Regions Beyond

Onesimus Online: Is Christianity African?: "There is a persistent myth among both Christians and Muslims and others that Christianity is a Western religion that is foreign to Africa. ..."

Best Non-Muslim Blogger on Islam

2010-11-17T23:41:00.000-05:00

Best Non-Muslim Blogger on Islam

HIGHLY QUESTIONABLE METHODS

2010-11-17T23:31:00.000-05:00

HIGHLY QUESTIONABLE METHODS

GOD-CENTERED GOSPEL VS. MAN-CENTERED GOSPEL

2010-11-17T23:30:00.000-05:00

GOD-CENTERED GOSPEL VS. MAN-CENTERED GOSPEL

Insight from Alexander Solzhenitsyn

2010-09-29T10:48:00.010-04:00

"It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes. We make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us to seek is where it accords with our emotions."

Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) was a Russian dissident, novelist, dramatist, historian, and the winner of 1970 Nobel Prize for literature. He survived eight years in Stalin's labor camps. He was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974 and returned to Russia in 1994. His writings that exposed the tyranny and horrors of the Soviet forced labor system included The Cancer Ward (1966), The First Circle (1964), The Gulag Archipelago (1976), and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) . His heroic figures portrayed the triumph of man over suffering and tyranny. He also warned the west of its moral bankruptcy, vulgar materialism, and probable political fate.

Malawi: Land of Contrasts

2009-10-20T19:48:00.016-04:00

Sometimes called the Switzerland of Africa, Malawi is a small country of majestic mountains, highland forests, picturesque tea plantations, and some surprisingly semi-arid regions. Most of the agricultural land can best be classified as the semi-arid tropics. The country is over 500 miles long, but in width, only 5 miles in some areas, and up to 100 miles maximum. Lake Malawi is the third largest in Africa. A brief visit to Nkhata Bay was a highlight of our travels because of its splendid view of the lake and its bustling, open-air market along the narrow main village street. Magnificent, but often cloud-enveloped, Mount Mulanje is almost 10,000 feet high.

Most minor roads are untarred and quite dusty in the dry season. We saw no rain during the nearly one month we were there in the hot dry month of September. Bridges were at times treacherous, parts of them being removed by those who needed the wood or metal.

We hiked about seven miles early one morning to visit one of our Seventh Day Baptist church's four dispensaries in Malawi. Most of the way we hiked along the railway line. On five occasions we walked across rather long narrow railway bridges, as we occasionally peaked nervously at the scenic but shallow river far beneath us. Parts of the river divide Malawi from Mozambique. The dispensary or clinic had been established in Chipho, on the river border area, at an earlier time when Mozambique refugees had been pouring into Malawi to escape the civil war violence in Mozambique. We discovered after finishing our review and training at the clinic, and after we had had lunch with our local deacon and his wife, that the train, on which we were to return, had derailed the evening before. We ended up hiking back over the same 7 miles, this time in the heat of the day, praying that the train wouldn't catch us while crossing the longest of the rail bridges, the last one before reaching our home base of the previous week, Makapwa. The train did indeed return but thankfully not until after dark that evening, a few hours after our return to Makapwa.

Malawians are some of the friendliest and most hospitable people I have met anywhere in the world. The children especially were a joy to be around. As we travelled on the very rural dirt roads, the children waved, shouting to us in excitement. They also would quickly run to be included in any quick, candid photos I would attempt to shoot.

Beautiful modern architecture was evident in Llongwe, the new capital city located in the central region where former strongman President Hastings Kamuzu Banda was born. The charming small city of Zomba, in the southern region is the former colonial capital and location of Chancellor College of the University of Malawi. I spent one afternoon at Chancellor College doing research on Charles Domingo, an early Christian pastor, teacher, and writer, who was trained at Livingstonia under Dr. Robert Laws, and even for a time, at Lovedale in South Africa. Domingo was baptized by the famous early anti-colonialism hero of Malawi, John Chilembwe, a Baptist pastor who had been trained in Virginia in the 1890's, and who in 1915 led an uprising against the British, when the hated hut tax, and onerous conscription of Malawians to fight the Germans and their allies in neighboring Tanzania during Wold War I, had caused a lot of turmoil in Nyasaland (Malawi since independence in 1964). Domingo, himself became a Seventh Day Baptist, through the English-born, Baptist missionary Joseph Booth, most famous as a vocal opponent of the corrupt colonialist system. Booth had written a book in 1897 entitled Africa for the Africans. Both Booth and Domingo were deported from Malawi, though both were pacifist oriented and not directly involved in the 1915 uprising. Domingo soon returned to Malawi, but Booth remained in and died in South Africa. Chilembwe was hunted down and shot near the Mozambique border, while many of his band of supporters were executed. Domingo himself was the first certified native teacher in Nyasaland, and prioritized setting up schools for chilren along with the churches he helped establish in the northern region of Malawi.
Zomba is surrounded by the Zomba Plateau and some mountainous terrain. On the top of the plateau is the stately Ku Chawe Hotel, recently restored. We enjoyed its fine restaurant with outside dining and a great view down into the valley. On our descent to the valley, we marvelled at the bicycles, on the steep, long, winding road, heavily laden with firewood being carefully guided down the long, steep mountain road to potential buyers of the firewood in Zomba. We were amazed at the strong young men who would day after day accomplish this herculean task, in order to eke out a living and to put food on the table.

Also in the southern region is Blantyre, the largest city. It was especially intriguing to me because of its impressive history and fine old architecture. Inside Blantyre's magnificent St Michael and All Angels Church, completed in 1891, are brass monuments to David Livingstone, the famous missionary-explorer, as well as to missionary David Clement Scott, who was a superb linguist and noteworthy cultural specialist. Scott published the comprehensive Cyclopedic Dictionary of the Mang'anja Language (forerunner of Malawi's national language Chichewa) in 1892, and the entire New Testament in 1896. Amazingly, the beautiful church is itself the work of David Scott. The Scottish Presbyterian missionary had no formal training in architecture or any of the building trades. The five sanctuary windows are magnificent art treasures. The inscriptions are inspiring: "The Good Shepherd," "The Good Physician," "And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me." The clocktower on the grounds also has a monument with a rather long list of the names of the early Scottish Presbyterian missionaries. The Mount Soche Hotel, and surrounding gardens, are among Blantyre's most eloquent. The Mandala House is reputedly Blantyre's oldest building.

Mzuzu, in the northern region is the only other city of any significant size. It is in an area of mountains and of a thriving timber industry. We saw many monkeys and a small "deer" during our travels in the northern region. The city also has a fairly new public university.

We were privileged to visit people and churches in all three regions of the country. Many of the churches had no benches, either of wood, or of the more traditional mud variety. The windows and doors were also often unfinished, being gradually finished as the funds were raised. Many times extra bricks are made and kilned in order to sell, so that the relatively expensive corrugated metal roof could be purchased. The corrugated metal sheets are often secured over long hand-hewn, wooden poles. My last weekend in Blantyre I preached (from Acts 1 and 2, and the work of the Holy Spirit in mission) with an interpretor, at a church where 200 to 250 adults and children sat on the earthen floor.

In the central region especially, we visited villages that were predominantly Muslim. The Muslims make up at least 15% of the population, mainly among the Yao people (as many as 90% of the Yao are Muslim), and to a much lesser extent among the Chewa people. Picturesque mosques are evident in these villages, as well as in all the cities. There have been only three presidents since Malawi's independence, the second being a Muslim. The first, Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda, was Presbyterian, and the current president, Mose Bingu, is Roman Catholic. Current Vice President Joyce Banda, is Presbyterian. The largest religious groups in Malawi are the Roman Catholics, the Sunni Muslims, the Presbyterians, the Seventh day Adventists, and several Pentecostal-Charismatic churches, including the Assemblies of God and the Living Waters churches. The Anglicans are not as prominent as they were in the colonial days, prior to Malawi's independence.
We enjoyed the great variety of food, but especially the fresh vegetables and fruit from our host family's garden in Limbe, on the outskirts of Blantyre. I also especially enjoyed the 'chambo" (talapia) and other fish dishes. Nsima, made from corn is the national food staple. Malawias joke that if you haven't had nsima with your meal, then you haven't really eaten a meal at all.

A portion of the Old Testament (Genesis and Exodus) is available from the Bible Society of Malawi in the Yao language, in a paperback, with drawings reminiscent of the Good News for Modern Man New Testament ( the Today's English Version). Their Bible House is in Blantyre. The New Testament may be published within months. I was also able to purchase from the Bible House in Blantyre the complete Bible in Chichewa (Chewa), the national language of Malawi. Both the older "Revised Chinyanja (Union) Version", also known as the Buku Lopatulika (first edition 1922, with revised editions in 1936 and 1966) and the much newer version, the modern speech Buku Loyera, finally completed in 1998, are readily available. The Buku Loyera was a project of both Protestant and Roman Catholic scholars. Some Protestant and independent Churches still prefer to use the older Buku Lopatulika. I visited the bookshop of a large Catholic Cathedral in Blantyre, but was unable to find the earlier Roman Catholic translation, Malembo Oyera, done over many years by the French missionary Fr Louis Villy and finally published in 1966. The Catholic bookshop only sold the Buku Loyera. Neither was I able to locate in any used bookstore either the Malembo Loyera or a pre-independence copy of the old Chinyanga Bible, the New Testament of which is, essentially, with some later revisions, the translation work of the late 19th century pioneer missionary David Clement Scott, and the Old Testament of which is essentially the work completed in 1919 of missionaries Rev W. Murray and his assistant Rev Alexander Heaterwick. The most recent edition of the Buku Lopatulika is as close as I could get to the older Bible. The Chinyanga language evolved into the Chichewa language under President Hastings, soon after Malawi's independence in 1964. In Zambia and Zimbabwe it is still called Nyanja (Chinyanja) My search for these earlier versions continues.

I was able to acquire full Bibles in Tumbuka ( or Chitumbuka, the prefix "Chi" indicates language of the particular people group, Tumbuka), Sena (or Chisena), and Kyangonde all published by The Bible Society in Malawi, but copyrighted originally by either the United Bible Societies or the British and Foreign Bible Society. Chitumbuka is also spoken in neighboring Zambia. These Bibles I found either at the Bible House or at the CLAIM (Christian Literature Association in Malawi) Bookstore. Both of these excellent book outlets are located in downtown Blantyre. A used copy of the New Testament and Psalms in the Lomwe language was traded to me by our hosts' son, since, though of Lomwe ancestry, he can't read Lomwe. It was published in 1991 by the United Bible Societies afiliate Casa da Biblia in Mozambique, but was originally copyrighted by the National Bible Society of Scotland in 1930. The Lomwe language is spoken more in neihboring Mozambique than in Malawi. I was informed at the Bible House in Blantyre by a 12-year employee that the full Bible in Lomwe should be available within about 5 years, and that the feasability of a possible partial or full Bible translation into Tonga (the Tonga are a people group in the northern region, mostly residing near Lake Malawi, consisting of only about 170,000 people) is still being researched.

The health, sanitation, and land management needs in Malawi at times seem staggering. Probably 10-20% of the population are HIV positive, though the percentage may have declined somewhat lately. Life expectancy is only in the age 40's, having declined because of the AIDS epidemic. Falciparum malaria is very deadly, especially among the very young and the immunosuppressed. There have been over 800 cases of the dreaded cholera disease this year already. Last year only a few cases of cholera were reported. Cholera is especially deadly in the very young, causing rapid dehydration from the diarrhea produced.

Maternal and infant mortality rates are very high compared to the western world. Malnutrition related to droughts has been common in the past. Irrigation of some of the semi-arid lands of Malawi is needed, but is still relatively uncommon. Controlled burning of the land is common. I saw these burnings very frequently in many regions of Malawi when I was there in September.

Corn is the staple of most Malawian diets, yet corn yields are low compared to western standards. Here were some average corn yields (admittedly a few years ago) in tons per hectare (one hectare equals 2.4 acres): USA about 9 (Indiana and Illinois are an even better, at 16), South Africa 4, Malawi 1.4, Mozambique 0.9 (three of four of our church's clinics are very near the Mozambique border). Average for all of Africa is 1.5, so Malawi was actually at about the average African yield, and also of the neighboring Zambia yield for corn, but significantly better than neighboring Mozambique yield. Malawi's corn yield may now be above the African average as food production in Malawi has increased significantly in the past 2 years or so, primarily due to some government initiatives to improve farming techniques and land management. Another positive note: uranium is now being mined, for export, in the far north of Malawi, near Karonga.

Would you please pray as individuals for Malawi. Also pray in Bible study groups, and in local churches. Here are some suggested prayer items:

1. Completion and publication of the Yao New Testament within the next few months.

2. Completion of the rest of Old Testament in Lomwe.

3. Possible translation of at least a portion of the Bible in the Tonga language.

4. A Holy Spirit led revival in Malawi, as previously occurred in the early 20th century subsequent much fervent prayer.

5. Spiritual discernment for Christians in Malawi concerning some of Satan's imitations, especially both cultic and occultic imitations. Jehovah's Witnesses and other anti-Trinitarian cults are prevalent. Prosperity gospel teaching seems to be seen and heard daily on TV and radio in Malawi. Witchcraft, spiritism, and syncretism are present. Literature about the cults and occult is needed- especially in the Chichewa language, not just in English.

6. Community health evangelism programs by local churches are needed. Teaching the women (probably by other, more mature Christian women) basic maternity and child health principles has been shown to have the greatest impact in lowering infant and maternal mortality rates.

7. Effective chastity teaching in the churches, especially for the youth. Better teaching regarding AIDS.

8. That Muslims and Hindus in Malawi would come to know the living Christ. The Yao people group of the south and cental regions are over one million in number and are almost 90% Muslim). Some of the Chewa peoples are also Muslim. Most of the minority Asian peoples in Malawi (originally from south Asia, mostly Gujarati and Tamil) are either Hindu or Muslims, yet unreached with the gospel of Christ.

Thanks for your prayers. I wish to especially thank our financial supporters and prayer partners, without whom this mission trip would not even have been possible. Most of all, thanksgiving is due to the Sovereign Lord of all, who has promised to bring in an abundant harvest of souls as we sow the seed of the gospel message.

Such assuring promises give us much hope, encouragement, and anchoring of our faith in Christ (Hebrews 6:18-19), We realize that God is in control and that he is the worthy object of all our mission in life. When our mission, witness, and work on earth is accomplished, we will still have an eternity to praise and worship him. That is why worship, and not missions, is indeed in the final analysis our ultimate priority (Rev 5:9-14 and Rev 7:9-17). All praise be to God the Father, and to the Lord Jesus Christ, and to the Holy Spirit, the driving force behind God-centered and God-honoring missions.

By God's grace and mercy, and for His glory and honor,
Ron Davis

AddThis - Sharing http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0809/goldson_Darwins_App...

2009-08-28T14:40:00.001-04:00

AddThis - Sharing http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0809/goldson_Darwins_App...

Shared via AddThis

Audio Bible Malawi

2009-08-24T23:53:00.001-04:00

God's Word in Audio - Testimonies

Faith Comes By Hearing associates gather information and testimonies about what God is doing in and through Audio Bible listening programs in heart languages around the world.

Father to the Fatherless

This past summer, 23-year-old Kristie Campbell and her fiancée, 24-year-old Trever Duarte, took six Proclaimers to Malawi: One to the children at the Grace of God Orphanage and one to the caretakers who cook for the children; others were distributed throughout the area. Now the children spend much of their free time listening to God’s Word. Kristie says, “When they received the Proclaimer, they were sitting in the hot sun, totally engaged. You can’t get these children to get so engaged in something, but this is great!”

As well as filling their free time, the children can now also hear about God the Father’s love for them. Some have been forsaken and abandoned because their parents’ lives were taken by disease. Others have been abused. God’s Word says, “When my mother and father forsake me, then the Lord will take me up” (Psalm 27:10). God’s Word reveals His great love and concern for the fatherless, and now these children can hear for themselves about their heavenly Father’s love for them—in their own mother tongue of Chichewa.

Kristie says, “We bring them all sorts of gadgets: potato peelers, beautiful frying pans for the open fire, African Bible commentaries, Bibles . . . but the Proclaimers were THE BEST gift we ever brought to our Native friends in Malawi. They are used non-stop. The children not only listen to the Proclaimer in their free time, but also during Bible School and their morning and evening prayer times.”

The caretakers who cook for the children also received a Proclaimer. They cook 12 hours a day for 120 children, leaving not much free time or time to attend church. They set the Proclaimer carefully on the dirt floor beside the open fire and they play it the whole time they are cooking. Even though they cannot read, or attend church, they can now hear God’s Word.

A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in his holy dwelling - Psalm 68:5

Click here for video of more FCBH work in Malawi.

From Naming’azi Listening Post-Thyolo:

Mr. Mizeri, who is the leader of Naming’azi Listening post, observed that the Faith Comes By Hearing program has brought hope and comfort into the lives of the members, especially now that HIV/AIDS is everywhere. The program has also equipped members to be able to witness to others about the love of God - a thing which was not there before the introduction of the Audio Bible listening programs.

From Pentecostal Holiness Church – Balaka:

Mrs. Padambo was over the moon when she gave her views regarding the FCBH Audio Bible listening program. She said the program is helping illiterate members to know and recite Bible verses, and with these they are able to assist fellow friends. The program has also resulted in a steady increase in the number of members attending church services. Above all, most members couldn’t pray or preach in church before, but because of Faith Comes By Hearing, people are more confident and full of faith.

From Fountain of Life Church:

Pastor Chisale of Fountain of Life Church made the following observations since his members started the Faith Comes By Hearing listening program:

"Members now know biblical concepts that were not known before the introduction of FCBH programs and members are now able to share and openly discuss Scriptures from the Bible without being shy."

From NYAMBADWE Youth Bible Study Group:

Lusayo, a youth from Nyambadwe Youth Bible Study Group, spoke on how he has benefited from hearing God's Word in his own language. First, he said that he has grown spiritually since he now is able to resist and overcome womanizing and other tempting situations influenced by peer pressure. Secondly, the program has increased his understanding of the Bible.

“There are some Scriptures which I didn’t understand that I now understand,” Lusayo remarked.

Thirdly, he is very grateful to God that through this program, he has now made a lot of new friends who are very helpful in his spiritual life. Lusayo also says that he has learned to make good use of his leisure time; instead of indulging in unnecessary activities, he uses he studies his Bible with his friends.

Some other testimonies:

Jesse used to be short-tempered before hearing the Word of God. When she picked a quarrel with a friend or neighbor, she would go for months without talking to the neighbor. But after joining the listening sessions, Jesse has now developed a heart of forgiveness as required by the Bible.

Stella lost her husband some years ago, but she has been having hallucinations of him every night. At the Faith Comes By Hearing listening sessions, she learned that prayer is the answer to all problems, including hallucinations. She started praying alone in her house so that God would deliver her from the torment. After a few days, her request was answered and now she sleeps peacefully with no more hallucinations.

Agness was an alcoholic. She couldn’t go for even a day without drinking. Having listened through the New Testament in her own language, she is now a completely reformed person. She no longer drinks, but spends most of her time in prayer.

Esther's health was very poor and weak. She couldn’t go to work in her garden. She was dependent on her husband and children for everything. After attending an Audio Bible listening program and being prayed for by group members, she is now healed and can even do gardening.

Posted using ShareThis

Free Audio Bible Download | Faith Comes By Hearing

2009-08-24T22:41:00.001-04:00

Free Audio Bible Download | Faith Comes By Hearing

Posted using ShareThis

Charles Domingo and Seventh Day Baptists in Malawi

2009-07-17T23:39:00.026-04:00

Charles Vicente Domingo can be considered the founder, in 1910, of an ongoing, continuous Seventh Day Baptist work in Nyasaland. He was born about 1880 in Mozambique. Nyasaland, located in Central Africa, was renamed Malawi at the time of independence in 1964. The Seventh Day Baptist work has continued unabated for at least one hundred years. It is unclear whether a Seventh Day Baptist work, however, continued without interruption, between the years 1900 and 1910, since in 1900 the Seventh Day Baptist industrial mission, the Plainfield Industrial Mission (started by the Plainfield Seventh Day Baptist Church) was sold and Joseph Booth, the pioneer missionary, left Seventh Day Baptists for awhile during that time.

The year 1900 is given by the Evangelical Dictionary of World Missions as the date for the founding by Joseph Booth of Seventh Day Baptists in Malawi. The same author, Klaus Fiedler, in the same article on Malawi, gives the year 1910 as the date that "Charles Domingo began the Seventh Day Baptists" in Malawi. Probably in reality then the 100 year anniversary of a continuous, unabated work of Seventh Day Baptists in Malawi is 2010. The 100 year anniversary though was already celebrated by Seventh Day Baptists in Malawi in the past decade.

Klaus Fiedler further writes, "With Malawi being seen as a Presbyterian/Anglican territory, evangelical and Catholic missions were seen as intruders. The early evangelical missions...all go back to Joseph Booth." Klaus Fiedler, a Baptist, though not himself a Seventh Day Baptist, lectured at the Seventh Day Baptist Bible College in Makapwa located in the more heavily populated southern region of Malawi, where Seventh Day Baptists have today their greatest concentration of members.

We will look at the Seventh Day Baptist leaders Domingo and Booth, as well as several other early church and political leaders , to better grasp the story of Seventh Day Baptists, as well as of other early missions, in Malawi.

Malawi was formally named the Nyasaland Protectorate by the British in 1907, although a British Central African Protectorate had been previously formed as early as 1891. The famous Scottish missionary David Livingstone had traversed Malawi on several occasions between 1859 and his death in 1873. Blantyre, Malawi is named for Livingstone's city of birth in Scotland.

