Congress for supporting his case.

UKRAINE

Doomsday Cult Fails to Deliver

Doomsday—November 14—came and went for self-proclaimed messiah Maria Devi Khrystos, who spent the day in jail. She was arrested November 10 as authorities considered charges of hooliganism and seizing state property.

The Great White Brotherhood, the Kiev-based cult started by Khrystos and her husband, may be banned in Russia and Ukraine due to concern over the disappearance of teenagers who later resurfaced in the cult.

Fear of the cult “will play into the hands of forces that work to restrict religion,” says Mark Elliott of Wheaton College’s Institute for East-West Christian Studies. “As extremists—such as this White Brotherhood cult—receive press attention, it’s bound to make conditions more difficult for evangelicals.”

Khrystos, a former Communist youth leader, declared herself messiah in 1990.

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