News Briefs: April 29, 1996

* Last Days Ministries (LDM), founded in 1977 by singer Keith Green and his wife, Melody, closed last month, following reduction of its staff by nearly two-thirds last summer (CT, July 17, 1995, p. 62). The ministry continued after Green's death in a 1982 plane crash and joined Youth with a Mission in 1991, the same year Melody Green remarried. "A ministry born for a specific time of anointing should only continue to exist for God's appointed season," Melody Green Sievright explained in the decision to end operations. LDM will continue to sell its remaining stock of music, books, and tracts from its Lindale, Texas, warehouse.

* In declaring a constitutional "right to die," the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on March 6 ruled 8 to 3 that Washington State's doctor-assisted suicide ban is unlawful. The court declared the prohibition violated the rights of terminally ill, mentally competent adults who have a right to "dignified and humane death." The ruling affects nine Western states.

* An emotional seven-year debate has come to an end, with the Evangelical Free Church of America (EFCA) "reaffirming" its view that "Jesus Christ has been raised up in his physical body." Prof. Murray J. Harris of Trinity International University in Deerfield, Illinois, had been the target of Southern Evangelical Seminary dean Norman Geisler and a coalition of 156 countercult ministries led by Duane Magnani of Witness Inc. for supporting a "cultic doctrine akin to that of Jehovah's witnesses" (CT, April 5, 1993, p. 62). Harris had described Jesus' resurrected body as "immaterial," "nonfleshy," and "invisible." In a statement January 29, EFCA president Paul Cedar said all EFCA pastors and Trinity faculty must now support the view that Jesus' resurrected body was of "flesh and bones." Trinity president Greg Waybright says Harris has agreed to the resolution.

* Tammy Faye Messner's second husband, Roe Messner, is headed for federal prison for 27 months after a March 20 sentencing on five counts of bankruptcy fraud. The couple married in 1993 after she divorced her first husband, Jim Bakker, who was serving a five-year prison term for fraud. Messner, 60, worked as a building contractor on Bakker's Heritage USA theme park. Tammy Faye Messner quit her syndicated talk show in February after six weeks due to stress and health problems related to colon cancer.