Charles Domingo was probably from Quelimane which was near the Indian Ocean in neighboring Mozambique. He was the son of a cook with the African Lakes Company. W. P. Livingstone, the early biographer of Dr. Robert Laws, in his Laws of Livingstonia, calls the young boy a "helpless waif" and claims that the father may have been an alcoholic, but provides no substantiation for this claim.

The remarkable African, William Mthusane Koyi, a Gaika Kafir, was born in 1846 in South Africa. He became a Christian at age 23, and subsequently walked 150 miles to Lovedale, where he trained. He then volunteered to be a missionary to Nyasa with the famous Livingstonia Mission. He had brought the young Domingo to Nyasaland as early as 1881 on his return from furlough. Koyi was to became a very successful and influential evangelist to the Ngoni people.

Domingo very early in life, perhaps from only one or two years of age, was taken care of by Dr. and Mrs Robert Laws. He soon served as a houseboy in their home. Dr. Robert Laws was a well-known physician missionary and the leader of the Livingstonia Mission and spent over 50 years in Malawi (from 1875 until 1927). Domingo received excellent training at its Overtoun Institute at Livingstonia, a noteworthy Free Scottish Presbyterian institution.

Domingo was taken by Dr. Laws in 1891 to South Africa. Laws was on his way to Scotland, as ordered by his mission board, after he had suffered a severe bout of fever. Laws left four young men at Lovedale, in South Africa, one of whom was young Charles Domingo. Laws stopped in Capetown, and gave an address on Nyasaland, which was attended by Joseph Booth, a missionary who had recently arrived from Australia, and who, after hearing Laws, decided to go to Nyasaland, as an independent missionary.

Domingo himself attended the Lovedale Institution which many considered the best school in sub-Saharan Africa at that time. Domingo thus received an excellent theological and academic education.

Back at the Livingstonia mission Dr. Laws, when for a time without a carpenter, taught the young Domingo theology, while Laws himself was working at the carpenter's bench. At Livingstonia and its environs near Lake Nyasa (Lake Malawi, or more accurately Maravi) in northern Nyasaland, Domingo served well as the first native assistant in the school, and also served in the church.

W. P. Livingstone's early Law's biography states that Domingo was an elder in the church, even though not officially ordained. He also became a gifted lead singer and soloist. He was formally licensed to preach in 1903. A thanksgiving service at the time of the Laws' silver wedding anniversary was conducted by Domingo. He was, however, partly because of the pervasive, subtle racism of the time, never ordained by the Presbyterians, who were also acknowledgely, very conservative in polity and practice.

The Presbyterian missionaries, did speak very highly of Domingo, and after the 1915 uprising led by Chilembwe, under intense questioning by the British colonial authorities, refused to speak disparagingly of Domingo. Other Malawians, who had good theological training and experience, were also at the time left unordained. This fact, as well as a disagreement at Loudon with the missionary Donald Fraser, may have influenced Domingo's decision to leave the Presbyterians, which he did abruptly in 1908, without giving any advanced notice.

He was baptized by immersion by John Chilembwe, a Yao tribesman and American-trained Baptist pastor. Chilembwe was the Providence Industrial Mission leader. Chilembwe had been brought to the U.S. by Joseph Booth about 1897. Chilembwe had met Booth in 1892 and had served as a household servant, and as a nurse-companion for Booth's little daughter Emily, who had been nursed back from near-death from malaria by Chilembwe, while Booth was gone on an extended mission trip.

Dr. Laws was to have, at a later time, a chance meeting with Domingo in Balantyre, where Laws had travelled by the new train system. He apparently treated Domingo who was ill. Laws' early biographer, W. P. Livingstone reports that Domingo had had dealings with John Chilembwe, "but he never seems to have agreed with his extreme views," and when Laws met Domingo in Balantyre, Domingo had already broken with Chilembwe. W. P. Livingstone also reported that Domingo, after failing to "obtain a footing" along the Nyasa Lake shore, "established a pretentious mud church" in Ngoniland, the pulpit and pew being made also of mud. Livingstone also reported that Domingo "gathered a following, his influence, unlike Chilembwe's being for good."

Charles Domingo briefly worked with the Watchtower movement (Jehovah's Witnesses) and the Church of Christ, perhaps out of financial expediency, but his views remained mostly Presbyterian, except for his new-found views on baptism by immersion and his even later views on the seventh-day Sabbath. He moved around northern Malawi frequently as a Christian evangelist, came under the influence of missionary Joseph Booth, and had become a Seventh Day Baptist leader by 1910, a century ago.

Remarkably, Domingo at one time served nine stations in northern Nyasaland, pastoring about 180 baptized believers. He set up stations with schools for children and young people. He stressed the necessity of not being dependent on foreign missionaries and on subsidies from outside Malawi, a view he later had to modify somewhat, because of a lack of good local jobs, due to colonial inequities and injustices. A related obstacle to an indiginous work was that currency was scarce, the barter system having to be used extensively by the rural people.

Domingo also may have reshaped his thinking about foreigners, after being favorably influenced by the U.S. Seventh Day Baptist missionary, Walter B. Cockerill, who came to Malawi in December 1913 and had bicycled hundreds of miles in the northern part of Malawi by 1914 and early 1915. Cockerill was deported from Malawi in 1915, a scapegoat of the colonial administration's crackdown on mission activity after the January 1915 uprising of John Clilembwe and his supporters, even though Cockerill himself was not involved in any way in the uprising.

George Shepperson and Thomas Price call the youthful Walter Cockerill "an innocent abroad" in their well-researched, definitive book, Independent African, published in 1958, which was primarily a book about the 1915 uprising in Malawi. Cockerill, partly because he was from the town of Berlin in Wisconsin, and also because he was working in the northern region of Nyasaland, near the colony of adjacent Tanganyika, which had become a German protectorate in 1891. Cockerill was suspected, incorrectly, by the British administrators of being a German sympathizer. There was an ongoing proxy war between British Africa and the German colonies in Africa, with a result that the Africans were often conscripted to fight against their wishes.

Because of this abuse and other abuses, Domingo opposed the colonial system, and the white employers who were "cruel as tigers. " The British colonialists dismissed from jobs some of his Seventh Day Baptist congregants who refused to work on the seventh day Sabbath, and were thus often jailed for being unable to pay the hut tax, which had been imposed about 1912. The "bomas" or administrative stations, which were often in the office of the District Commissioner (or "D. C."), were named after the thorn hedge (literally: "stockade of thorns") which surrounded the D. C. in Balantyre.

Although Domingo strongly opposed colonialism, he did not believe in resorting to violence, as Chilembwe had done in the 1915 uprising. In spite of his innocense he was also later deported by the fearful British colonial authorities. Livingstone again reports, "Though unconnected with the rising, Charles Domingo went down in the cataclysm."

Livingstone makes this somewhat biased assessment of Domingos later years, "The writer saw him in 1920 at Mzimba, where [subsequent to his deportation and after his return to Malawi] he was employed in the Government service, and came across his church in the bush falling into ruins. Charles appeared to be conscious of his foolish conduct, but there was nothing against his moral character, which was something to the credit of the careful teaching and training he had received in the [Livingstonia] Mission."

By 1912 there were several thousand Seventh Day Baptist adherents in northern Nyasaland. The church structures were, it is true, mostly unpretentious mud churches with mud benches, in contrast to the impressiive, often beautiful, Presbyterian and Anglican church edifices in Malawi. When I visited the Seventh Day Baptist churches in September 2009 many of them had mud benches or the congregants simply sat on hard-packed mud floors.

Charles Domingo, edited an African version of the Sabbath Recorder magazine in Nyasaland, under Joseph Booth, the editor-in-chief, who was working out of Capetown, South Africa. Booth, accused of being an an "Ethiopianism" supporter by the British colonialists, had been deported from Malawi in 1903. When I visited Chancellor College of the University of Malawi, in the old colonial capital, Zomba, I was able to copy a file full of letters from Charles Domingo. Domingo had written, mostly to Joseph Booth in Africa, and also to the Seventh Day Baptist Missionary Society in the United States. His hand writing was very neat and beautiful, as was one of his wife's letters. Chancellor College also has, according to the card catologue, the first three issues of the African Sabbath Recorder, which Domingo edited with Charles Booth. The second and third issues seem to be lost and unavailable for viewing, I discovered on my second visit to the college library.

Domingo supported a strong education for the youth, as well as for adults. Unlike Elliot Kamwana, the famous indiginous, charismatic Watchtower leader in northern Nyasaland, who reportedly baptized as many as ten thousand people, Domingo strongly supported education for the youth and adults. Kamwana was generally opposed to education, primarily due to his Watchtower millenial ideas; there was no need to educate people since Christ was supposed to return in 1914, as Jehovah's Witnesses falsely taught. Charles Domingo, on the other hand, was the first trained and educated indiginous teacher in all of Nyasaland, and made the education of the people a high priority of his Christian work.

Joseph Booth, the English nonconformist was born in England 1851, moved from Australia to Nyasaland in 1892, and died in South Africa in 1932. He visited the U.S. in 1897 (author Benjamin Ray says 1895) accompanied by John Chilembwe. Booth published the egalitarian, anti-racist treatise Africa for the African: Dedicated First to Queen Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, Second, to the British and American Christian People, Third and Specially to the African-American people of the United States of America , in the city of Baltimore in 1897. It went through two editions.

He, with the help of the Plainfield, New Jersey Seventh Day Baptist Church, which he had joined in 1898 while he was in America, started an industrial mission in southern Malawi on 2,000 acres near Cholo (now more correctly spelled Thyolo). It came to be known as the Plainfield Mission. The coffee-growing industrial mission was not economically viable for a variety of reasons, one of which was a precipitous drop in coffeee prices, and soon failed and was sold at a great loss to the Seventh Day Adventists. It is now under the Adventists known as Malamulo Mission, one of the showplace, vintage mission complexes in Africa.

Booth was only in Malawi from 1892 until 1903, having been deported, and also banned from returning to Nyasaland, by the British colonial government.

Chilembwe, who went with Joseph Booth to the U.S. in about 1897, attended Virginia Theological Seminary, a National Baptist Convention school, for three years. Chilembwe returned to Malawi in 1899 or 1900 as an ordained Baptist minister, and started Providence Industrial Mission (PIM). He, like Domingo, established mission schools. He completed a beautiful large brick church building there in 1913, later destroyed by the British after the 1915 uprising.

A hut tax had been imposed by the colonial administrators (their colonial stations were nicknamed the "boma") in 1912, which the Malawian correctly viewed as a a form of conscription or slave labor, since half the tax could be rebated for doing a month's work on the white settler's lands. The Malawians were also conscripted to fight European battles on African soil before and during World War I, which many of them resented. The German colony of Tanganyika (now Tanzania) was contiguous to Nyasaland on its north boundary, and the Germans, in similar manner conscripted Africans from their colony.

Chilembwe became famous for leading the 1915 uprising in which several colonial men were killed, including the cruel manager of the Bruce estates, William J. Livingstone, a relative of the famous Scotish missionary-explorer, David Livingstone. It is to be noted in contrast to the killing of the men, that the western women and children were taken to safety, fed, and treated well.

Separatist churches, like the Watchtower Society and the Seventh Day Adventists, to some extent had raised unfulfilled millenial dreams of a new order to be established with Christ's imminent second coming. The white colonial order in Malawi and Africa it was proclaimed would be abolished. The year of 1914 had been set by Jehovah's Witness leader, Charles Taze Russell, for Christ's return.

Chilembwe started the first Central African resistance movement to British colonialist abuses, and is considered by Malawians to be their first national patriot. Near the Mozambique border Chilembwe was shortly tracked down and killed by Nyasaland policemen, working for the colonial government. Other supporters and accomplices of the uprising were also executed by the colonial government.

The only Seventh Day Baptist leader, who I was able to establish, with any certainty, to have been part of the 1915 uprising, was Pastor Filipo Chamaya. He was involved in a planned branch-uprising at Ntcheu. His group of Ngoni supporters were less organized and were apprehended by the District Commission before there was any violence. Chinyama was executed, even though no one had been killed by him or his men.

Joseph Booth very early was a noted denomination hopper, partly for financial reasons, having been variously a Presbyterian, a Baptist, a Seventh Day Baptist , a Seventh Day Adventist, a Watch Tower movement supporter, and a Church of Christ worker. In the end, however, he rejoined and stayed with Seventh Day Baptists. During his visit to the U.S. he published an anti-Watchtower treatise, and distributed it at Chautauqua Lake in New York, where he lectured during the summer.

Booth had come to Malawi in 1892, three weeks after his wife Mary, who had shared the missionary call, died of pneumonia. He independently started the Zambezi Industrial Mission and then the Nyasa Baptist Industrial Mission, before organizing in 1899 the Plainfield Industrial Mission with the help of the Plainfield Seventh Day Baptist Church in New Jersey. Twelve thousand dollars had been paid by the Plainfield Church for the plantation.

Booth left Malawi in 1902 or 1903 after religious disagreement with the Adventists, with whom he had briefly affiliated. He was permanently barred from Malawi by the British colonialists in 1907 for "seditious" ideas. He was a pacificist and not involved in the Chilembwe armed uprising of 1915. He was egalitarian and opposed to colonialism. Booth had angered some whites by paying, what was considered by colonial standards, very high wages to Malawians.

George Shepperson and Thomas Price, Harry Langworthy, T. Jack Thompson, John McCracken, Andrew C. Ross, Robert Rotberg, Bridglal Pachai, D.D. Phiri, have written scholarly works which, among other things, have effectively shown the African response to European and African missionary factors. The three early Malawians trained by the missions, who came under the "Ethiopianism" and "Africa for the African" influence of Joseph Booth, have now become well known in Malawi and African history- John Chilembwe, Elliot (Kenan) Kamwana, and the Seventh Day Baptist Charles Domingo, althought the last has been somewhat less studied than Chilembwe and Kamwana.

Charles Domingo was a better writer than the better-known John Chilembwe. His English was sinificantly better. Apparently the education obtained by Domingo at Lovedale and at Livingstonia, in Africa, was superior to that received by Chilembwe in the segregated Baptist seminary in Virginia, though all three of these were Christian schools.

Domingo effectively used the pen, to oppose the injustices of colonialism in Africa. He was one of the pioneers in an Africa movement for freedom. As the first trained African teacher in Malawi, Domingo placed a high priorty on educating the youth, the future leaders of Africa. Though he, like Booth, had briefly been swayed by the Watchtower movement, his Christian faith remained orthodox and evangelistic. His writings were strongly influenced by the Bible, his primary source book. He emphasized that churches and Christian schools should be led by Africans, and not be so dependent on western missionaries and agencies, a concept that was ahead of the colonial times in Africa. His vision for his people was mostly unfulfilled in his lifetime, due to the colonial inequalities and injustices, and the pervading poverty of his family and people in a colonial culture.

Charles Domingo's vibrant Christian faith, a faith that was practical and holistic, was the hallmark of his life, and of his vision of hope for the African people.

References/Sources:

Black, William Henry, Proposal for a Christian Mission to the Millions of Ethiopia and Eastern Africa, Walworth, Wisconsin: J. C. Beard, Crown Row, 1845.

Booth, Joseph, Africa for the African, Baltimore, 1897. Republished by CLAIM (Christian Literature Association in Malawi), Balantyre, Malawi, in the Kachere Series of the University of Malawi, Zomba, Malawi in 1996, edited by Laura Perry, 114 pp. , editor's preface, index, illustrations.

Booth, Joseph, Correspondence with American Seventh Day Baptists in the Malawi/Nyasaland Collection, 1898-1915, Seventh Day Baptist Historical Society, Janesville, Wisconsin.

Briggs, Philip, Malawi: The Bradt Travel Guide, Chalfont St Peter, UK: Bradt Publications, 1996, 1999. 246 pages. Chapter 1: History, pages 3-22.

Crosby, Cynthia, Historical Dictionary of Malawi, Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1980. 169 pages, abbreviations and acronyms, chronology, introduction, maps, extensive bibliography with introduction to bibliography. Charles Domingo, pp. 41-42.

Davidson, Basil, The African Genius, Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1969, 367 pp. Illustrations and maps, notes and references, select bibliography, index. Published in England as The Africans. For Charles Domingo, John Clilembwe, and Joseph Booth see pp. 281-283, 288, 296.

Domingo, Charles, and Joseph Booth, "A Native Pastor's Plea for Boys and Girls," Sabbath Recorder, 72, 5 (January 29, 1912), 140-142.

Douglas, John and Kelly White, Spectrum Guide to Malawi, New York: Interlink Publishing Group, 2003, 384 pages. "The History of Malawi" section, pp 30-43.

Harris, Joseph E., Africans and their History, New York, New York: Penguin Books, 1972, second revised edition, 1998. 337 pages, bibliographical notes, index. Booth and Chilembwe pages 198-200, 231, 236. "Chilembwe's Rebellion" pages 198-200.

King, Michael and Elspeth, The Story of Medicine and Disease in Malawi: The 130 Years since Livingstone, Balantyre: The Montforth Press, 183 pages, 1992.

Langworthy, Emily Booth, This Africa Was Mine, Sterling Tract Enterprise, 1950, 139 pp. Introduction by George Shepperson, M.A., Department of History, The University of Edinburgh, 2 maps, 2 photos: Joseph Booth, and daughter Emily Booth as a child, in Malawi. Written by the daughter of Joseph Booth.

Langworthy, Harry, "Africa for the African": The Life of Joseph Booth, CLAIM: Balantyre, Malawi, 1996, 520 pp. Kachere Monograph Number 2, University of Malawi, Zomba, Malawi. Bibliography, index, 40 illustrations, including maps. Harry Langworthy is the great grandson of Joseph Booth and the grandson of Emily Booth.

Langworthy, Harry W., "Charles Domingo, Seventh Day Baptists and Independency," Journal of Religion in Africa, 15,2 (1985), 96-121.

Langworthy, Harry W., "Joseph Booth, Prophet of Radical Change in Central and South Africa, 1891-1915," Journal of Religion in Africa xvi, 1 (1986), pp 22-43.

Livingstone, W. P., Laws of Livingstonia: A Narrative of Missionary Adventure and Achievement, London: Hodder and Stroughton, 1921. 385 pages, introduction, many photos, endmap, index. Domingo pages 194, 257, 277, 277, 309, 327, 339, 355.

Lohrentz, Kenneth, "Joseph Booth, Charles Domingo, and the Seventh Day Baptists in Northern Nyasaland, 1910-1912," Journal of African History, 12, 3 (1971), 461-480.

McCracken, John, Politics and Christianity in Malawi 1875-1940: The Impact of the Livingstonia Mission in the Northern Province, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1st edition, 1977. CLAIM edition, 2000, 376 pages, 5 maps, preface, abbreviations page, bibliography, index.

Moreau, A. Scott, editor, Evangelical Dictionary of Missions, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 2000, 1068 pp. Articles on "Malawi" and on "Joseph Booth" both by Klaus Fielder.

Moore, N. Olney., and Wayland D. Wilcox, "The Report of the Visit to South and Central Africa," Sabbath Recorder 73, 22 (November 25, 1912, 695-735.

Moore, N. Olney., "Seventh Day Baptists and Mission Work in Nyasaland, Africa," Riverside, Cailfornia, 1950, Duplicated copies.

Morrison, J. H., Missionary Heroes of Africa, New York: George H. Doran Co., 1922. reprinted New York: Negro University Press, 1969, 267 pages. Chapters on David Livingstone, Stewart of Lovedale, and Laws of Livingstonia.

Pachai, Bridglal, editor, Livingstone, Man of Africa: Memorial Essays 1973-1973, London: Longman Group, 1973. 245 pages, notes, index, includes essays by George Shepperson, Andrew C. Ross, and John McCracken.

Pachai, Bridglal, editor, The Early History of Malawi, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1972, 454 pages.

Pachai, Bridglal, Malawi: The History of the Nation, London: Longman Group, 1973, 324 pages. Charles Domingo, see pp. 89, 169-170, 176, 179, 204-205, 210.

Pearson, Bettie, "An Old Soldier of Christ," Sabbath Recorder, 189, 4 (July 27, 1970), P. 6-7.

Pearson, David C., Seventh Day Baptists in Central Africa, Seventh Day Baptist Historical Society assisted author in publication, 2003. 138 pages, forward by Janet Thorngate, introduction by author, 2 maps, biography of Malawian SDB leaders, list of SDB missionaries and their dates of service, explanatory notes, bibliography, index. Charles Domingo, pages 14-19 in chapter 4 "Booth Relives."

Phiri, D. D., History of Malawi: from Earliest Times to the Year 1915, Christian Literature Association in Malawi (CLAIM), 2004, 292 pages, references, index. Pages 163-167 has sections on Seventh Day Baptists Charles Domingo and Alexander Makwinja.

Ray, Benjamin C., African Religions: Symbol, Ritual, and Community, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1976. 238 pages, introduction, notes, bibliography, index, map. Chapter 6, "Religion and Rebellion," includes pages 159-165: "John Chilembwe and the Nyasaland Uprising of 1915."
Ross, Andrew C., Balantyre Mission and the Making of Modern Malawi, Balantyre, Malawi, 1996. Ross, R. K., Christianity in Malawi: A Source Book

Rotberg, Robert I. The Rise of Nationalism in Central Africa: The making of Malawi and Zambia, 1873-1964, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1965,1972. 360 pages, preface, postscript, note on the sources, select bibliography, index. Charles Domingo, pages 69-72, 76-77, 135. Seventh Day Baptist Church, pages 64, 66, 70-71, 85, 151.

Sanders, Renfield, Malawi, New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988, 103 pages.

Sanneh, Lamin, Disciples of All Nations: Pillars of World Christianity, New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. 362 pages, inroduction, notes, maps, select bibliography, index. Charles Domingo, pp 142-143, 307.

Shepperson, George, and Thomas Price, Independent African: John Chilembe and the Origins, Setting, and Significance of the Nyasaland Uprising of 1915, Edinburgh, Scotland: The University Press, 1958. 564 pages, introduction, illustrations, notes and references, sources appendices, index, endmap. Charles Domingo, see pp. 159-169, 183, 210,213, 223, 241-242, 323, 334, 339.

Shepperson, George, "Joseph Booth and the African Diaspora," Tenth Herkovits Memorial Lecture, Evanston, Illinois, 1972.

Singano, E. and A. A. Roscoe, Tales of Old Malawi, 1974, amended and enlarged 2nd edition, 106 pages, 1980. Forward, thirty tales from Malawi's oral tradition, 137 riddles plus meaning of riddles.

Siwane, Nyaniso James, The Unknown Made Known: A History of Seventh Day Baptists in South Africa, published by the Seventh Day Baptist Conference of South Africa and the Seventh Day Baptist Missionary Society, 1995. See Chapter 4 " Joseph Booth: The European Connection"
Thompson, T. Jack, Christianity in Northern Malawi: Donald Fraser's Methods and Ngoni Culture, Leiden, The Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1995. 292 pages, peface, glossary, map, 20 photos, bibliography, index. Charles Domingo pp. 166-169, 173, 177, 223.

White, Landeg, Magomero: Portrait of an African Village, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, 1st paperback edition 1989. 271 pages, preface, illustrations, maps, sources, index. Much Chilembwe and some Booth information.

Williams, Walter Lee, Black Americans and the Evangelization of Africa, 1877-1900, Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982.

500 YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF JOHN CALVIN'S BIRTH

2009-07-11T11:33:00.017-04:00

John Calvin (1509-1564) was born a half a millenium ago in Noyon, France. Yesterday, July 10, was the 500 year anniversary of his birth. The son of a lawyer for the Roman Catholic Church, John Calvin had a conversion experience between 1528 and 1533, and formally broke with the Roman Catholic Church in 1533. John Calvin eventually became a dominant leader in the Protestant Reformation through his powerful preaching, systematic theological writing, organizational and administrative skills, and missionary zeal. Reformers associated with Calvin in Geneva and Strasbourg included Guillaume Farel, Martin Bucer, and Theodore Beza.

The Protestant Reformation began on the European continent with intensive study of New Testament texts by scholars such as Martin Luther, Philipp Melanchthon, and John Calvin. Geneva in particular became the center of Reformation scholarship, as John Calvin and Theodore Beza were Greek and Latin scholars.The Reformers were involved in translating the Scripture into the vernacular. Many English Protestant leaders found safe haven in Switzerland and Germany. They studied and wrote primarily in Geneva. English and French translations of the New Testament and the whole Bible were produced. Miles Coverdale completed the first complete Bible with Apochrypha, in the English language. It was published in Zurich in 1535. A French Bible was translated by Pierre Olivetan, a cousin of Calvin. Notable English and Scotish Protestant exiles to the continent were William Wittingham, John Knox, John Foxe, John Bodley, John Bale, William Kethe, William Williams, Anthony Gilby, Christopher Goodman, Thomas Wood, Thomas Sampson, William Cole, and Thomas Cole. The Geneva Bible translation was supported by John Calvin, Theodore Beza, and John Knox, all considered some of the greatest Protestant theologians in history. Beza had published several editions of the Greek and Latin New Testaments. The Geneva Bible New Testament was finished in 1557 and the complete Geneva Bible in 1560, a year and a half after the death of Queen Mary, who had persecuted the Protestants. The Geneva Bible was in English, but the sources for the translation were in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French, and prior English translations. The Geneva Bible had extensive Calvinist-oriented notes on the Bible text. John Bodley (father of the Bodelian Library of Oxford's namesake, Thomas Bodley) was the primary financial backer of the Geneva Bible. One of the primary translators, William Wittingham, a Greek scholar, was married to the sister of John Calvin's wife. The King James Bible was very indebted to the Geneva Bible, as were both translations to the earlier Tyndale Bible.

John Calvin's followers also were leaders in the developement of constitutional and representative government, the right of the people to change government, and the separation of church and civil government. In France his followers were refered to as Huguenots, and, in the British Isles and the Americas, they were called Puritans. These ideas of representative government were originally limited to the land-owning aristocracy but over the next century, especially in Holland, England and Scotland, and Colonial America more democratic ideals developed and flourished, culminating in the first flowering of extensive liberty in the small state of Rhode Island, founded by the Calvinist (or "Particular") Baptists Roger Williams and Dr. John Clarke.

It is true that Calvin's administration of justice erred. Some of his opponents were tortured and executed, the most notable being Servetus, who was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1559.

Will Durant called John Calvin's massive masterpiece, Institutes of the Christian Religion, "one of the ten books that shook the world." This influential and systematic exposition of Bible doctrine, followed and expanded on the articles of the Apostle's Creed. It was revised at least five times between 1536 (first edition) and 1559. The book became the fundamental treatise in the developement of a truly evangelical theology. Calvin held that the Bible was the basis of all Christian teaching. He was indebted, however, to the writings of Augustine, the Apostles' Creed, and the Nicene Creed, as well as to other early church writings. Calvin published the first of his many Bible commentaries, the Commentary on Romans, in Strasbourg in 1539.

His only child died at birth in 1542, and his wife died in 1549. In 1559 Calvin founded an academy in Geneva, which eventually became a university. Calvin has been described as a simple, reticent, and austere man, and not very much is known about his personal life.

Max Weber's well-known, but flawed, thesis (translated into English and published as The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) pictured Calvin as the source and spirit of modern capitalism, drawing heavily on the ideas of deist Benjamin Franklin, and misconstruing prolific English Puritan writer Richard Baxter. Calvinists were portrayed as exhibiting brotherly love only as a means of bringing glory to God, and thus devoid of real interest in the welfare of individuals or the community. Calvin did, it is true, as opposed to Luther, encourage the taking of interest. Robert Mitchell shines a beam of light on the issue: "Calvin's theological doctrines are based upon Scripture, and his social and economic views are related to his teachings of the Bible and how he should conduct his life." Georgia Harkness states " More consistently than any other Reformation leader, Calvin taught that the Bible was the sole authority in matters of faith and conduct." William Williston argues "...Far more than Luther... Calvin treated the Scriptures as a new law regulative of the Christian life." Richard Baxter (1615-1691), himself, probably better describes this ethic than does Max Webber. In his 17th century English, Baxter writes," True Morality of the Christian Ethick, is the Love of God and Man, stirred up by the Spirit of Christ, through faith: and exercised in works of Piety, Justice, Charity, and Temperance."

Calvinists have often, and unfairly been criticized for a lack of missionary passion and activity. Roger Greenway, in his article on Calvinism, in the Evangelical Dictionary of World Missions, refutes this view both with Scripture and from history. He shows that Calvinism stresses truths that encourage missions. Three truths or doctrines are analyzed in relationship to missions: the glory of God, the kingdom of God, and the sovereignty of God. Historically, Calvinists have fielded the majority of missionaries in many parts of Asia (Korea for example) and the South Pacific , Africa (Moffat, Livingstone, Laws, Lovedale, etc.) and Latin America, and have had a major role in the missionary enterprise for over two centuries. Greenway writes, "There are critics who argue that Cavinism's emphasis on the sovereinty of God discourages mission...Calvinism's defense lies in its submission to the Scriptures which clearly teach both divine sovereignty and Christian duty to co-labor with God in mission."

John Calvin, himself, was, ostensibly, the most mission minded of all the early Reformers sending many evangelists back into his French homeland. He also in 1555 commissioned four missionaries to evangelize the indiginous people (Native Americans) of Brazil. Tragically, the mission and colony was plundered by the Portuguese and the few survivors martyred by Jesuits.

Calvin taght that the Bible was the supreme authority not only in spiritual matters, but also on the nature of all human institutions. His doctrinal statements began and ended with Scripture, even though he was well versed in the early church fathers and in the classic literature of the ages. Calvin writes in his Institutes "Read Demosthenes or Cicero, read Plato, Aristotle, or any others of that class; I grant you that you will be attracted, delighted, moved, enraptured by them in a surprising manner; but if, after reading them, you turn to the perusal of the sacred volume, whether you are willing or unwilling, it will affect you so powerfully, it will so penetrate your heart, and impress itself so strangely on your mind that, compared with its energetic influence, the beauties of rhetoricians and philosophers will almost entirely disappear; so that it is easy to perceive something divine in the sacred Scriptures, which far surpasses the highest attainments and ornaments of human industry." Further, he writes 'This is a principle which distinguishes our religion from all others, that we know that God hath spoken to us, and are fully convinced that the prophets did not speak at their own suggestion, but that, being organs of the Holy Spirit, they only uttered what they had been commissioned from heaven to declare."

Further Reading:

Brake, Donald, A Visual History of the English Bible, Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008

Calvin, John, Institutes of the Christian Religion, translated by Henry Beveridge, 2 volumes, Grand Rapids: Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1983.

Harkness, Georgia, John Calvin: The Man and His Ethics, New York: Abingdon Press, 1931, 1958.

McNeill, John T., editor and introduction, John Calvin on God and Political Duty, New York: Liberal Arts Press, , 1950, 1956

Mitchell, Robert M., Calvin's and the Puritan's View of the Protestant Ethic, Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1979

Moreau, A. Scott, Evangelical Dictionary of World Missions, Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1990. See "Calvinism" article by Roger S. Greenway.

Van Halsema, Thea B., This was John Calvin, Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1959, 1990

St. Patrick: I was like a stone lying in the deepest mire.

2009-06-25T16:23:00.014-04:00

'I was like a stone lying in the deepest mire; and then, "he who is mighty" came and, in his mercy, raised me up. He most truly raised me up on high and set me on top of the rampart.'-- St Patrick (c. 389-c. 461) in his Confessio.

Patrick was the apostle-missionary to heathen Ireland, a Celtic Christian, and, arguably, the most famous saint of the 5th century. He was at least a 3rd generation Christian, as he speaks of his father as a deacon and his paternal grandfather as a presbyter.

St. Patrick left two short works, his Confessio and his Epistola. Confessio outlines the story of his life. It was not what we would call an autobiography, by modern standards, as it left wide gaps in the story of his life. His life, therefore, remains obscured and enveloped in controversy, conjecture, legend and myth.

Patrick used simple illustrations from the world around him to explain God and the Christian faith to the Irish. His life exemplifies the enthusiasm of the Celtic Church. He frequently quoted that other great missionary, St. Paul. After 30 years of arduous and perilous missionary ministry to the Irish, he founded up to 300 churches and baptized as many as 120,000 believers. Ireland, which had been pagan when Patrick started his ministry, became a center from which Christianity radiated to the British Isles and to continental Europe.

Ireland become a center of Celtic monastacism (although Patrick was never himself a monk), and Christian culture, as well as of missionary zeal. The monastaries became the repositories of ancient Christian writings, as the barbarian hordes descended on continental Europe, destroying many ancient texts there. Ireland, it should be noted, did not officially become a Roman Catholic country until the 12th century, long after Patrick's lifetime.

"He [Patrick] conquered by steadfastness of faith, by glowing zeal, and by the attractive power of love."-August Neander, General History of the Christian Religion and Church, 1855.

For further reading:

Bury, John, The Life of St. Patrick and His Place in History, New York: Macmillan, 1905. Reprinted by Books for Libraries, 1971.

Cahill, Thomas, The Hinges of History, Volume I : How the Irish Saved Civilization, New York: Doubleday, 1995.

Hanson, R. P. C., The Life and Writings of the Historical Saint Patrick, San Francisco: Harper, 1984, 144 pages.

Latourette, Kenneth Scott, A History of Christianity, Vol I: to A.D. 1500, Revised Edition, New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1975, pages 101-102.

Neil, Stephen, A History of Christian Missions, New York: Penguin Books, 1980, pages 56-57.

Olsen, Ted, Christianity and the Celts, Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2003, 192 pages.

Tucker, Ruth, From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya: A Biographical History of Christian Missions, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House, 1983, pages 38-40.

Love, with Courage and Wisdom, moves the World

2009-06-22T11:49:00.003-04:00

I have found this quote insightful and helpful:

"Love without courage and wisdom is sentimentality, as with the ordinary church member.
Courage without love and wisdom is foolhardiness, as with the ordinary soldier.
Wisdom without love and courage is cowardice, as with the ordinary intellectual.
But the one who has love, courage, and wisdom moves the world."
--Ammon Hennacy (1893-1970)

Many soldiers are, of course, not "ordinary," but heroic, so I am not trying to disparage soldiers. And many of the intellectuals are merely pseudo-intellectuals. And the real "ordinary Christian" should, by God's grace and empowering, and through the indwelling Holy Spirit of God, exhibit love with courage and wisdom. It should be said of us, ordinary Christians, as it was said of the early church:

"These that have turned the world upside down are come hither also."- Acts 17:6, (King James Version)

Answers to Quiz on English Language and Early American Bibles

2009-05-11T09:30:00.000-04:00

I am posting answers to yesterday's Quiz on English Language and Early American Bibles, with yesterday's quiz questions immediately following, for your easy reference.

ANSWERS
1. d) hundreds
2. King Alfred
3. John Wyclif
4. William Tyndale
5. Myles Coverdale
6. King James Version
7. Geneva Bible
8. King James Bible
9. New International Version
10. Algonquin (Native American) language / John Elliot- missionary to the Algonquins
11. German language
12. English language

QUESTIONS
1. How many English translations of the Bible and the New Testament have been completed over the centuries? a) about a dozen b) about a score or 20 c) about a hundred d) hundreds

2. Who was the great 10th century King of England who translated some of the Psalms into English and is considered by many scholars to have been early England's greatest King?

3. Who, with the help of some others, completed by hand, in 1382, the first English translation of the Bible?

4. Who in 1526 completed, and had published, the first printed English version of any part of the Bible?

5. Who in 1535 finished the first complete printed English Bible?

6. What English Bible, published in 1611, became the best selling book of all time and remained the best selling English Bible in annual sales until the 1980's?

7. What version of the Engish Bible inspired John Bunyan as he wrote Pilgrim's Progress?

8. What English Bible went through 236 editions between 1660 and 1710?

9. What English translation or version of the Bible became the best-selling English Bible beginning in the 1980's?

10. In what language was the first full Bible translation done in America in 1663? What famous missionary did it?

11. In what language was the second full Bible translation in America done? It was printed in 1743 by Christopher Saur.

12. In America in 1782, the full Bible was done in yet a third language? What language was it?
(That particular Bible publication, completed in 1782 by Robert Aitken, was the only Bible publication ever authorized by the U.S. Congress.)

LOOK FOR ANOTHER BIBLE AND BIBLE TRANSLATIONS QUIZ IN ABOUT A WEEK.

TIME TO REAP, by Fred D. Jarvis

2009-05-11T09:13:00.013-04:00

I found this poem in an old missions newsletter about Indonesia. It was tucked away in an old Bible. I have decided that the poem has a message that needs to be shared. It challenged me- it challenges all Christians-to share the gospel, the good news of Christ.
Does anyone know anything about the author Fred D. Jarvis, where he lived and when he wrote this?

TIME TO REAP

Now is the time to rise and reap,
The fields are harvest white;
This is the hour, I now repeat,
To spread the Gospel light.

This is the hour to give and work
Until the war is won;
O let us not our duty shirk
Before it is done.

The entire world is Christ's domain,
Yet heathen millions wait;
Let's quickly reap the golden grain
Before it is too late.

We must not let that harvest field
Grow ripe, then rot and die;
Our hearts must heed their strong appeals,
O let us then the sickle wield,
It's murder by neglect.

We dare not pass them by.
Of all the wrongs that we commit,
Perhaps our worst defect,
Is damning souls while we just sit,

It's time to call a halt, dear friend,
It's time to pray and weep;
The sheaves must quickly be brought in;
It's time for us to reap!

...Fred D. Jarvis

ANSWERS TO THE 2ND QUIZ ON THE BIBLE, THE WORLD'S GREATEST BOOK

2009-05-03T22:39:00.006-04:00

1. a. Latin (or the Old Latin)

b. Syriac (other satisfactory answers: SyroChaldaic, Aramaic, the Peshito)

These were the oldest (first) translations of the New Testament from the original Greek.

2. Sir David Dalrymple -- early British scholar who found all but about 11 verses of the New Testament in the then known writings of the Ancient Church Fathers.

3. The Apostle Paul -- wrote his letters between 50-65 A.D. (C. E.)

4. b. 400 B.C. --when the Prophets and Writings were accepted as Hebrew Scriptures along with the Law (Torah, Pentateuch).

5. c. 250 B.C. --when the Hebrew Old Testament was first translated into Greek.

6. Incunabula (the singular is Incunabulum) -- fairly rare books and Bibles printed before 1501 (1445-1500), the first printed books in the western world. (There was some printing done even earlier in China.)

7. The Council of Jamia --in 90 A.D. (C.E.) this Jewish council fixed the Hebrew canon at the same 39 books that are now also in the Protestant Old Testament of the Bible.

8. Erasmus -- in the 1500's produced editions of the New Testament in Greek used by others to make later vernacular translations of the New Testament.

9. Syriac and Coptic -- were sometimes used as translation sources other than the Greek and Latin Vulgate, the latter of which were much more commonly used.

10. Count Constantin Tischendorf (1815-1874) -- German scholar who published the New Testament in Greek in 8 editions between 1841 and 1869, and discovered Codex Sinaiticus at the monastary of St Catherines in the Sinai Peninsula.

The 3rd Quiz, in a day or two, will be on the English Bible and the Bible in the U.S.A.- look for it.

Bible Quiz Answers, and Another Quiz about the Bible

2009-04-28T20:32:00.006-04:00

Answers to the quiz about the Bible, the world's greatest and best-selling book:

1. Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic. These are the 3 languages of the original Bible manuscripts.

2. The Septuagint , LXX (Roman numeral for 70), Greek language. The first and oldest translation from the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament.

3 The Essenes. They hid the Dead Sea Scrolls from the Romans, preserving them for posterity.

4. Esther. Parts of all but this book of the Old Testament were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.

5. Polyglot. Book that contains the Bible in multiple languages.

6. Uncial. Ancient writing style of large plain block letters as opposed to more modern cursive writing.

7. Palimpest. Literally means "written twice". Ancient writing is found hidden under more modern writing on a manuscript, vellum, parchment, etc.

8. Deuteronomy. Book of the Law that King Josiah found in Temple hiding place, and had read to the people.

9. Jerome. Wrote the "authorized" Latin Vulgate in the 4th century A.D. (C.E.).

10. John. The oldest known extant manuscript is part of this Gospel book of Bible- dating to about 125 A.D. (C.E.).

11. Johannes Gutenberg. Used moveable type to print the Latin Vulgate Bible in the 1400's in Germany.

12. 4,000. Languages that have no Bible translation, not a single verse-but most of these are not major languages (not so many speakers of the language compared to the languages that have Bible translation.)

New Quiz on the Bible, the World's Greatest Book:

1. What two languages have the two oldest (first) translations of the New Testament?
Clue: One is now a "dead" language not spoken in any nation of the world, but the basis of many European Languages.

2. A British scholar who found, many years ago, that all the New Testament, but eleven verses, were found in the then known writings of the ancient "Church Fathers."

3. He wrote many letters between 50 and 65 A.D., now part of New Testament Scripture.

4. The Prophets and the Writings were accepted as Hebrew Scripture alongside the Law (Torah) a little after: a) 500 B.C. b) 400 B.C. c) 300 B.C. d) 200 B.C.

5. The Old Testament was first translated into Greek (the Septuagint) about:
a) 100 A.D. (C.E.) b) 100 B.C. 3) 250 B.C. 4) 500 B.C.

6. Bibles and books printed before 1501 (between 1445 and 1500 A.D. (C.E.) that are fairly rare and collectable are called____. (Clue starts with an "I" and is from the Latin)

7. The Jewish council that in 90 A.D. fixed the Hebrew canon at 39 books, the same 39 books found now also in the Old Testament of the Protestant Bible.

8. Famous Renaissance man who used manuscripts back to the 10th century A.D. to produce an edition of the Greek New Testament in 1516 which became the basis for many later vernacular translations of the New Testament.

9. New Testament translators use the Greek and the Latin Vulgate, but they occasionally also use the ____ and ___ translations of the New Testament. Name these 2 translations or languages.

10. A 19th century Greek scholar-translator who discovered the Codex Sinaiticus manuscripts in a waste basket at the St. Catherine's monastary near Mt. Sinai.

ANSWERS, AND ANOTHER QUIZ, IN 3 DAYS.

The Bible, the World's Greatest and Best-Selling Book: A Fun Quiz to Challenge You

2009-04-24T23:14:00.005-04:00

The Bible is the Word of God, inerrant in the original autographs (manuscripts). It is the best-selling and greatest book of all time. The Bible as we now have it, consisting of the Old and New Testaments, has flourished for nearly two millenia. I am doing a series of quizzes, containing about 10-12 questions each time, in order to stimulate further interest study of God's Word, the Book of all books. I will list the answers in my next blog in about 2-3 days. Here is the first quiz. A few questions are relatively easy, but some fairly difficult:

1. What are the 3 languages of the original manuscripts of the Bible?

2. The first (oldest) translation of the Old Testament was made for the Jews of many lands, and was also the primary Bible, rather than the Hebrew Bible, of the early church. What was the translation called, what was its numeric symbol, and what was its language?

3. Which of the three divisions of Judaism hid and preserved for posterity, the "Dead Sea Scrolls" from the Romans, who in 68 B.C. destroyed their community?

4. All except which book of the Old Testament was found in the Dead Sea Scrolls?

5. What is a large book that contains the Bible in multiple languages called? Clue: multiple=poly (it's prefix is poly, the word begins with poly_)

6. What is the writing style, used in ancient Bible manuscripts or parchments, that consists of large, plain, capital letters, called?

7. What is the word for the ancient writing style found hidden under the more modern, cursive writing on a parchment? The word means "written twice."

8. King Josiah found and had read to his people this book of the Law (Torah or Pentateuch) in a temple hiding place. What's the book's name?

9. Which early "Church Father" began translation work, in about 380 A.D., on the authorized Latin Vulgate?

10. The oldest extant New Testament manuscript discovered, dates from about 125 A.D. (C.E.) and is part of which Gospel book?

11. Who used moveable type to print the Latin Vulgate in the 1400's at Mainz, Germany?

12. About how many languages have never had a single verse of the Bible:

a) 1,000 b) 2,000 c) 3,000 d) 4,000

Answers will be published Sunday or Monday (2-3 days), with a new Quiz on the Bible, the world's greatest book.

Pioneer Black Baptist Missionaries: George Lisle and Lott Cary

2009-04-05T13:29:00.007-04:00

GEORGE LISLE

George Lisle (sometimes spelled Leile), an African-American, was the first known Baptist foreign missionary from America, and perhaps, the first Baptist minister to carry the Gospel to any foreign country. He preceded the famous Baptist missionary William Carey by 15 years or more.

Lisle was born a slave, about 1750 in Virginia.. He was set free by his owner, a Baptist deacon named Henry Sharpe, for the purpose of preaching the Gospel. Lisle was baptized on May 20, 1775. He became the first black ordained Baptist minister in America. He established a Baptist church in Savannah, Georgia as early as 1777, which merged with another Baptist group originally from Silver Bluff, South Carolina, pastored by David George, and founded by an itinerant preacher Brother Palmer. The merged church became the African Baptist Church of Savannah, Georgia.

When Deacon Sharp died, Lisle went to Jamaica, at least in part to escape re-enslavement by Sharpe's heirs. He served as an indentured servant to repay money he borrowed for the journey to Jamaica.

During eight years of preaching he baptized 500 Jamaicans and established a strong Baptist church there. He also sent urgent appeals to the British Baptists to send missionaries to Jamaica.

The emancipation of the slaves in Jamaica on July 31, 1833, was another result of this missionary work, and can be directly correlated to another, later Baptist missionary in Jamaica, William Knibb.

LOTT CARY

Born into slavery near Richmond, Virginia in 1780, Lott Cary (some books use the spelling Carey) turned to Christ in 1807. He became a member of the First Baptist Church of Richmond.

From the balcony of the church his heart was set afire to preach to his own people. He learned to read the Bible and was licensed to preach. With money he had saved as a craftsman he, in 1813, bought freedom for himself and his family.

In 1815 he helped found the Richmond African Missionary Society. It was a time of "growing interest in world missions." It contributed to missions through the American Baptist Union. Lott Cary, and Colin Teague, an assistant minister at First African Baptist Church in Richmond and a fellow craftsman who purchased his freedom from slavery, were both primary leaders of the society. The first president, however, was a white man, William Crane, Lott Cary's mentor. This society was an auxiliary of the General Missionary Convention of the Baptist Denomination of the United States of America for Foreign Missions, organized in 1814, and was to become known as the Triennial Convention.

When the American Colonization Society was organized in 1816, Baptists raised funds to send freed blacks as missionaries to Liberia, in conjunction with the African Baptist Missionary Society and the Triennial Convention. Lott Cary, with Colin Teague, also a Baptist, sailed January 16, 1821 to Liberia from Norfolk, Virginia on the ship Nautilus, a full generation after Lisle went to Jamaica. Cary established the first Baptist church in Liberia, the Providence Baptist Church of Monrovia, the capitol city. He set up schools for children in and around Monrovia. He established the Monrovia Baptist Missionary Society, serving as its first president. The society's goal was primarily to evangelize the local indiginous tribes, which it did successfully.

Cary was a godly leader, and a great missionary and statesman. He was a founder of the nation of Liberia, based, as its name implies, on principles of freedom. He also had the distinction of being the first Baptist missionary to Africa from the U.S. He died in an accident in 1828, seven years after sailing for Africa.

The Lott Cary Baptist Foreign Mission Convention was organized in 1897 at Shiloh Baptist Church in Washington, D. C. in honor of Lott Cary. It was an independent outgrowth of the National Baptist Convention organized three years earlier in 1894. In this mission organization, named for Lott Cary, the "learned and unlearned walk hand in hand" in "love and service" as they promote God's mission in the world.

FOR FURTHER READING:

Adams, C. C. and A. Marshman Halley, Negro Baptists and Foreign Missions, Philadelphia, 1944.

Cole, Edward B., The Baptist Heritage, Elgin, Illinois: David C. Cook Publishing Co., 1976, 205 pp. forward, preface, appendix containing " Chronological Review of Important Dates for Baptists."

Fitts, L., Lott Carey, First Black Missionary to Africa.

Jacobs, S. M., editor, Black Americans and the Missionary Movement in Africa.

McBeth, H. Leon, The Baptist Heritage, Nashville, Tennessee: Broadman Press, 1987, 850pp., preface, bibliography, index. See especially pp. 777-782.

Moreau, A. Scott, editor, Evangelical Dictionary of World Missions, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 2000. Article on "Lott Carey" by Richard D. Callenberg.

Puritan Pulpit, Summer 1989 (Volume 1, Number 2) and Fall 1989 (Volume 1, Number 3), Ron E. Davis, editor. Articles : "George Lisle and Lott Cary" and "George Lisle, Pioneer Black Baptist Missionary to Jamaica: His Own Account."

Shick, T. W., Behold the Promised Land: A History of the African-American Settlers in Nineteenth Century Liberia.

Torbet, Robert G., A History of the Baptists, Valley Forge, Pennsylvania: Judson Press, 3rd edition, 1975, 1978 (earlier editions staring in 1950) See pp 353-355.

Wood, James E., editor, Baptists and the American Experience, Valley Forge, Pennsylvania: Judson Press, 1976.

Al Bashir, ordered arrested for war crimes in Sudan, retaliates against humanitarian groups

2009-03-05T18:28:00.004-05:00

Sudanese President Omar Al Bashir became the first sitting head of a country to be issued an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court ( the ICC). As had been predicted, al-Bashir retaliated by expelling six humanitarian NGO's and denouncing the ICC.

More than 300,000 have died and up to 3 million have been displaced, fleeing their homes, since the 2003 start of the genocide and ethnic cleansing in Darfur, western Sudan.

The I.C.C. formally charged al-Bashir with war crimes. They allege that he ordered his troups and Arab militias to kill, torture, and rape civilians in Darfur, including many women and children.

Please fervently pray for a quick end to the genocide, and that the atrocities do not escalate, now that the humanitarian groups, that were helping the vulnerable women and children, have been expelled. And pray God will raise up a new generation of righteous leaders in the Sudan.

The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. James 5:16 (KJV)

Be Still and Know God: Four Disciplines For Christians

2009-02-27T12:40:00.007-05:00

"How busy we have become... and as a result how empty!" writes Charles R. Swindoll, in his little gem, Intimacy with the Almighty. "We have made ourselves very complicated."

In this small book of great truths for hurried and harried Christians, Swindoll expounds on four disciplines, based on four decisions, that can help us cultivate an in-depth relationship with the Almighty God.

The 4 disciplines:

1. Simplicity

2. Silence

3. Solitude

4. Surrender

The 4 decisions:

1. To reorder one's private world

2. To be still

3. To cultivate serenity

4 To trust the Lord completely

"Nothing under his control can ever be out of control," Swindoll writes. "When I keep my hands out of things, his will is accomplished, his name is exalted, and his glory is magnified."

As we finish another week of work, and begin another Sabbath of rest, a Sabbath that God wisely established at creation for all of us, let us celebrate his great glory and magnificent creative power. Let us, thoughtfully and joyfully, take the time, given us by God, to rest in him, so that he might truly work in us and through us.

I recommend spending an hour or two reading and heeding this little classic, as you also meditate on God's Word.

Be still and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the heathens, I will be exalted in the earth. Psalm 46:10 (King James Version of the Bible)

Reference:

Charles R. Swindoll, Intimacy with the Almighty: Encountering Christ in the Secret Places of Your Life, Dallas, Texas: Word Puplishing, 1996, 80 pages, including 2 pages of endnotes.

Other pertinent books cited by Swindoll:

Bennett, Arthur, ed., The Valley of Vision, Carlisle, Pennsylvania: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1975.

Edmon, V. Raymond, The Disciplines of Life, Wheaton, Illinois: Scripture Press, 1948.

Foster, Richard J., Celebration of Discipline, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978.

Kelly, Thomas, A Testament of Devotion, New York, Harper & Row Publishers, 1941.

Nouwen, Henri J. M., The Way of the Heart, New York: Seabury Press, 1981

Solzhenitsyn, Alexandr, The Gulag Archipelego, translated by Thomas P. Whitney, Harper & Row Publishers, 1973.

Tozer, A. W. (Aidan Wilson Tozer), The Divine Conquest, Camp Hill, Pennsylvania: Christian Publications, 1950.

A. W.Tozer's Seven Thing's That Define Who We Are

2009-02-27T11:21:00.007-05:00

Aiden Wilson Tozer (1897-1963), a great Christian and Missionary Alliance preacher and devotional writer, developed a list of seven things that define and shape who we are. Tozer himself was said, by one early biographer, to have spent more time on his knees than at his desk. Here is the challenging and defining list:

1. What we want most

2. What we think about most

3. How we use our money

4. What we do with our leisure time

5. The company we enjoy

6. Whom and what we admire

7. What we laugh at

How do you stack up? Are you serving yourself, your own pleasure and your materialistic quests? Or do you have a passion for God, and for his kingdom and glory?

A. W. Tozer books still available in print at budget prices:

The Pursuit of God
The Knowledge of the Holy
God's Pursuit of Man
Tozer: Mystery of the Holy Spirit
Keys to a Deeper Life
Man: The Dwelling Place of God
I Talk Back to the Devil
The Purpose of Man: Designed to Worship

Acknowledgement: The seven definers are from a handout of Garri George shared at a Youth For Christ luncheon, in Anderson, Indiana Feb. 25, 2009. Garri George is the Executive Director of East Central Indiana Youth for Christ/Campus Life. Youth for Christ's Vision/Mission Statement: "As part of the body of Christ, our vision is to see every young person in every people group in every nation have the oppotunity to make an informed decision to be a follower of Jesus Christ and become a part of a local church." Youth for Christ's mission is "to participate in the body of Christ in responsible evangelism of youth, presenting them with the person, work, and teachings of Christ, and discipling them into a local church."

Over 2,000 Languages Still Need Bible Translations

2009-02-22T00:20:00.005-05:00

There are almost 7,000 languages spoken today around the globe. Over 2,000 of these languages, representing almost 200 million people, await Bible translation.

One organization, The Seed Company, has a goal of beginning the translation of the Bible in 200 more languages within three years. The goal is to complete the translations in the heart language of the people, by partnering with others, such as national colleagues, other organizations, investors, and prayer networks.

Those of us who live in western countries, blessed with multiple translations of the Bible, can, through The Seed company, partner with those who have had no portion of Scripture at all in their tongue.

The Seed Company, an affiliate of Wycliffe Bible Translators, has offices in Arlington, Texas (headquarters) and Santa Ana, California. The webpage incudes a "prayer focus" link, to facilitate prayer for unreached peoples whose languages are targeted for Scripture translation.

To get involved in the project, go to: http://www.theseedcompany.org/

or phone: 817-557-2121 or 714-549-SEED
or toll free: 877-593-7333

Water, water... but not a drop to drink: the dire water-supply problem!

2009-02-21T23:56:00.008-05:00

In certain areas of Africa and Asia, four-fifths (4/5ths) of all illnesses are caused by waterborne diseases.

Diarrhea, caused by drinking dirty and contaminated water, is the leading cause of childhood deaths in these parts of the world.

Local river or trench water, so polluted you wouldn't even want to bathe in it, may often be the only drinking water available to the poor in the developing world, and in areas wracked by wars, genocide, famines, and natural disasters.

One partial solution might be the use of simple water filters, which can be constructed locally for about $15 USD, using entirely local materials.

Seven Specific Commands of Christ

2009-02-21T22:52:00.005-05:00

George Patterson, a missionary for many years in northern Honduras with the Conservative Baptist Home Mission Society, developed an obedience-oriented T.E.E. (theologic education-by-extension) program, which trained pastoral students on the job. These students then planted and pastored over 100 churches.

Those new to the faith and to the church, memorized seven of Christ's main commands, with accompanying Scripture texts. Many of these indiginous, new believers were illiterate, when they turned to Christ, so had to memorize the Scriptures, then share them with others, rather than just share by reading the texts.

The seven commands of Christ, with the Bible texts, are these:

1. Repent and believe Mark 1:15
2. Be baptized Matthew 28:18-20, Acts 2:38
3. Love John 13:34, Matthew 22:37-40
4. Celebrate the Lord's Supper Luke 22:17-20
5. Pray John 16:34, Matthew 6:5-15
6. Give Matthew 16:19-21, Luke 6:38
7. Witness Matthew 28:18-20

Patterson also distinguishes three levels of authority, of which we also would be wise to differentiate and prioritize:

1. God's command's (have all the authority of heaven)
2. Apostolic practices (not commanded, but have the authority of example)
3. Human customs (a congregation is united in agreement on a paricular tradition)

Most church divisions develope, sadly, because 2nd and 3rd level practices are treated as if they were first-order commands.

Reference:

Patterson, George, "The Spontaneous Multiplication of Churches," in Perspectives on the World Christian Movement: A Reader, Ralph D. Winter and Stephen C. Hawthorne, editors, Pasadena: William Carey Library, 1981, revised edition 1992

Malaria Is A Real Global Health Challenge, But Tens Of Millions Of Deaths Can Be Prevented!

2009-02-14T10:19:00.014-05:00

Malaria kills 1-2 million people annually. Deaths primarily occur in children. A third of all deaths worldwide in children under age 5 are from malaria. Pregnant women are also at higher risk of death from malaria. About 90% ot the deaths from malaria are in Africa. Between 300 and 500 million people get malaria annually.

When people are ill from Malaria they have difficulty working, and usually are a big burden on their family, and other caregivers as well.

We now know, from computerized analyses done by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers, and from other studies, that environmental control is probably as important as bednets and the new vaccines (now in trials being done in Africa), in reducing malaria. For example, spreading ground-up seeds from neem trees, which grow in Africa, on the ponds and standing water can reduce mosquito populations by about 50%. Using simple shovels and plows, to fill in or reduce the size of ponds, also help significantly. Plant derived pesticides also help. Bed nets can also be treated with pesticide to improve their effectiveness. Some countries are again using DDT (an organochlorine pesticide) with success and fairly low risk. DDT was banned in the U.S. in 1972, except for use in public health emergencies, like the outbreak of malaria or typhus, because it has EPA class II toxicity (moderate toxicity).

Bill Gates retired last year as the head of Microsoft to focus on the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. One of the foundations main projects is ending malaria. The foundation is spending millions on fighting disease and reducing deaths caused by malaria. In September 2008 Gates announced that the foundation will provide 168 million to the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative. Two vaccines for malaria are now in late stage trials in Africa and the results so far look promising. The U.S. Government, under the previous Bush administration, also has given a long term commitment, and funding, to fight, not only AIDS, but also malaria, in Africa.

One campaign is asking for a million people to get involved in the malaria fight. Tens of millions of deaths from malaria can be prevented they hope.

Deaths can be prevented by use of simple $5 bednets, inexpensive shovels, old-fashioned DDT, and the vaccines now being developed.

President Lincoln, Man of Faith and Prayer: Born 200 Years Ago

2009-02-11T17:01:00.027-05:00

Many consider Abraham Lincoln to have been America's greatest president. He was born February 12, 1809 in Hodgenville, Kentucky, and died at age 56, on April 15, 1865. He died from an assassin's bullet in Washington, D.C., shortly after the end of the Civil War and five months after his reelection as President.

His parents were Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks Lincoln. His family moved from Kentucky to Indiana in 1816, and from Indiana to Illinois in 1830. He was the first president born beyond the boundaries of the original 13 states, the first president who was assassinated, and the first Republican president.

His was not an easy life. His father was abusive and barely literate. He lost his mother when he was 9 years old. His baby brother, older sister, and two sons also died. His wife suffered from mental illness. He lived in poverty, was self-taught (he had less than 2 years of schooling), and was homely and gangling. Lincoln worked as a ferry operator, a flatboat pilot, an enlisted soldier, a partner in an unsuccessful merchandise business, a postmaster, and a lawyer. He was admitted to the bar in 1837. He was an excellent wrestler.

He failed in his bid for public office several times: to the Illinois House of Representatives in 1832, to the U.S. Senate from Illinois on the Whig ticket in 1855, to be the Republican vice presidential nominee in 1856, and to the U.S. Senate on the Republican ticket in 1858 (just two years before his election as the first Republican president in 1860). He was not liked much during his two-year term in the U.S. House of Representatives because he opposed the Mexican War, and because he was considered a amusingly odd westerner of only average talent. His opposition to the war lost him his congressinal seat. His political failures and losses, however, prepared him to be a better president, a presidency he won with a mere 39% of the vote, as the Democrats split their vote.

Lincoln was a man of faith in God. Although he apparently never belonged to any denomination, he attended for over 10 years, the First Presbyterian Church of Springfield, pastored by his friend, Rev. James Smith. After becoming President, he frequented a number churches in Washington, D. C., often more than one on a Sunday.

A small book of Scripture and poetry, containing the signature "A. Lincoln," and discovered in 1957, is evidence of his deep faith. He carried this book, The Believer's Daily Treasure; or Texts of Scripture arranged for every day in the year, in his vest pocket. The book had been published in 1852 in London by The Religious Tract Society as a 4th edition. He probably read it as he travelled the Old Eighth Circuit, and later, during the Civil War, as commander-in-chief.

Lincoln read the Bible throughout his life, often quoting it in conversation and in public addresses, and referring to it frequently in his letters. His famous Gettysburg (1863), Second Inaugural (1865), and House Divided (1858) speeches, and many other speeches contain Scripture and references to the Almighty God and the Heavenly Father. He used the name of Jesus in his private and public speech, and seems to be the only president to cite the Holy Spirit in a proclamation.

Several writers and historians have refuted the idea that he was anything but an orthodox Christian, who held to the tenets of historical Christianity (see the reference list). He exhibited Christian virtues of forgiveness, magnanimity, generosity, compassion, courage, honesty, self-control, warm humor, devotion, zeal, patience, and humility. Historian Michael Burlingame, author or editor of 12 books on Lincoln, says, "He was able to rise above the tyranny of the ego which most of us suffer from."

A 19th century author, Allen T Rice, wrote of Lincoln, "His sense of humor never flagged. Even in his telegraphic correspondence with his generals we have instances of it." One of his favorite humorists, he enjoyed reading, sometimes to his staff, was the writer Charles F Browne (pseudonym Artemus Ward).

He and his family owned several Bibles. He cherished the Scriptures, proclaiming: "In regard to this great book, I have but to say it is the best gift God has given to man." He told his friend, L. L. Crittenden, "I decided a long time ago that it was less difficult to believe the Bible was what it claimed to be than to disbelieve it."

In the Washington Cathedral in Washington, D.C., is a statue of Lincoln in an attitude of prayer, done by the sculpturer Herbert Spencer Houck. Houck's grandfather, while walking the fields near the Battle of Gettysburg, had once found Lincoln kneeling in the leaves. This picture of Lincoln, passed on verbally from grandfather to grandson, was the inspiration for Hauck's statue, "Lincoln in Prayer."

Rev. Willard Davis, in a great and important sermon, "Was Abraham Lincoln Really a Christian?" preached in 1989, 20 years ago, at Fourth Presbyterian Church, quotes Lincoln: "When I went to Springfield I wasn't a Christian... When I went to Gettysburg I wasn't a Christian. But there at Gettysburg I consecrated my life to Christ." Rev. Davis goes on to say that the day that he came to know Christ was November 19, 1863 (probably the same day Houck's grandfather found him kneeling in the leaves of the fields of Gettysburg). Davis relates that his subsequent Second Inaugural Address reads like a sermon, much more than his pre-conversion speeches do. Davis claims, based on his studies, that Lincoln was planning to join the Presbyterian Church on Sunday just several days after he was shot and killed. At the time he was shot at Ford Theater he was telling his wife they should take a trip to the Holy Land, "We could go up to Jeru..." He never got to finish the word "Jerusalem"

On the 200th Anniversary of his birth, let us remember the humble Abraham Lincoln, who rose above a life of hardships and sorrows to become one of the greatest U.S. Presidents-a president who acknowledged and trusted God, read His Word, and was in frequent prayer.

References used to prepare this blog:

Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writing, Roy P. Bassler editor, Kraus-Thompson, 1968 (1st published 1946)

Abraham Lincoln's Daily Treasure: Moments of Faith with America's Favorite President, edited by Thomas Freiling, Grand Rapids: Fleming H. Revell (a division of Baker Book House), 2002

Facts About the Presidents: From Washington to Johnson, Joseph Nathan Kane, NY: Pocket Books, 1960, 1964

Great Speeches/ Abraham Lincoln: With Historical Notes by John Grafton, NY: Dover Publications, 1991

Vindicating Lincoln: Defending the Politics of Our Greatest, Krannawitter, Thomas

Lincoln's Devotional: Introduction by Carl Sandburg, Great Neck, NY: Channel Press, 1957 (from my father's library & containing his signature)

Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time, Allen T. Rice, New York, 1886, 1909.

The Life of Abraham Lincoln for Boys and Girls, Charles W. Moores, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1900, illustrated

The Hidden Lincoln, Emmanuel Hertz, editor, 1938 (Law partner of Lincoln, William H. Herndon's letters and papers relating to Lincoln, edited by Hertz)

The Lincoln Reader, Paul M. Angle, editor, Greenwood, 1981

For Further Research about Lincoln's Spiritual Life:

Barton, William, The Soul of Lincoln, 1920

Fox, Dr. G. George, Abraham Lincoln's Religion

Jones, Edgar DeWitt, Lincoln and the Preachers

Olasky, Marvin, The American Leadership Tradition

Wolf, William J., The Almost Chosen People: A Study of the Religion of Abraham Lincoln

Go to the website of the "HAVEN Today" radio program, if you would like to obtain Pastor Willard Davis' 1989 sermon, "Was Abraham Lincoln really a Christian," preached at the Fourth Presbyterian Church, Bethesda, Maryland: http://www.haventoday.org/

The Pursuit of Holiness

2009-02-01T21:36:00.007-05:00

Christian sanctification can be defined as the pursuit of holiness. Strong's Concordance lists holiness as a synonym of godliness. W. E. Vine defines godliness as "that piety which is characterized by a Godward attitude, does that which is pleasing to Him."

False religions may have piety, ethics, and altruism, but no godliness and holiness (blamelessness before God). The ethics or altruism of the common or natural man may cause him to do the right thing, but not do it unto God (not to the glory of God).

Sanctification is both positional (Hebrews 10:14) and practical (Colossians 1:21).

In our ignorance we underestimate our sinful nature, as well as the greatness and glory of God. The poet Robert Browning, once said that ignorance is not innocence, but sin.

Richard Baxter, the great Puritan pastor and writer showed that we fight sin both offensively and defensively:
1) Offensively - we fight sin in ourselves, others, and the world.
2) Defensively - we fight against ignorance, doubts, hardness of heart, and worldliness.

"Implements" needed to put to death the sin in our lives:
1) The Word of God
2) Prayer
3) The Spirit of God (the Holy Spirit)

Two things we must have in our fight against sin and for holiness:
1) Conviction
2) Commitment

How can we know right from wrong. We should ask 4 questions, based on the book of 1 Corinthians in the Bible:
1) Is it helpful? 1 Corinthians 6:12
2) Does it bring me under its power? 1 Corinthians 6:12
3) Does it hurt others? 1 Corinthians 8:13
4) Does it glorify God? 1 Corinthians 10:31

A disciplined intake of the Word of God involves a planned time and a planned method. The method involves:
1) hearing the Word of God from pastors and teachers (Jeremiah 3:15)
2) reading the Bible (Deuteronomy 17:19)
3) studying the Scripture (Proverbs 2:1-5)
4) memorizing key Scriptures (Psalm 119:11)
5) meditating on Scripture (Joshua 1:8)
6) application -obedience to the Scripture ( James 1:22)
7) perseverance (Proverbs 24:16)

Primary Reference:

Bridges, Jerry, The Pursuit of Holiness, Colorado Springs: Navipress, 1978 ff.

Other References:
Adams, Jay E., Godliness through Discipline, Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1973
Baxter, Richard, The Reformed Pastor, Edinburgh, Scotland: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1983 (reprint of 1656 Puritan classic)
Bridges, Jerry, The Practice of Godliness, Colorado Springs: Navipress (sequel to Pursuit of Holiness)
Bridges, Jerry, Respectable Sins
Owen, John, Temptation and Sin, Evansville, Indiana: Sovereign Grace Books, 1958 (reprint of 1656 Puritan classic, Indwelling Sin)
Pink, A.W., The Doctrine of Sanctification, Swengel, Pennsylvania: Bible Truth Depot, 1955
Ryle, J. C., Holiness, London: James Clarke & Co., 1952 (reprint of 19th century classic)
Vine, W. E., Merrill F Unger, and William White, Jr., Expository Dictionary of Biblical Words, Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1985

Acknowledgement: Some of this material was also from teaching notes of Ed Zetterberg.

Ghandi's Seven Deadly Social Sins

2009-02-01T21:01:00.004-05:00

Mahatma Ghandi's 7 deadly social sins are fairly diagnostic of are current economic ills:

1. politics without principle

2. wealth without work

3. commerce without morality

4. pleasure without consciece

5. education without character

6. science without humanity

7. worship without sacrifice

An Update on Tuberculosis: a more deadly disease than ever

2009-01-28T16:01:00.008-05:00

Tuberculosis (TB, TBC) is one of the deadliest diseases in the world and has had a resurgence lately. It kills worldwide roughly 2 million people a year, compared with the 1 million killed by malaria.

TB is a communicable disease of humans and animals, primarily affecting the lungs, caused by a slow growing bacteria microorganism, of the bacillus group.

Clinical trials are now being done around the world to find effective vaccines against the world's three worst infectious disease killers: AIDS, TB, and Malaria. Research is also being done to develope a vaccine for the rampant Hepatitis C Virus. Visceral leishmaniasis (black fever, leishmaniasis involving the internal organs of the body), the world's second most common parasite killer (folowing malaria) also is the focus of new and better treatments.

Promising phase II trials were completed in Kenya and Tanzania for two malaria vaccines. They were published last month and presented at the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene meeting in New Orleans. Multicenter phase III efficacy (effectiveness) trials should begin early this year, after approval by national regulatory agencies and ethics committees. The vaccines reduced the incidence of illness caused by the malaria parasite by 53% over 8 months and by 65% over 6 months in the two phase II studies.

The cure for TB, using medication, can cost as little as $20, since the medicines are primarily oral and generic (not expensive brand-name drugs). By comparison there is no cure yet for AIDS, and medical treatment can be relativelely expensive.

One third of the world's population is infected with the TB germ. TB germs can live in a person without making the person sick, but often the organisms eventually break away and spread, causing illness. Each year almost 9 million people in the world do become sick with the TB disease. It must be made clear that TB infection is not the same as TB disease. In the U.S. the majority of cases are now in the foreign born.

TB is also the leading killer worldwide of those who have AIDS, the two diseases being a very lethal combination.

About 5% (1 in 20) of the 9 million yearly new cases worldwide are resistant to multiple drugs that are used to treat TB, the highest percentage ever. TB resistant to the two first-line drugs, isoniazide and rifampin, is labelled MDR-TB (multidrug-resistant TB). TB resistant to both first-line and second-line drugs (XDR-TB or extensively-resistant TB) is virtually untreatable and very deadly. XDR-TB carries a 25% mortality within one year, even in the U.S. The dreaded XDR-TB has been found in over 45 countries.

A 2008 WHO report indicates an alarming slowing in the progress of detecting new cases, probably because TB budgets remain flat in most countries of the world. Another problem is that there has been only 25 labs in all of Africa capable of detecting resistant TB (MDR-TB), and 19 of these are in South Africa.

Although there are no quick fixes, there are ways to improve the TB problem:

1. The TB drug resistance problem needs a head-on assault by international partnerships, which include different sectors of society.

2. Governments, pharmaceutical companies, churches, and other NGO's (non-government organizations) can provide free or subsidized access to treatment at a local level in hard-hit areas of the world, or even on a more global scale. Otherwise gains made in resistant TB, as well as in AIDS, treatment, may be lost.

3. HIV positive patients should routinely be tested for TB.

4. Strict adherance to treatment guidelines must be followed, in order to prevent emergence of resistant strains of the TB bacteria (and the HIV virus).

5. TB patients should be separated to reduce the risk of transmission to others.

Resources:

WHO (World Health Organization)- WHO Stop TB Department
www.who.int/tb/en/
www.who.int/tb/xdr/en/ (website for XDR-TB)

CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention
www.cdc.gov/tb
www.cdc.gov/mmwr
www.cdcnpin.org/scripts/listserv/tb_update.asp

TB Education and Training Resources
http://www.findbresources.org/

questia.com/tuberculosis

travellersdiseases.com

immunodx.com

RevolutionHealth.com

Everydayhealth.com

amednews.com (American Medical News, April 14, 2008)

theglobalfund.org (Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria)

GAVIAlliance.org

savethechildren.org (Save the Children)

International Holocaust Remembrance Day

2009-01-27T20:50:00.009-05:00

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is particularily timely in view of the reported 300% increase in Anti-Semitism globally in the past two weeks, and in view of the ongoing genocides in Darfur, Sudan and in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We should remember and honor the over 6 million victims of the Holocaust, as well as educate ourselves about and take a stand against these 21st-century genocides.
We must take a strong stand on all sanctity of life and life-promoting issues, whether it be "against" abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, "mercy" killing, genocide, ethnic cleansing, or forced starvation, or "for" adoption, biblical marriage, a clean-water and safe-food supply for those in poverty, making life-saving antimicrobials and other medicines available for victims of epidemic diseases, etc.
Abortion has been equivalent to a huge, long-term genocide, which has killed 1.5 million yearly, a total of 52.5 million babies, in the U.S., since the Rowe vs. Wade decision of 1973. This killer has devastated the African American community in the U.S., in particular. It is the number one killer of African Americans in the U.S. African Americans make up 13% of the U.S. population but account for 36% of the abortions in the U.S.
Luke Robinson, of Frederick, Maryland, a minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, has, this week, challenged President Obama on this abortion issue and called for an end to this Holocaust of African American babies.
You may want to write President Obama, respectfully, about this important issue.

Scriptures on which to reflect and meditate:

Genesis 1:26-28
Job 10:8-9
Psalm 100:3
Psalm 139:13-16
Luke 1:39-45

Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, Two Brutal Tyrants of Massive 20th-century Genocide. Have we learned anything yet?

2009-01-10T13:48:00.048-05:00

Two massive, and now almost forgotten, genocides occured in the 20th century in the Ukraine, in the 1930's, and in China, from 1958 to 1961, under the brutal tyrants Josef Stalin (1879-1953) and Mao Zedong (a.k.a. Mao Tse-tung, 1893-1976). More than 7 million died in the Ukraine and 30 million in China, both under programs of forced famine and starvation.

The victims of these two genocides, unlike the Jews of the Holocaust, never received the satisfaction of judgement against the perpetrators of the genocide. Stalin, after decimating the population of the Ukraine and of Russia, continued to rule until 1953. Mao decimated China's population and continued to hold power until 1976, as the man with the "little red book of wisdom".

Both men were often idolized and lionized by the political left in the West, much like they have idolized and fictionalized the Arab radical-Muslim terrorists, and Communist killers like Ho Chi Minh, and, closer to home, Che Guevara and Fidel Castro.

By 1930 the Kulak farmers in the Ukraine were extinguished as a people, whole villages destroyed, as 25,000 of them died per day. Forced famine and starvation (the world's first purely man-made famine) were the means of genocide. As Ivan Stadnyuk wrote in his novel, People Are Not Angels, "The men died first, then the children, and finally the women. "Only one famine, that of China in 1877-78, was more destructive" than this one in the Ukraine. As enemies of the state, 10 million Kulaks were herded into boxcars and sent to Siberia, where they either died or were forced into slave labor. The central issue was to crush the peasant class, no matter what the human cost. When Hitler's Nazis occupied the Ukraine in 1941 they exchanged one reign of terror for another.

Nikolai Bukharin, who Lenin called the "darling of the party", stated that during the Bolshevik Revolution he had seen "things that I would not want even my enemies to see. Yet, 1919, cannot even be compared with what happened between 1930 and 1932. In 1919, we were fighting for our lives. We executed people , but we also risked our lives in the process. In the later period, however, we were conducting a mass annihilation of completely defenseless men, together with their wives and children." "A real dehumanization" had taken place among the Communist "professional bureaucrats," he felt.

Dr. Julius Margolin was an influential Lithuanian Jewish leader and a friend of the Soviet system prior to World War II. During the Soviet occupation of his country, he was, nevertheless, sent to a Siberian slave camp for seven years, along with hundreds of thousands of his country men. After his release, he wrote " Millions of men are perishing in the camps of the Soviet Union...Since they came into being, the Soviet camps have swallowed more people, have executed more victims, than all the other camps-Hitler included-together; and this lethal engine continues to operate full blast. And those who in reply only shrug their shouldres and try to dismiss the issue with vague and meaningless generalities, I consider moral abetters and accomplices of banditry."

In his definitive work on the Soviet carnage, The Great Terror, British scholar and Sovietologist, Robert Conquest, estimates the total number of people directly killed in the Soviet Union by the Communist athorities since the revolution to be conservatively about 21.5 million, and likely, about 50% higher, which would mean about 32 million directly killed. This was over a period of about 50 years, from about 1919 until 1970, when Conquest wrote. Senator Thomas J. Dodd, the member of the U.S. Senate Committee of the Judiciary, who had requested that Conquest write The Human Cost of Soviet Communism, for the Judiciary Committee, in an introduction to the 1970 U.S government publication, comes up with a "grand total of 35 million human lives as a minimum estimate and 45 million as a more probable estimate." He states," Mr Conquest does not include in his tabulation, although it is the conviction of the undersigned Senator that they belong there, his estimate that the cost of the civil war, from military action, executions, typhus, and famine, totaled 9 million lives, and that the great famine of 1921 which followed the civil war, cost another 5 million lives." How many more people were killed between 1970 and 1991, when the Soviet Union was formally dissolved?

Mao's "Great Leap Forward" program was really a great leap backward, as a formerly agrarian economy collapsed, and the resulting famine resulted in 30 million peasant deaths in the late 1950's and early 1960's. Mao advised other Iron Curtain dictators to follow his example in starving the peasant masses. Only Albania really followed, the others holding Mao somewhat in derision. Mao had "killed off the cream of China's youth and imprisoned the country in poverty," to use Lane Montgomery's words, in her book Never Again, Again, Again..., Genocide: Armenia, The Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Herzegovenia, Darfur. "Genocides always serve a purpose. They are are not spontaneous," writes Montgomery, "They occur because governments or tyrants perpetrate them for their own purposes."

Professor Richard L. Walker, who wrote The Human Cost of Communism in China for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in 1971, estimated from all the evidence, the human cost of Communism in China to be a minimum of 34 million, and up to as much as 64 million, people dead from the time of the first civil war (1927-36) until about 1970. Even Moscow claimed that "in the course of 10 years, more than 25 million people in China were exterminated... During 1960 alone, Mao Tse Tung's government exterminated more Chinese than were killed in the entire war against Japan." Walker summed up: "The Communist movement in China, despite its proclaimed high ideals, must be judged on performance, and, as regards the human equation, there is little to commend it. Those who wish to rationalize public assassinations, purges of classes and groups or slave labor as a necessary expedient for China's progress are resorting to the same logic which justified a Hitler and his methods for dealing with economic depression in the Third Reich."

Jung Chang and her husband, historian Jon Halliday, have written a massive, scholarly classic, Mao: The Unkown Story, in which Mao is revealed to be the biggest mass murderer in history. This classic should rightly shut the mouths of the Mao cult, unless these fans be either totally sadists, or extreme propagandists, bent on further falsifying history.

From the opening sentence of Chang and Halliday's book, "Mao Tse-Tung, who for decades held absolute power over the lives of one-quarter of the world's population, was resposible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth-century leader," to the closing page, it carefully documents Mao's reign of terror and brutality. This book should also put to rest the mid-20th century myths perpetuted by Edgar Snow, John K Fairbank, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Theodore White and other western apologists of Mao and Chinese communism. Theodore White advocated that we be "sponsors of revolution" and that "our policy must offer the masses of Asia the same things that the Russian revolution promises them..." The 'Mao Myth' is centered around the 'Long March' myth, which has long been known to have been fabricated by Edgar Snow. His book of lies is still in print.

Paul Hattaway, in his 650 page 2007 sweeping documentary China's Book of Martyrs (AD 845-present)- The Church in China: Volume 1 of the "Fire and Blood" Series about Christianity in China estimates that since the Nestorians first introduced the gospel to China in the seventh century, about 250,000 Christians have died directly because of their faith, and that "since 1900, more Christians have been killed for Christ in China than in all other countries of the world combined. China's martyrs have included some well know names, such as John and Betty Stam, Eric Liddell, whose life was celebrated in the film Chariots of Fire, and Watchman Nee. But the great majority of China's martyrs have been unsung heroes of the Christian faith: simple men and women, boys and girls who when tested 'did not love so much as to shrink from death' (Revelations 12:10-11)."

Bob Davey in an ongoing scholarly series Reformation Today magazine has traced the slower growth of Christianity in China prior to the 20th century, and the more rapid growth of Christianity in China in the 20th century, the latter which has ocurred in spite of the creeping liberalism within the early-20th century China church and the rise of communism and Mao's 'Long March' to victory. Davey gives succinct accounts of 20th century western and Chinese Christian heroes, faithfully evangelizing the China field-Gladys Aylward, John and Betty Stam, Mildred Cable, Marie Monsen, John Sung, Andrew Gih, Watchman Nee, Pastor Hsi, and others. He gives a positive account of numerical and spiritual growth of the indiginous Chinese Christian church, and of its extension into Southeast Asia and other parts of the world. He has yet to write, in his ongoing series, of the decades from 1940 to the present.

Unfortunately, in the Sudan the tyrant Al-Bashir is now, in the 21st century, using forced famine, starvation, and extermination techniques to wipe out the black African farmers in Sudan, as the world stands by, mostly in silence and apathy. Currently the Muslims in Darfur (western Sudan) are taking the brunt of this policy, but previously it was the Christians and animists in southern Sudan. Haven't we, in the 21st century, learned anything from history, especially from the history of the 20th century?

Further Reading:

Adeny, David H., The Church's Long March, Ventura, CA: Regal Books, 1985.

Bays, Daniel, ed., Christianity in China: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996.

Bosshardt, Alfred, The Restraining Hand, Hodder &Stoughton, 1973.

Broomhall, A J, Hudson Taylor and China's Open Century, London: Holder & Stoughton, 7 volumes, 1981-1989.

Burgess, Alan, The Small Woman, Evan Brothers, 1957.Chang, Eileen, Naked Earth, Hong Kong: The Union Press, 1956, 365pp. A novel about China originally published in Chinese by the Tien Feng Press, Hong Kong, 1954.

Chang, Jung and Jon Holliday, Mao: The Unknown Story, New York: Anchor Books (A division of Random House, Inc., 2005, 2006. http://www.anchorbooks.com/

Ching-Weng, Chow, Ten Years of Storm: The True Story of the Communist Regime in China, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960, 323pp., forward by Lin Yutang, preface by author, index.

Conquest, Robert, The Great Terror, NY and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, 570pp., notes, bibliography, index. The definite work on Stalin's purges of the 1930's.

Conquest, Robert, The Human Cost of Soviet Communism, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971. Prepared at the request of Senator Thomas J. Dodd. 33 pp., plus appendix, 6 page index, and 4 page introduction by Senator Thomas J Dodd.

Courtois, Staphane, et al, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Edwards, Lee, The Life and Times of Walter Judd, Missionary for Freedom, NY: Paragon House, 1990, 364pp., notes, bibliography, index.

Fletcher, Jesse C., Bill Wallace of China, Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman, 1996.

Giffiths, Valerie, Not Less Than Everything: the courageous women who carried the Christian gospel to China, Oxford, UK and Grand Rapids, MI, Monarch Books, with Overseas Missionary Fellowship, 2004.

Hefley, James and Marti, By Their Blood: Christian Martyrs of the 20th Century, Mott: Milford, MI, 1979.

Hefley, James and Marti, The Secret File on John Birch, Hannibal, MO: Hannibal Books, 1995.

Huizenga, Lee S., John and Betty Stam: Martyrs, Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1935.

Kinnear, Angus, Against the Tide, The Story of Watchman Nee, Kingsway, ed. 1979. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1987.

Lambert, Tony, China's Christian Millions: The Costly Revival, London: Monarch Books, 1999.

Latourette, Kenneth S., A History of Christian Missions in China, New York: Macmillan, 1932.

Latourette, Kenneth S, A History of Modern China, Pelican, 1954.

Lawrence, Carl, The Church in China, Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House Publishers, 1985.

Lyall, Leslie, A Passion for the Impossible: The China Inland Mission Story, 1865-1965, Chicago: Moody Press, 1965.

Lyall, Leslie, Red Sky at Night: Communism Confronts Christianity in China, Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1956.

Lyall, Leslie, Three of China's Mighty Men, OMF, 1973

Ming-Dao, Wong, A Stone Made Smooth, Mayflower Christian Books, 1981.

Mohler, Albert, "Mao's Reign of Terror," review article of the book Mao: The Unknown Story, by Jung Chang and Jon Holliday, in Reformation Today, volume 211, May-June 2006, pp. 29-32.

Monsen, Marie, The Awakening, Revival in China 1927-1937, China Inland Mission, 1961.

Monsterleet, Jean, Martyrs in China, Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery Co., 1956.

Montgomery, Lane H., Never Again, Again, Again...Genocide: Armenia, The Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Herzegovenia, Darfur, NY: Rudder Finn Press, 2007, 198pp., Bibliography.

Palmer, Gretta, God's Underground in Asia: The Full Story of the Red War of the Church in China, a Story of Organized Terror and Christian Heroism, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1953.

Pollock, John, A Foreign Devil in China: The Story of L. Nelson Bell, 1971. Reprinted by World Publications, Minneapolis, 1988.

Puebla Institute, The Martyrs of Maoism: China's Persecuted Christians, Washington, D.C.: Puebla Institute, 1992.

Reformation Today, various articles on China and Christianity, by Bob Davey, between Nov.-Dec. 2007 and Jan.-Feb. 2010 (the latter issue has the most recent article, "The Gospel in China 1930-1937".

Roberts, Dana, Understanding Wachman Nee, Plainfield, NJ: Haven, 1980.

Rummel, R. J., China's Bloody Century: Genocide and Mass Murder since 1900, New Jersey: Transaction Publications, 1991.

Shaw-Tong, Liu, Out of Red China, NY: Duell Sloan and Pierce, 1953, 269pp., preface by author, introduction by Dr. Hu Shih.

Shea, Nina, In the Lion's Den: A Shocking Account of Persecution and Martyrdom of Christians Today and How We Should Respond, Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman, 1997.

Spence, Jonathon D., The Gate of Heavenly Peace: the Chinese and Their Cultural Revolution, 1895-1980, New York: Viking Press, 1981

Stewart-Smith, D. G., The Defeat of Communism, London: Ludgate Press, 1964, 482pp, introduction by author, preface by Salvador de Madariaga, bibliography, index, 43 historic photographs, maps.

Taylor, Mrs. Howard (Geraldine), The Triumph of John and Betty Stam, Philadelphia: China Inland Mission, 1960. Reprinted by OMF Books, 1978.

Thomson, D. P., Eric Liddell: Athlete and Missionary, Crieff, Scotland: Research Unit, 1971.

Tien Ju-K'ang, Peaks of Faith: Protestant Mission in Revolutionary China, Leiden, The Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1993.

Tucker, Ruth A., From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya: A Biographical History of Christian Missions, Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1983

Walker, Richard Lewis, The Human Cost of Communism in China, Washington, D.C.:U.S Government Printing Office, 1971. 28 pp., plus 5 p. index, 8 p. introduction by Senator James O. Eastland, forward by Walker, and tetter to Eastland by Senator Thomas J. Dodd, who report be prepared. Reprinted by ACU Education and Research Center, 1977.

White, Theodore H. and Annalee Jacoby, Thunder Out of China, New York: William Sloane Associates, 1946.

The Opacity Factor-A Country's Lack of Transparency Hinders Its Economic Growth

2009-01-09T19:11:00.009-05:00

Satyam Computer's 7% plunge in stock price Wenesday, January 7, can teach us some lessons. Satyam, one of India's leading outsourcers, and a company whose stock is easy to buy in the U.S. (as an A.D.R.), it turns out, has been falsifying its financial data for years. Just because a foreign company is a U.S.-listed ADR doesn't guarantee investment safety-U.S regulatory agencies can barely police companies in their own back yard.
We don't have to go all the way to to India -the same thing has been going on in the U.S., with companies like Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco which also "cooked' their books. The lack-of-transparency issue has been ignored at our peril the past decade. Tamar Frankel, a law Professor at Boston University, as well as an author, writes that "The global business culture downplays honesty...People talk a lot about efficiency and innovation, but being very trustworthy and honest is not high on the list."
The Milliken Institute, a capital formation and economic growth think tank, ranks sixty countries of the world by "Opacity Risk," which it defines as a lack of transparency. That risk is guaged by 1) a nation's corruption, 2) its legal systems, 3) its enforcement policies, 4) its accounting and disclosure standards, and 5) its regulatory quality. The lack of transparency is a major impediment to capital formation, and thus economic growth.
It turns out that India is not a very safe counry in which to invest-ranking 40th out of 60 countries. Probably not just coincidentally, two other mega-sized countries, China and Brazil, by comparison, only rank 41st and 42nd respectively.
U.S. citizens can not take much comfort either. The United States, as could almost be predicted from its dramatic stock markets' drop the past year, has plunged from 4th to 13th in transparency ranking in the past decade. Only 13th of 60 countries.
Which countries are the best-at least according to this measuring stick? The five best are: Finland, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sweden, and Australia.
The Milliken Institute's Joel Kurtzman sums it up thus: "I see the [transparency] issue as something that has been ignored over the last decade, and the issue of Satyam is perhaps one of many to come. If you operate in a lax system, you're likely to have more wrongdoing."
Which company will make tomorrow's headlines for lack of transparency? And, the bottom line- isn't this really a matter of ethics? "Who said, "It's the economy stupid?" Ultimately it's not the economy but ethics-or, worse yet, just "old-fashion" sin.

For Further Reading:

Frankel, Tamar, Trust and Honesty: America's Business Culture at the Crossroad.

Two Hundred Years of Gospel Missions in China

2009-01-06T15:03:00.033-05:00

Robert Morrison (1782-1834), the pioneer Protestant missionary to China, travelled by boat from England to Canton in 1807 with a passion to reach the Chinese people with the gospel. He baptized his first convert in 1814, and persevered in China for 25 years. He immersed himself in the language and culture, and became fluent in the Mandarin and Cantonese dialects. He completed a six volume Chinese-English dictionary (1815-1820) which is still in use. He also completed, from 1819-23, with colleague William Milne, a Chinese Bible translation. His ground-breaking efforts saw less than a dozen direct converts, but he prepared the way for many other missionaries to go. It can be said that Morrison, like the apostle Paul, laid the foundation upon which others built. His pleas helped recruit the first American missionary to China, Elijah Coleman Bridgman. His co-worker Liang Fa (Leang A-fa), 1789-1855, ordained by Morrison in 1823, became the first Chinese evangelist and the first pastor of the Chinese Church in Canton (Guangzhou).

A brief overview of Christian missions in China, before the modern missionary movement, should be helpful. The somewhat heretical, monastic Nestorian Christians had penetrated China as early as the seventh century. They followed the trade routes to Central Asia and reached China in A.D. 635, during the T'ang dynasy, which flourished from A.D 618-907. The T'ang dynasty, paricularily under T'ai Tsung, created the most prosperous and civilized culture in the world. The Roman Catholic missionaries arrived in China in the sixteenth century. Matthew Ricci (born 1552), the first, arrived in 1588. Of course, earlier than this, Marco Polo had reached Shangdu (Shang-tu, near modern Kalgan), Kublai Khan's summer palace, overland, with his father and uncle, in 1274. They had been warmly welcomed, so much so, in fact, that they weren't able to leave until 1292, sailing from, what is now Quanzhou, the southern China port, to, what is now, Singapore, before returning to Venice.

Medical missions have played a key role in China in the modern era. Peter Parker became the first Protestant medical missionary in 1834, and, with others, founded the Medical Missionary Soociety of China in 1835-36. Parker trained his first Chinese medical student in 1836. Fifty years later the famous Dr. Sun Yat Sen studied for a year there (in 1886). Some subsequent, famous, medical missionaries in China were Hudson Taylor, A. J. Broomhall (biographer of Hudson Taylor), and John Kenneth Mackenzie (1850-1888). Dr Mackenzie founded and ran the first government medical school in the Empire. L. Nelson Bell (1894-1973), a Southern Presbyterian, was in China from 1916 until 1941, as a missionary physician and surgeon in, what was to become, by 1930, the largest Presbyterian Hospital in the world. The Hospital was in Jiangsu Province. He became the father-in-law of Billy Graham. Dr. Walter Judd (born 1898), who became active in the Student Volunteer Movement, went to China in 1925 and later became a Minnesota congressman and central figure in post-World War II foreign affairs. Dr. Bill Wallace went to China from Knoxville, Tennesssee, in 1935 and died a martyr for Christ in a Communist prison in 1951. He saved an entire hospital by moving it down the river from Wachow.

After the Opium War of 1840-42, Hong Kong was ceded to the British. The Treaty of Nanking signed in 1843 opened five ports to the West, A flood of missionaries started entering China as a result of these events.. The first and most influential was German missionary, Karl Gutzlaff, who arrived in 1840 to minister in the coastal areas, aroused Europe to China missions, advocated missionaries wear Chinese dress, and translated much of the Old Testament directly from the Hebrew to Chinese.

Mary Ann Aldersley, along with Maria Dyer (who later married Hudson Taylor) was a student of Robert Morrison's Chinese class. Aldersley was on the first committee of the Society for Promoting Female Education in the East (SPFEE). She sailed to Djakarta, Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia) in 1837 to work with Chinese immigrants, set up a school for girls in Surabaya(Indonesia), moved to Macao in 1841 when Hong Kong was leased to the British, and entered China in 1843. She was the first single western woman to do so. She established a school for girls, which grew over the years It was in in the largest of the port cities to open up to the West, Ningbo, which had a population of 300,000. She had opposed Maria Dyer's marriage to Hudson Taylor in 1858. Aldersley never once returned to England.

William Chalmers Burns (1815-1868), son of a famous Scottish minister, was himself a revivalist used of God in Scotland, England , and Canada. He became the first missionary to China of the Presbyterian Church of England, arriving in 1847. He evangelized in Canton, Amboy and Peking. He travelled and preached widely, adopting Chinese attire, as had his travelling companion of seven months (in 1855-56), Hudson Taylor. He opposed and raised awareness of the evil of the the opium and coolie trades.

James Hudson Taylor (1832-1905) arrived in Shanghai in 1854 from England with the Chinese Evangelization Society, as only their second missionary, He wore Chinese clothes. He courageously opened up the interior to the gospel. He travelled extensively in China in spite of ill health. He founded China Inland Mission, now the Overseas Missionary Fellowship. China Inland Mission (CIM) a "volunteer society" was the pioneer or prototype of "faith missions", which sprang up in the late 19th century" In 1866 sixteen missionaries sailed back to China with him from England. By 1891 he led 640 workers in China. He had a policy of not soliciting funds. He saw over 80 of the CIM family, adults and children, killed in the Boxer Uprising. His wife and four children died in China of disease and famine. His wife, Maria (Dyer), whom he married in 1858, was born in China of missionary parents. She died in 1870 at the age of only 33. He died in China in 1905, a month after returning to China..

Timothy Richard (1845-1919) was sent by the Baptist Missionary Society (of England) to China in 1859 developing missionary strategies that challenged many preconceived mission notions of the day. He was an inspiration to the Chinese literati, spurring education, agriculture, industrial, transportation, and trade reforms. He wrote about secular topics, and about Buddhism and the Chinese gods. He was instrumental in the founding of Shanxi University after the 1900 Boxer Uprising. He continued work in China until 1916, three years before he died.

George Leslie Mackay (1844-1902), a Canadian Presbyterian, who graduated from Princeton University, studied under Alexander Duff in Edinburgh, Scotland, went to the island of Formosa in 1872, and served as a missionary and evangelist for 29 years on the northwest part of the island. He married a Formosan. Mackay advocated a self-supporting and self-propagating indiginous church movement there, seeing six churches established. He established training schools and a hospital. He died at age 58.

Charlotte (Lottie) Diggs Moon (1840-1912) went as a single Southern Baptist missionary to China in 1873. She was almost evacuated to Japan in the Boxer Uprising of 1900. She witnessed the plague, smallpox, and famine in Tengchow during the time of a local rebellion. She organized relief efforts. She died on a ship to Japan, after a doctor found her severly malnourished. The Lottie Moon Society is now a major source of Southern Baptist mission funding, having raised millions of dollars for missions.

The famous "Cambridge Seven" sailed for China in 1885 to work with China Inland Mission (CIM), having applied for service with CIM in 1883-84. The most famous of these "student volunteers" was Charles Thomas (C. T.) Studd. He excelled in sports, especially cricket, at Eaton and Cambridge. Some considered him England's greatest cricket player. Studd came from a famous and wealthy family, and was noted for his hard-driving zeal and and, at times, brashness. His dad, and, later, he, had life-changing experiences after attending D. L. Moody's evangelistic services. American evangelist, Moody, visited Cambridge in an 1882 tour of England. Five other of Cambridge's finest athletic and academic students, and one other student, all of wealthy upbringing, travelled around England and Scotland speaking and mobilizing other students, before accompanying Studd to China. One of the seven was Dixon Hoste (1861-1946) who later, in 1902, succeeded Hudson Taylor as director of the China Inland Mission. The remainder of the Cambridge Seven were Montagu Beauchamp, William Cassels, Stanley P. Smith, and brothers Arthur and Cecil Polhill-Turner. Studd gave away his substantial inheritance for the work. After 10 years in China, he helped found the 'Student Volunteer Movement, which mobilized thousands for missions." He also did mission work in India and the Congo for many years. He founded the Worldide Evangelization Crusade (now WEC International) His later life was wracked with controversy, because of his "Gambler for God" intensity.

Jonathan Goforth (1859-1936), a Canadian Presbyterian minister, and his wife Rosalind Goforth (1864-1942), sailed to China in 1887-1888. They suffered many hardships in China, including the death of five of their eleven children, a fire that destroyed their possessions, and Jonathan's near-death in the Boxer Uprising, in which many other missionaries and converts were martyred. The Goforths were very effective evangelists and soul-winners. In the 1908-1909 North China Revivals, God used Goforth mightily. He was also used of God to prepare hearts for the 1932 Shantung Revival, as many Southern Baptist ministers involved in that revival had attended a 1929 conference in Peitailo, China in which Goforth spoke.. The Goforths returned to Canada in 1934, and wrote books which mobilized many others to missions.

In the 20th century, Eric Liddell was born in China in 1902, his parents being Presbyterian mssionaries. He won gold medals in the 1924 Olympics, and then returned to China in 1925. He died in a Japanese internment camp in 1945, with a hemorrhaging brain tumor, the harsh camp conditions probably hastening his death. He is, to this day, considered a hero in China, his former residence being protected by the Chinese government.

Gladys Aylward (1902-1970) of England arrived in China by rail in 1932, joining Jeannie Lawson in remote Yangcheng. Jeannie died, soon afterwards, but Gladys stayed until 1947. She used the Inn to reach many. She effectively opposed the foot-binding of girls. In 1940, during the Japanese invasion, she led 100 Chinese children, for one month, through mountains, to safety. The Hollywood movie, The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, was based on these events. She later, in 1957, went to Taiwan and set up an orphanage, dying there in 1970.

In the Boxer Uprising of 1900, 189 Protestant missionaries (including 53 of their children), and several thousand Chinese Christians were killed. Many were CIM and single women missionaries in the interior. It is estimated that in 1900, at the time of the uprising, 2/3 of the western missionaries in China were women. Another authority, Ruth Tucker, author of From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya, estimated that in the early 20th century the missionaries in some parts of China were 1/3 men missionaries, 1/3 married women, and 1/3 single women. She writes that, for instance, in one province, Shantung, in 1910, there were 79 women and 46 men Presbyterian and Baptist missionaries. Another example is from the very small denomination, Seventh Day Baptists, to which my wife and I belong. Misssion work was started in Shanghai in 1850 and hospitals were soon built in Shanghai and Liuho. Over the next 100 years, until the doors closed in 1950, when the Communists took control, there were more women than men missionaries. The Seventh Day Baptist medical doctors there were often women: Dr Ella Swinney (medical missionary in Shanghai beginning in 1883, Dr. Rosa Palmborg (born in Sweden 1867, medical missionary in China, 1894-1940), Dr. Grace Crandall (born 1875, medical missionary in China beginning in 1911), and Dr. Besse Sinclair (began medical work there in 1917). Valerie Griffiths, of Overseas Missionary Fellowship, documents in her book, Not Less than Everything, the key role of the courageous, heroic, pioneer women, married and single, in carrying the gospel to China.

Later well known twentieth century martyrs incuded John and Betty Stam in 1934 and John Birch in 1945. In 1950 the Communists took over China, missionaries were expelled, and persecution of Christians by an atheist state became the norm.

In the 50 years (1950-2000) after the Communists came to power, under adverse circumstances and a hostile environment, the Protestant churches, many being house churches, have grown perhaps a hundred fold, from over 900,000, to over 90 million. About 15 million worship in the state approved "Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM) churches, and the rest, the great majority, in the unapproved house churches. Jonathan Chao, in an article, "Success under the Cross" (reprinted as "China-Growth through Suffering") carefully documents the factors causing this stunning growth. The growing indiginous movement is well exemplified by Philip Teng, of Hong Kong, the son of Presbyterian minister, and a graduate of Edinburgh University in Scotland. He was a Christian and Missionary Alliance pastor, educator, evangelist, missionary and missiologist. He did mission work in southern Borneo, Indonesia and helped plant a number of churches. In 1973 he served as president of the Alliance World Federation.

Although hundreds of people groups in China are still unreached with the gospel, the story of the church in China is one of stunning growth under intense hardship. Some estimate that there are more Christians in China than in any other country in the world, even counting the United States. Let us pray that this growth will continue unabated, and will extend widely and mature mightily, so that China, much like Korea, will host missionaries to the rest of the world, including the decadent and post-modern West. And may God receive all praise and glory.

Select Bibliography:

A. Books

Aldersey White, E., A Woman Pioneer in China: The Life of Mary Ann Aldersley, Livingstone Press, 1932
Allen, C., The New Lottie Moon Story
Babcock, Ruby, A Study of Seventh Day Baptist Missions in China, American Sabbath Tract Society, 1925
Benge, Janet and Geoff Benge, Lottie Moon Giving her All for China, YWAM Publishing, 2001
Broomhall, A. J., Hudson Taylor & China's Open Century, Hodder and Stroughton, 7 volumes, 1981-1989
Broomhall, Marshall, Martyred Misssionaries of the China Inland Mission, CIM, 1901
Broomhall, Marshall, Robert Morrison: A Master-Builder
Broomhall, Marshall, The Bible in China, British & Foreign Bible Society, 1934
Bryson, Mrs., John Kenneth Mackenzie: Medical Missionary to China, Chicago: Student Missionary Campaign Library (Feming H. Revell Company), N.D.
Carlberg, Gustav, China in Revival, Augustana Book Concern, 1936
Clarke, William, The Church in China: Its Vitality, Its Future, Council Press
Caughey, Ellen, Some Gave All, Barbour Publishing, 2002 (biographies of Birch and Moon)
Duewel, Wesley, Revival Fires, Zondervan Publishing House, 1995, chapter 35: "Goforth and the North China Revival," chapter 36: "The Great Chinese Harvest," chapter 38: "The Shantung Revival"
Edwards, Lee, Missionary for Freedom: The Life and Times of Walter Judd, Paragon House, 1990
Fletcher, Jesse C., Bill Wallace of China, Broadman Press, 1963
Fulton, A., Through Earthquake, Wind and Fire: Church and Mission in Manchuria 1867-1950
Glover, A. E., A Thousand Miles of Miracles in China. A Personal Record of God's Delivering Power from the Hands of the Imperial Boxers of Shan-si (Shaanxi), Holder & Stroughton, 1904
Goforth, Jonathan, By My Spirit
Goforth, Rosalind, Goforth of China, , Zondervan, 1937
Gallagher, Louis, ed., China in the 16th Century: The Journals of Matthew Ricci: 1563-1610, Random House
Griffiths, Valerie, Not Less Than Everything, Monarch Books, Overseas Missionary Fellowship
Hefley, James and Marti, By Their Blood: Christian Martyrs of the Twentieth Century, Mott
Hefley, James and Marti, The Secret File on John Birch, Tyndale House Publishers, 1980
Hunter, A. and K. Chan, Protestantism in Contemporary China
Moffet, S., A History of Christianity in Asia
Kwok, Pui-lan, Chinese Women and Christianity 1860-1927, Scholars Press, 1992
Palmburg, Rosa, China Letters, Recorder Press, American Sabbath Tract Society, 1943
Pollock, J., A Foreign Devil in China, (life of Dr Nelson Bell)
Lambert, Tony, China's Christian Millions, Monarch Books, 2000
Latourette, Kenneth, A History of Christian Missions in China, SPCK, 1929
Latourette, Kenneth, History of Christianity, Revised edition, 2 volumes, 1975
Lawrence, Una, Lottie Moon, Sunday School Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1927
Merwin, Wallace, Adventure in Unity: The Church of Christ in China, Erdmans, 1974
Miller, R. Strang, William C. Burns (in the book Five Pioneer Missionaries, Banner of Truth,
1965, reprinted 1987
Moreau, A. Scott, ed,. Evangelical Dictionary of World Missions, Baker Books, 2000
Morrison, E. A., Memoirs of the Life and Labours of Robert Morrison, D. D. , 2 volumes, Longman, 1839
Mueller, J Theodore, Great Missionaries to the Orient, 1948. Chapter 14: "George Leslie Mackay"
Neill, Stephen, A History of Christian Missions, Penguin, 1964
Outerbridge, Leonard, The Lost Churches of China, Westminster Press, 1952
Swift, Catherine, Eric Liddell, Minneapolis: Bethany House Publishers, 1990
Taylor, Dr. and Mrs. Howard, Hudson Taylor's Spiritual Secret, Moody Press, 1989
Taylor, Geraldine (Mrs Howard Taylor), The Triumph of John and Betty Stam, CIM, 1935
Thomas, R. Wardlaw, Giffith John, The Story of Fifty Years in China, Religious Tract Society, 1907
Townsend, William, Robert Morrison, The Pioneer of Chinese Missions, London Missionary Society, 1892 edition
Tucker, Ruth, From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya: A Biogrphical History of Christian Missions, Zondervan Publishing House, 1983
Wallis, Andrew, The Missionary Movement in Christian History, Orbis Books, 1997
White, B., Unfinished Encounter: China and Christianity
Winslow, Carolyn, Tomorrow, Young People's Missionary Society, 1945

B. Periodicals

Mission Frontiers, Nov.-Dec. 2008, The U. S. Center for World Mission, 30:6, Title on cover: 'The Flying Man: China Rediscovers Its Hero". Articles on Liddell, Morrison, Parker, Taylor, Gutzlaff, and Richard. http://www.missionfrontiers.org/

Reformation Today, Nov.-Dec 2000, volume 178. Article: "China- Growth Through Suffering', by Jonathan Chao, p. 3-10.

Reformation Today, Nov-Dec. 2007, volume 220. Article: "Robert Morrison (1782-1830): Pioneer of the Gospel to China," by Bob Davey, p. 23-30

20/20 VISION: 20 MISSION BOOKS THAT CHALLENGED ME MOST THE PAST 20 YEARS

2009-01-04T18:27:00.023-05:00

I thank God for giving me another year to praise and serve Him, and also to reflect on His past mercies. The New Year is a good time to look back, as well as to look forward.
About 20 years ago God lead my wife and I to take, over the course of several years, about a half-dozen courses (some were one week inter-term courses offered in Januay and August) at Westminster Seminary-West in Escondido, California.
Subsequently, He lead us to take the Perspectives on the World Christian Movement Course in Redlands, California, where we were mentored by Frank and Nancy Tichy, and where we had the privilege of hearing Ralph and Roberta Winter, Don Richardson, Lloyd Kwast, Arthur Glasser, Don McCurdy, Stan Yoder, Thomas and Elizabeth Brewster, and others. We later moved to Indiana and, as Perspectives class alumni and helpers, were able to learn from Ruth Tucker, David Hesselgrave, Marti Smith, Amy Law, Carol Davis, Jennifer Collins, David Giles, Jim Lo, Randy Spracht and others. Our oldest daughter also had been able to take the Perspectives course in Hemet, California.
My two excellent mission classes at Westminster-West were with Timothy Monsma, co-author with Roger Greenaway, of Cities: Missions' New Frontiers, and with Derk Bergsma.
We were really challenged to be involved in missions.
This involvement soon included short term projects in Africa, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, and Guyana, and two years in Indonesia. For our oldest daughter it meant a summer project in the Philippines with New Tribes Mission and 2 years teaching in Dominican Republic. Elizabeth Elliot became one of her favorite authors.
The past several years have entailed recruiting and leading medical mission teams mainly to Guyana, South America, to do outreach clinics, and to help children there get needed surgeries. We have also done short-term projects in Jamaica and Indonesia.
I have been thinking about the mission-oriented books that most influenced and challenged me in these past 20 years and have come up with a list of 20. Since I have an avid interest in missions history, my choices are skewed somewhat in that direction. I would enjoy getting feedback from you-especially about some mission books that might be on your list. My list includes some large reference-type books. I've listed them first.

My "20/20" List:

1. Evangelical Dictionary of World Missions, A. Scott Moreau, editor, Baker Books, 2000. 1068 p. A gift from my daughter and a book I'll occasionally spend most of an evening absorbing.

2. Perspectives on the World Christian Movement: A Reader, Ralph Winter and Steven Hawthorne, editors, William Carey Library, 1981, 1992. 846p. Our Perspectives class textbook. A new edition, I haven't seen, was just released. My old hardcover copy is well marked and still referred to frequently.

3. Operation World: When We Pray God Works, Patrick Johnstone and Jason Mandrryk, editors, U.S Center for World Mission and WEC International, 21st Century edition, 2001, 797p. Still an indispensible reference and prayer guide to every country in the world.

4. From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya: A Biographical History of Christian Missions, Ruth Tucker, Zondervan, 1983, 511p. Winner of the Gold Medallion Award. A book I've read in full, marked up, and reread in parts.

5. A History of Christian Missions, Stephen Neal, Pelican Books, 624p. My little paperback version makes for nice travel reading. A good overview of the momentum of Christian missions through history.

6. Eternity in their Hearts, Don Richardson, Regal Books, 1981. My favorite of Don's books because of its sweeping view of 27 ancient cultures God prepared for the gospel with astonishing redemptive analogies. The book title is from Eccles. 3:11. His "4000-Year Connection" is one of the chapter titles, and also the title of his one-day seminar we attended in the 1990's. The mission mandate is emphasized. I did a book report on this one for the Perspectives class. Peace Child, the story of the Sawi headhunters and redemptive analogy was his best-seller, translated in 18 languages, and a Readers Digest book-of-the-month selection. Lords of the Earth, about missionary Stan Dale and the stone-age Yali of Irian Jawa was also a good read.

7. Let the Nations Be Glad: The Supremacy of God in Missions, John Piper, 1993, revised and expanded 2003. A passionate plea for God-centered missions. " Missions exist because worship doesn't. Worship is ultimate, not missions, because God is ultimate, not man." A classic.

8. The Life and Diary of David Brainerd, Moody Press, 1949. A missionary to Native Americans in NJ , NY, and PA, who counted about 150 converts in NJ BY 1746, just before his death. A classic since it was made widely available by Moody Press. My compact pocket-sized, 1850's abridgement (The Life of the Rev. David Brainerd, by the Rev. Jonathan Edwards, Riligious Tract Society, 1799ff) of the original 1740's diary, has been overseas with me several times, and is one of the few books I've read (and cried) through more than once. The great theologian and missionary in his own right, Jonathan Edwards, Brainerd's mentor, put the diary into publishable form, after Brainerd's death from tuberculosis at age 29.

9. My Love Must Wait: The Story of Henry Martyn, D. Bentley-Taylor. I no longer have a copy, but shed some tears over this one too. English missionary to India and Iran, who followed in the tradition of Brainerd and Carey. He died in Turkey at age 21. He had earlier written in India, "Now, let me burn out for God." I would also like to see a 21st century biography written on the life of William Borden, another missionary, who like Brainerd and Martyn burnt out for God in his youth.

10. Five Pioneer Missionaries: David Brainerd, William C. Burns, John Eliot, Henry Martyn, John G. Paton, Banner of Truth Trust, 1965, 1987. 345p. The best biography of some of the greatest calvinistic-oriented missionaries of the 18th and 19th century, although it doesn't include missionary greats like Moffat, Carey, and Judson.

11. The St. Andrews Seven: The Finest Flowering of Missionary Zeal in Scottish History, Stuart Piggin and John Roxborough, Banner of Truth Trust, 1985, 130p. The story of the legendary Thomas Chalmers and six of his students at the University of Saint Andrews in the 1820's. The six students were: Alexander Duff, John Urquhart, John Adam, Robert Nesbit, William Sinclair Mackay, and John Ewart. Their teenage enthusiasm to serve Christ to the ends of the earth, led to great missionary work later, primarily in India. The early death of John Urquhart spurred the other five to "discover God's will and do it."

12. The Missionary Heroes of Africa, J. H. Morrison, George Doran Co., 1922, Reprinted by Greenwood Publishing Group, 1969. 267 pages. Has a chapter on each of these notable 19th and early 20th century "missionary heroes" of Africa: Robert Moffat, David Livingstone, John Mackenzie, James Stewart (of Lovedale), Robert Laws (of Livingstonia), Alexander Mackay (of Uganda), George Grenfell (of the Congo), Francois Coillard (of the Zambezi), and Mary Slessor (of Calabar). Another book I've enjoyed rereading recently.

13. Company of Heaven: Early Missionaries in the South Seas, Graeme Kent, Thomas Nelson, 1972, 230p. Many, nice historical illustrations. Written by an English author, who also served in the British Army, as a school teacher, and as a BBC producer, and lived with his family in the Soloman Islands. Fascinating, well writen account.

14. Some Gave All: Four Stories of Missionary Martyrs, Ellen Caughey, Barbour Publishing, 2002, 208p. The four martyrs are John Birch (China), Betty Olsen (Vietnam), Lottie Moon (China), and Nate Saint (Ecuador). From Barbour's "Heroes of the Faith" series- in paperback.

15. Cities: Missions New Frontier, Roger S. Greenaway and Timothy M. Monsma, Baker Book House, 1989, 2nd ed. 1990. Textbook for my class with Monsma at Westminster-West. An excellent, scholarly global overview of urban missions.

15. Let the Whole World Know: Resources for Preaching on Missions, Richard R. DeRidder and Roger S. Greenaway, Baker Book House, 1988. An great resource for preaching or teaching. I have used it, including, my favorites, these summaries of Christ's commission:

GO - authority enough
YE - messengers enough
INTO ALL THE WORLD -territory enough
AND PREACH -work enough
THE GOSPEL -message enough
TO EVERY CREATURE -audience enough
I AM WITH YOU ALWAYS -assurance enough

YOU SHALL BE MY WITNESSES,
IN JERUSALEM -where I was rejected and condemned
IN JUDEA -where I was crucified
IN SAMARIA -where I was not wanted
IN THE UTTERMOST PART OF THE EARTH -where I am not known

16. Revolution in World Missions, K. P. Yohannan, gfa books a division of Gospel for Asia, many printings 1986 to the present, 212p. Yohannan challenges us to "examine our lifestyles in view of millions who have never heard the gospel." I read it in 1992 and passed it on to a Guyanese pastor who quickly read it with exitement. Advocates supporting indiginous missionaries in the vast unreached 10/40 window, as Gospel For Asia does. Nearly a million copies are in print. Older used copies are still easy to find, under title, The Coming Revolution in Word Missions: Final Thrust to Reach The 10/40 Window.

17. Catch the Vision 2000, Bill and Amy Stearns, Bethany House Publishers, 1991. I found this a practical book, in the 1990's, to better understand God's global purpose and to reach every unreached people group. Their newer Run with the Vision should be as helpful also.

18. How to be a World Class Christian: Special 50-Day Adventure Abridged Edition, Paul Borthwick, Victor Books, 1993. Have given away several copies-it's compact, useful, and inexpensive ( and easy to find used copies). Borthwick's A Mind for Missions is similarily useful but not as compact.

19. In the Gap:What it Means to be a World Christian, David Bryant, Inter-Varsity Press, 1979, 1981. Empasizes prayer, partnering, and teamwork. In the back it has a verse from every book of the Bible showing God's missionary heart and purpose. Bryant's newer book is Stand in the Gap.

20. A Vision for Missions, Tom Wells, Banner of Truth, 1985, 157p. A little book I discovered and read recently. The missionary endeavour is very basic to Christianity. He delves into the inspiration behind the 18th and 19th century missionary movement, with special emphasis on the examples of David Brainerd, William Carey, and Henry Martyn.

My reading list for the New Year includes:

1. David Bosch, Transforming Mission, Orbis, 2003.
2. Philip Jenkins, The Coming of Global Christianity, Oxford University Press, 2002.
3. Vishal and Ruth Mangalwadi, The Legacy of William Carey: A Model for Transformation of a Culture, Crossway Books, 1999. Summarized in a recent issue of Mission Frontiers magazine
4. Daniel Weber, William Carey and the Missionary Vision, Banner of Truth Trust, 2005. Part 2 of the book, over half the book, has Carey's complete An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens, written in 1792, a book God used mightily at the beginning of the modern missionary era.
5. Andrew F. Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith, Orbis Books, 1197. A winner of "Christianity Today Book Award."
6. David Hesselgrave, Paradigms in Conflict: 10 Key Questions in Christian Missions Today, Kregel Books, 2005. Hesselgrave signed my copy at the Perspectives class.
7. Mrs Howard Taylor, Borden of Yale '09, C.I.M., 1913. Moody Press reprint 1923.
8. Charles Soutter Campbell, William Borden: A Short Life Complete in Christ, 1909. If I can find it.

I recently read summaries of, or acquired and perused, most of these books, stimulating my interest in reading them in full. I would like to read more about the lives of early 20th century missionaries William Borden (No book has been written about Borden since 1913, it seems) and Eric Liddell (Liddell's 1924 Olympic feats are well know through the movie, Chariots of Fire). John Keddie's Running the Race, a biography of Eric Liddell was recently published in Mandarin and is being distributed in China, where Liddell is a hero, mainly because of his internment by the Japanese at Weihsien in China until his death in 1945, with a brain tumor. The film project about Eric Liddell, The Flying Man, and his missionary years in China is exciting. Mission Frontiers, Nov-Dec 2008 issue, has a 4 page article, "Eric Liddell, The Flying Man: China Rediscovers Its Hero," by Mark Harris. You may also wish to inquire about the future film by emailing to: loveinchinacommunications@gmail.com

Misssiology 101- Quotes from Mission Moblilizers

2008-12-14T23:11:00.002-05:00

If God has fit you to be a missionary, I should not shrivel down to be a king. Charles H. Spurgeon

We who have Christ's eternal life need to throw away our own lives. George Verwer

We talk of the second coming, half the world has never heard of the first. Oswald J. Smith

We must be global Christians with a global vision because our God is a global God. John Stott

Love is the root of missions, sacrifice is the fruit of missions. Roderick Davis

Go send, or disobey. John Piper

Every step in the progress of missions is directly traceable to prayer. Arthur Tappan Pierson

Prepare for the worst, expect the best, and take what comes. Robert E. Speer

God's part is to put forth power, our part is to put forth faith. Andrew A. Bonar

God cannot lead you on the basis of facts you do not know. David Bryant

God cannot dedicate your ignorance no matter how much you dedicate it. David Mays

We have a God who delights in impossibilities. Andrew Murray

Two distinguishing marks of the early church were: poverty and power. T.J. Bach

Today Christians spend more money on dog food than missions. Leonard Ravenhill

Here is a test to find whether your mission on earth is finished: if you are alive, it isn't. Richard Bach

The church must send or the church will end. Mendell Taylor

Today five out of six non-Christians in our world have no hope unless missionaries come to them and plant the church among them. David Bryant

Anyone who can help 100 missionaries to the field is more important than one missionary on the field. In fact, mission mobilization activity is more crucial than field activity. Phil Parshall

More Gold Nuggets from Missionaries, Past and Present

2008-12-14T20:57:00.003-05:00

Here are some more short quotes from past and present missionaries that challenge me and jog my complacency:

The Bible is not the basis of missions; missions is the basis of the Bible.
-Ralph Winter (b. 1924, missionary to Guatamala, missiologist, founder of U.S Center for World Mission, William Carey International University, and the Perspectives on the World Christian Movement course)

Missionary zeal does not grow out of intellectual beliefs, nor out of theological arguments, but out of love.
The missionary spirit of Christ in us cannot rest until it finds an expression in some type of service.
There is a horrible tendency for an organization to grow in importance til it overshadows the end of its existence, and begins to exist for itself.
-Roland Allen (1868-1947, British missionary to Africa and China, missions theorist and proponent of the Three-Self theory: mission churches should become self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating. Author of Missionary Methods: St Paul's or Ours (1912) and Spontaneous Expansion of the Church and the Causes Which Hinder It (1927).

My business is to witness for Christ. I make shoes to pay my expenses.
-William Carey (1761-1834, pioneer missionary to India, founder of the modern missionary movement)

Would that God would make hell so real that we cannot rest.
There are only three stages in the work of God: Impossible; Difficult; Done.
-James Hudson Taylor (1832-1905, British missionary to China, founder of China Inland Mission, now Overseas Missionary Fellowship, motivated and moblized many for worldwide mission)

I continually heard... the wail of the perishing heathen in the South Seas.
-John Gibson Patton (1824-1907, Scottish missionary to the South Pacific, later in his life a popular speaker and mission mobilizer)

May the time come when rich men and great men would think it an honor to support whole stations of missionaries in Africa, instead of spending their money on hounds and horses.
-David Livingstone (1813-1873, famous Scottish missionary and explorer in Africa, arrived in 1840, died there)

If ten men are carrying a log-nine of them on the little end and one at the heavy end-... which end will you lift on?
-William Borden (reflecting on the unreached in China in comparison to the U.S., heir to vast Borden fortune, protege of Samuel Zwemer, died in his youth after less than a year as a missionary in Egypt, never having reached his destination of China, mobilized and inspired many both before and after his death)

Don't aim to plant churches. Aim to plant a church that will plant many other churches.
-George Patterson (went as a Conservative Baptist missionary to Honduras in 1965, developer of a successful type of T.E.E.- "Obedience-Oriented Education")

There are no closed doors to the gospel-provided that once you get inside, you don't care if you ever come out.
-Brother Andrew (b. 1928, Dutch missionary to closed countries, evangelist to Eastern Europe, founder of Open Doors, author of God's Smuggler)

Yea, so I have strived to preach the gospel, not where Christ was named, lest I should build upon another man's foundation. (Romans 15:20)
So that we can preach the gospel in the regions beyond you. For we do not want to boast about work already done in another man's territory. (2 Corinthians 10:16)
-the Apostle Paul

Gold Nuggets from Missionary Pioneers

2008-12-13T10:15:00.003-05:00

These short, pithy quotes were gleaned from early missionaries, most of whom have been on the cutting edge of the three eras or waves of the modern missionary movement which began just prior to the 19th century (Ralph Winter's classification): the Coastland Era (1800-1910), the Inland Era (1865-1980), and the Unreached Peoples Era (1935-present). Three of these quotes are from prior to the modern movement:

"That land is henceforth my country which most needs the gospel."
--Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700-1760, missions pioneer who travelled extensively throughout Europe, North America, and the West Indies and helped spur the Moravian missiomary movement which extended from the West Indies and the Guianas in the 1730's, to North America and Greenland, and subsequently into Africa and Asia)

"I love to live on the brink of eternity."
--David Brainerd (1718-1747, Presbyterian missionary to the Seneca and Delaware Indians of New York and New Jersey, he died at age 29 of tuberculosis but his posthumous diary was used mightily of God to spur others on to greater missionary devotion)

"I will lay my bones by the Ganges that India may know there is one who cares."
"...remember the perishing nations."
--Alexander Duff (1806-1878, pioneer Scottish missionary to India was a student of Thomas Chalmers' strong education emphasis and founded the largest mission school in India)

"Tell the students to give up the small ambitions, to come eastward to preach the gospel of Christ.
--Francis Xavier (1506-1552, famous pioneer Roman Catholic missionary to Japan, Goa, and Malay)

"All my friends are but one, but He is all sufficient."
--William Carey (1761-1834, pioneer Baptist missionary to India and 'father of modern missions' as the publisher of Enquiry into the Christian's missionary obligation)

"The longing of my heart is to make known my glorious Redeemer to those who have never heard."
--William Chalmers Burns (1815-1868, Scottish pioneer missionary to China who had been involved in the Scottish revival of 1839, he preached widely over China, vigorously opposed the odious opium and coolie trades, and wore Chinese apparel)

"God's work done in God's way will never lack God's supply."
"Brother if you would enter that province, you must go forward on your knees."
"I have found that there are three stages in every work of God; first it is impossible, then it is difficult, then it is done."
--James Hudson Taylor (1832-1905, medical missionary to China, founded China Inland Mission, a pioneer of the "Inland Era", wore Chinese clothes)

"All the resources of the Godhead are at our disposal."
--Jonathan Goforth (1859-1936, Canadian Presbyterian missionary to China who caught the vision of missions while reading Robert Murray McCheyne, great soul-winner, Jonathan and his wife Rosalind saw 5 of their 11 children die in China)

"I will open Africa to the gospel or die trying."
--Rowland Victory Bingham (1872-1942, Canadian missionary pioneer born in Britain, founder of Sudan Interior Mission, now SIM, his two missionary partners, Gowans and Kent died within a year of arriving in the interior of the Sudan -now northern Nigeria- in 1893)

"They are making a living when they should be making a life."
"The history of missions is the history of answered prayer...It is the key to the whole mission problem. All human means are secondary."
"I feel now that Arabia could easily be evangelized within the next thirty years if it were not for the wickedness of selfish Christians."
--Samuel Marinus Zwemer (1867-1952, American pioneer missionary to the Middle East as well as other Muslim lands, Princeton Seminary professor, scholar, missiologist, prolific writer about missions and Islam, founder and editor for 37 years of the journal The Moslem World)

"The greatest missionary is the Bible in the mother tongue. It needs no furlough and is never considered a foreigner."
--William Cameron ("Uncle Cam") Townsend (1896-1982, American missionary in Guatamala, fonder of Wycliffe Bible Translators)

"Why do you need a voice when you have a verse."
--Jim Elliot (20th century martyr among the Aucas or Waodanis in Ecuador)

"It's amazing what can be accomplished if we don't worry about who gets the credit."
--Clarence W. Jones (founder of HCJB Radio in Quito, Ecuador, and of the World Radio Missionary Fellowship)

"Let us press on. All Africa must be won for Christ. Though a thousand missionaries die, send me."
--Andreas Rias (missionary to Africa)

"From my many years' experience I can unhesitatingly say the cross bears those who bear the cross."
--Sadhu Sundar Singh (India Christian, advocate of indiginous missions)

"Had I cared for the comments of people, I should never have been a missionary."
--Charles Thomas (C. T.) Studd (1863-1931, British pioneer missionary to China, India, and Africa, and one of the famous 'Cambridge Seven')

"And thus I asprie to reach the gospel, not where Christ was already named, so that I would not build on another man's foundation."
--the Apostle Paul

Sin's 5 Elements

2008-12-07T19:38:00.009-05:00

Sin can be defined as anything that doesn't conform to the holy character of God as expressed in His moral law. The lack of conformity may be in thoughts, in attitudes, or in actions.

Let's consider 5 elements of this definition of sin:

1) Sin is moral evil (e.g., stealing) as opposed to natural evil (e.g., cancer). Moral evil is rebellion against God, and is what brought natural evil into the world.

2) Sin is always, ultimately related to God. Sin is a personal attack on the character and ordinances of God. The central problem of sin is that it offends and incurs the wrath of God. David confessed his adultery and murder "Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight..."(Ps. 51:4). Sin of course also does have devastating relational, physical, and societal effects. For example, King David's sin did have these consequences against Bathsheba, against her husband Uriah, and against the people of Israel. Yet it is God he has ultimately offended, and it is to God that he must ultimately answer.

3) Sin is breaking God's law. There are sins of omission and of commission. Breaking one commandment is breaking all God's commandments, because it is rebellion against the character of God. "For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it." (James 2:10). Compare this verse to Galations 3:10: " All who rely on observing the law are under a curse, for it is written: Cursed is everyone who does not do everything written in the book of the Law." God's unified law reflects His nature and His claims, so rejecting one of His laws is rejecting Him. God does recognize gradations of sin based on Knowledge (Ezekial 8:6, Mt. 10;15, Lk.12:47-48, John 19;11), intent (Numbers 15:30-31), kind, and effect. Yet sin done in ignorance is still sin. Even though God recognizes these degrees of sin on an ethical and human level, all are equally guilty before God and in need of His Son, Jesus Christ, to pay the penalty for sin (to atone for our sin).

4) Sin is deep-rooted in our nature. Sinful actions just reveal the condition of an inner depraved heart. God requires the heart be right (Ex. 20;17, Heb.13:5) not just correct outward actions. These inner attitudes in Scripture are identified as either sinful or righteous. "Out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander (Mt. 15:19 compare with Mt. 7:15-19).

5) Sin has given all of us a corrupted condition and a guilty standing before God. God's pronouncement of guilt is His legal determination that we are in an unrighteous state before Him. The corrupted, polluted condition or state inclines us toward ungodly behavior. But by the grace of God, both his inherited guilt and moral pollution are atoned for by Christ Jesus for " If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive our sins and to cleanse us from all our unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9).

This grace, mercy, and forgiveness to us through Christ's atoning sacrifice, is a defining difference between God's way and all the human-works oriented religions of the world.

Scriptures to ponder:

Romans 8:1-17
John 3:1-16
Titus 3:5-7
I John 2:29, 3:9, 4:7, 4:18 5:1, 5:6
Ephesians 4:17-32
Colossians 3:1-17
I Peter 2:22
Isaiah 53:8
Ezekial 36:25-27

For further reading I recommend:

Jerry Bridges, The Pursuit of Holiness, Colorado Springs: Navipress, 1978, 1989 ff.

Acknowledgement: Much of the ideas are from recent teaching notes of Dennis Wilson.

AIDS ORHANS IN AFRICA- YOU CAN HELP

2008-12-07T16:57:00.003-05:00

The AIDS epidemic is having long-term impact, and this impact is the most severe in Africa. Of the roughly 34 million orphans in sub-Saharan Africa, 11 million are AIDS orphans-a million since 2007 alone. Eight of ten children in the world whose parents have died of AIDS live in sub-Saharan Africa. In the past decade, the proportion of children who have been orphaned from AIDS has risen exponentially. The health, the basic human rights, and the survival of these orphans is in great peril.

You can make a difference by praying, sponsoring a child, giving financially, volunteering your time, and enlisting others to help.. It is best to learn as much as you can about the AIDS orphan problem, but try to focus on one area of need. You may have a bigger impact by helping one small, indiginous, Christian-oriented, non-profit AIDS orphan agency, like SAVE THE AIDS ORPHANS, where even a gift of $10 will have a big impact on feeding the children, etc. WORLD ORPHANS is another good, but larger, facebook cause. Even much larger causes are Compassion International and World Vision. You can join some of these causes, enlist others, contribute money ($25 is the usual recommended amount) and pledge to raise support from others-all through Facebook. You can also do volunteer work on a short term or longer term basis.

More favorite quotes

2008-11-02T07:55:00.002-05:00

You who seek God, let your heart revive. -Psalm 69:32b (NASB)

Personal commitment is the key to certainty. -Tim Keller

Only Christianity says God put Himself into the play. -Tim Keller

Defend the Bible? I would as soon defend a lion! Unchain it and it will defend itself. - Charles Spurgeon

If you have one true friend you have more than your share. -Thomas Fuller

Good sermons and good books are of excellent use, but yet they can serve no other end but that we practice the plain doctrines of scripture. -Jeremy Taylor

Religion is not transforming people; rather it is being transformed by the people. It is not raising the moral level of society; it is descending to society's own level... and society is smiling accepting its surrendor. -A. W. Tozer

The cross breaks the dominion of sin, but the presence of sin remains -the Puritans

If you find the perfect church, don't go, you'll ruin it. -Zig Ziegler

Remember: silence helps the killer, never his victims. -Elie Wiesel

Ah! The clock is always slow; it is later than you think. -Robert W. Service

The church is not the master of the state, or the servant of the state, but the conscience of the state. -unknown author

The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing. -Albet Einstein

Where you live, should not determine whether you live or die. -Bono

We need a banner because of the truth. - preface to the 1689 London Baptist confession

The lessons of history, theology and the life and teachings of Jesus himself are unambiguous: the most effective, strategic and life-changing expressions of the love of Christ, are those that involve generous, heartfelt acts of service and compassion: not separate from the proclamation of the gospel, but integral to it. -Tim Myers, Pioneers

Community Health and Developement is a great door opener and trust builder, especially in village contexts. It has proven effective for long-term platforms, and is a strong expression of the gospel. -Pioneers in Asia leader

They may take our lives, but they will never take our liberty. -William Wallace

You don't need a title to continue to serve. -Gabriel Bejjani

Get out of the way, figure out where God is going, then go with Him. -Nick Kersen

Unknown authors:

We can go 40 days without food, 8 hours without water, 4 minues without air, but only 8 seconds without hope.

The noble army of the martyrs.

As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God. -Psalm 42:1

Starbucks and Bono: an alliance for Africa

2008-11-01T15:52:00.002-04:00

Bono and Starbucks have teamed up to help fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria- the big disease killers in Africa. Bono and Bobby Shriver founded (RED) in 2006 to provide money for the Global Fund created previously to fight these killers.

Bono and Starbucks CEO, Howard Schultz, presented the news this week in New Orleans to 10,000 Starbucks employees and store managers. The sale of selected holiday beverages will benefit the fund between November 27 and January 2. Five cents will go to the Global Fund for every drink sold. The Starbucks drinks that will help the fund include the peppermint mocha twist, gingersnap latte, and expresso truffle. And these "(RED)" products will not cost extra. Also, Starbucks money will continue to support the Global Fund after January 2nd. Bono said that "you can't measure the true success of a company on a spread sheet."

More than 4,000 people die every day in Africa because they can't get the basic medication they need to fight the big-killers. Life extending anti-retro-viral medications for AIDS (2 drugs) cost only 43 cents per day.

Starbucks buys its coffee beans from these African countries (alphabetically: Cameroon, Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zaire. It is opening farmer support centers in Ethiopia (where coffee was first discovered) and Rwanda next year, which will also help the local economies there.

Genocide: "How could they?" Or should it be "Could I?"

2008-10-23T12:23:00.005-04:00

More than 100 million people have died at the hands of other people in the last 100 years. The 20th century, coined the age of genocide, saw the genocide and mass killing of over 60 million people.

James Waller, in Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing, published in 2002, contends that ordinary people can commit extrordinary evil if the right ingredients are present. His research begins with Caine slaying Abel and takes us into the 21st century and the genocide in Sudan. "The dawn of the twenty-first century brings little light to the darkness. Sudan, the largest country in Africa, continues its decades-long assault on itself. Of all the wars that have taken place around the world since 1945, the civil war in Sudan and the accompanying genocide against the people of the country's south have claimed more lives than any other conflict." His pre-Darfur research estimated 2 million of the 30 million in Sudan killed and 4.5 million displaced from their homes-more than anywhere else in the world.

Waller feels that "when we understand the ordinariness of extraordinary evil, we will be less surprised by evil, less likely to be unwitting contributors to evil, and perhaps better equipped to forestall evil" Awareness of our own capability to do evil is the best safeguard against genocide and mass killing. "Could I be capable of such inhumanity?" is more appropriate question than is "How could they?"

Prevention of future genocide should include emphases on healing, forgiveness, and reconciliation, such as what is presently going on in Rwanda. A good dose of humility would also serve us all well.

"Long is the way and hard, that out of hell leads up to light" -John Milton, Paradise Lost.

"Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me and know my thoughts; And see if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. -Psalm 139: 23-24.

Reference:
Waller, James. Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 316 pp., Endnotes for each chapter, selected bibliography, index, illustrations (photos, charts).

Quotes for World Christians

2008-07-04T15:35:00.007-04:00

Quotes for "World Christians":

The spirit of Christ is the spirit of missions. The nearer we get to Him, the more intensely missionary we become. Henry Martyn (1781-1812)

In the vast plain of the north [in Africa] I have sometimes seen, in the morning sun, the smoke of a thousand villages where no missionary has ever been. Robert Moffat (1795-1883)

All that I am I owe to Jesus Christ, revealed to me in His divine book. David Livingsone (1813-1873)

I have but one candle of life to burn, and I would rather burn it out in a land filled with darkness than in a land flooded with light. John Keith Falconer

I look upon this world as a wrecked vessel. God has given me a lifeboat and said to me,"Moody, save all you can." D. L. Moody (1837-1899)

Some wish to live within the sound of a chapel bell; I wish to run a rescue mission within a yard of hell. C.T. Studd (1862-1931)

Defend the Bible? I would as soon defend a lion! Unchain it and it will defend itself. Charles H. Spurgeon (1834-1892)

The Scriptures teach us the best way of living, the noblest way of suffering, and the most comfortable way of dying. John Flavel (17th century Puritan)

The name of Christ-the one great word-well worth all languages in earth or heaven. G. Bailey

Great is truth and shall prevail. Thomas Brooks (1608-1680)

Whatever men may think of religion, the historic fact is, that in proportion as the institutions of Christianity lose their hold upon the multitudes, the fabric of society is in peril. A.T. Pierson (Africa Inland Mission)

For man plans, but God arranges. Thomas A Kempis (ca. 1380-1471)

Live near to God, and so all things will appear to you little in comparison with eternal realities. Robert M. McCheyne

You cannot repent too soon, because you do not know how soon it may be too late. Thomas Fuller (1608-1661)

He who prays as he ought will endeavor to live as he prays. John Owen (1616-1683)

In prayer it is better to have a heart without words, than words without a heart. John Bunyan (1628-1688)

Leave not off praying to God: for either praying will make thee leave off sinning; or continuing in sin will make thee desist from praying. Thomas Fuller (1608-1661)

As often as we are mown down by you, the more we grow in numbers; the blood of Christians is the seed. Tertullian (c.160-c.225). Traditionally cited as the next quote.

The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church. attributed to St. Jerome (ca. 347-420)

Grace is but glory begun, and glory is but grace perfected. Jonathon Edwards (1703-1758)

Fire and water may as well agree in the same vessel, as grace and sin in the same heart. Thomas Brooks (1608-1680)

All the sin that has darkened human life and saddened human history began in believing a falsehood: all the power of Christianity to make men holy is associated with believing truth. John Albert Broadus (b.1827)

To do so no more is the truest repentence. Martin Luther (1483-1546)

Religion today is not transforming people; rather it is being transformed by the people. It is not raising the moral level of society; it is descending to society's own level, and society is smiling accepting its surrender. A.W. Tozer (1897-1965)

Christ is the great central fact in the world's history; to him everything looks forward or backward. All the lines of history converge upon him. All the march of providence is guided by him. All the great purposes of God culminate in him. The greatest and most momentous fact which the history of the world records is the fact of his birth. C.H. Spurgeon (1834-1892)

Every occupation, plan, and work of man, to be truly successful, must be done under the direction of Christ, in union with his will, from love to him, and in dependence on his power. George Mueller (1805-1898)

Dump Soda for your health!

2008-05-25T14:18:00.004-04:00

Soda pop ("liquid candy") is clearly linked to worsening childhood and adult obesity, as well as diabetes, trends. Now consumer groups on 5 continents are confronting the problem head on, with the "Dump Soda" campaign, launched in Sydney, Australia in October 2007.
The "Dump Soda" campaign includes:
1. Ask governments to require soda pop producers to stop advertising geared to children under 16 years old.
2. Ask government to tax soft drinks to fund fitness and nutrition programs.
3. Stop the sales of sweetened beverages in school.
4. Reduce portion sizes of soft drinks.
5. Push soft drink producers to market lower-sugar products.
Since "diet" sodas, containing sugar substitutes, have been linked to the Metabolic Syndrome (or "Syndrome X"-a pre-diabetic condition, which has risk to the heart), I would question number 5 above if it really means marketing more drinks containing sugar substitutes.
For more information on this campaign go to: http://www.dumpsoda.org/

Reference: World Watch (magazine), March/April 2008 issue.

The Bible in Africa

2008-05-25T13:34:00.004-04:00

How do Christians in Africa and the global South view Scripture. Philip Jenkins in The New Faces of Christianity writes: "For the growing churches of the global South, the Bible speaks to everyday, real-world issues of poverty and debt, famine and urban crisis, racial and gender oppression, state brutality and persecution."
These African Christians tend to be theologically conservative. They as a whole: 1. take Scripture literally, 2. venerate the Old, as much as the New, Testament, 3. have a high view of the Bible's authority, especially on moral issue, and 4. emphasize the supernatural, including miracles, healings, and visions, in the Bible.
Supernatural warfare is at the "heart of living Christianity."

References:

Barrett, Tony and Todd Johnson, World Christian Trends, Pasadena, Calif.: William Carey Library, 2001.

Bosch, David, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shift Shifts in Theology of Missions, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991.

Christianity Today, July 2007, cover: "Health and Wealth in Africa, lead article p.23ff: "Gospel Riches."

Jenkins, Philip, The New Faces of Christianity, Oxford University Press, 2006.

Jenkins, Philip, The Next Christiandom, the Coming of Global Christianity, Oxford University Press, 2001, 798pp.

Taylor, David, "Operation World 2001-Reveals Global Trends," Mission Frontiers (December 2001).

Africa in the News-Part II

2008-05-24T08:20:00.006-04:00

These articles about Africa, in the recent secular press, I found at our local public library. Daily newspapers were excluded.

National Geographic, April 2008, cover title- "Africa's Ragged Edge: Journey into the Sahel," p. 34ff "Lost in the Sahel: Along Africa's harsh frontier between desert and forest, crossing some lines can be fatal" by Paul Salopeh, Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent with the Chicago Tribune, photos by Pascal Maitre. Quote on p. 48: "Women have been singled out for maximum violence in Darfur. Mass rapes by the Janjaweed have been documented. Women have been burned alive." This is an well-written feature story, with great photograghy.

The Atlantic, March 2008, http://www.atlantic.com/nigeria , www.theatlantic.com/nigeria-photos . Feature story p. 40ff "God's Country: Muslims and Christians in Nigeria", by Eliza Griswold, photos by Seamus Murphy, Quotes: "Nigerians have seen that Sharia has not stanched corruption. In fact, many of the politicians who backed sharia have been linked to massive scandals." "Thanks to explosive growth in Africa, Christianity's demographic and geographic center will have moved, by 2050, to northern Nigeria." "Using militias and marketing strategies, Christianity and Islam are competing for believers by promising Nigerians prosperity in this world as well as salvation in the next." "In 2006, riots triggered by Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed left more people dead in Nigeria than anywhere else in the world." "As Barbara Cooper, the author of Evangelical Christians in the Muslim Sahel , puts it, " 'Faith matters.' "

The Nation, October 22, 2007, "The Fight to Save Congo's Forests," by Christian Parenti, research support from the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute. Quotes: "The real power behind the throne in Congo is the World Bank, the single largest lender to this hugely indebted government." "First come the roads, and companies take a few hardwoods; then come poachers, settlers and agro firms, and deforestation picks up speed." "If the vast and isolated forests of the Congo Basin-the second-largest tropical woodlands on the planet- had a capital, it would be this sleepy city [Kisangani] of crumbling colonial era buildings and empty boulevards." Kisangi is a small town in the DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo) 1300 miles from the mouth of the Congo River, where river navigation ends, and where there are no longer has any driveable roads to the the outside world. It was previously Stanleyville, a trading post, under the Belgian colonialists. Joseph Conrad used it as a model for Kurtz's interior station in the novel, the Heart of Darkness.

Newsweek, April 21, 2008, "Diemmas of the Horn: Washington wanted to keep Somalia from turning into another Afganistan. Now it's an African Iraq," by Scott Johnson. Quotes: "Some 600,000 have fled the country in the past year, and 750,000 are now trapped in squalid camps for the internally displaced." "A recent U.N. report declared Somalia's humanitarian crisis to be the worst in Africa." "...the violence in Somalia is increasingly random and getting worse."

Time, May 12, 2008, "Time 100 - Builders and Titans" has these 3 stories of importance to Africa: 1. "Alexis Sinduhije. A Burundi journalist risks his life to heal his nation's ethnic wounds," by Christiane Amanpour. Quote: "In 2001, Burundian journalist Alexis Sinduhije founded Radio Publique Africaine (RPA) as a means of fostering peace between the Tutsi and the Hutu in his war-torn country." Over 3000,000 died in Burundi in the civil war between the 2 groups in the mid-1990's. Sinduhije is a Tutsi who adopted a Hutu war orphan. 2. "Mo Ibrahim. How Africa's cell-phone king became a leading voice for democracy," by William Easterly. When Ibrahim sold Celtel in 2005 there were more than 100 million cell phones in Africa, compared to 2 million in 1998, when he started the company. Quotes: "While doing business in Africa, he recognized two other essential but unmet needs: good governance and accountable instutions." "The inaugural Mo Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership, which rewards respect for democratic institutions, went to former President of Mozambique Joaquin Chissano last year." 3. "Mia Farrow. The Actress forced the world to pay attention to the killings in Darfur," by Paul Ruseabagina, who, himself, helped save 1,268 Rwandans at his hotel during the genocide. Quote: "For her work on behalf of these people, for her many years of hard work as a UNICEF goodwill ambassador, for her efforts to get China and the rest of the world to stop supporting the government of Sudan and to pay attention to the genocide in Darfur, I salute her."

Newsweek, May 12, 2008, "Something to Shout About: Africa needed hearing aids. Howard Weinstein got a chance to start over." This retired Canadian business executive is now providing affordable solar-powered hearing aids to partially deaf Africans, from a nonprofit business set up in Otse, Botswana, a town of 3,500 at the edge of the Kalahari desert. Quotes: "The World Health Organization says there are 250 million hearing-impaired people around the globe, with two thirds of them living in developing nations. And yet every year fewer than 10 million are manufactured." " 'Poor people in Africa, Latin America and Asia wear a hearing device until it runs down and then put it in the drawer or sell it', Weistein says. 'If you could come up with a solution, you could touch millions of lives.' " "Today the once empty room in the African semidesert has become the hub of a thriving nonprofit business. Some 20,000 people in 30 countries are using SolarAid brand hearing aids, chargers and batteries."

Time, March 3, 2008, "The Healer: On assignment for Time, musician and humanitarian Bob Geldof reports on the presidential trip to Africa-and why the Continent's rebirth is the Bush Administration's greatest achievement." "The great unacknowledged story of America in Africa didn't immediately originate with this President. But it was accelerated hugely by him, increased by him, argued by him and monitored by him." "A continent growing economically at more than 5% per annum, with 23 or so democratic-ish countries south of the Sahara." "Africa is the only continent yet to be built. It's a continent of 900 million potential producers and consumers. There are more languages and cultural diversity in Africa than almost anywhere else."

Current History, May 2008, "The US and Africa: Prisoners of a Paradigm?", by Greg Mills, head of Brenthurst Foundation and advisor to the president of Rwanda, p.225-230. Quotes: "Africa needs more investment and economic growth. It needs less theater and, certainly no more pity." "The Bush administration arguably has been the most generous ever in Washington, in terms of policy toward, trade with, and aid to Africa." Also see the Current History, Africa issue, May 2007.

Current History: A Journal of Contemporary World Affairs, Africa issue, April 2008, "Africa's Religious Resurgence and the Politics of Good and Evil," by Stephen Ellis and Gerrie Ter Haar, authors of Worlds of Power: Religious Thought and Political Practice in Africa, Oxford University Press, 2004. "African politicians typically pay great regard to the spirit world as a source of power. Many cultivate diviners and marabouts to enhance their authority." "It is quite common in Africa to engage in practices from various religious traditions simultaneously." "Many Africans use a spirit idiom to express dissatisfaction with poor governance." "At a time when 'developement'-the notion that bureaucratic, seular government will lead to unprecedented prosperity-has for many lost its appeal, religion provides alternative ways of organizing society and politics and of thinking about the world."

Related articles, in which only portions of the stories are about Africa:

Current History, January 2008, Global Progress Report, 2008, p. 11ff, "Developement: Halfway there" In the year 2000, 192 coutries set up the Millenium Developement Goals to improve the lives of the world's poorest people by the year 2015. This is mainly a report, at the half way point, based on a UN update of the uneven results. The proportion of people in extreme poverty has fallen from a third, to under a fifth of the world, between 1990 and 2004, most dramatically in Asia. Quotes: "...as long as farmers in the Sahel are dependent solely on rainfall for the success of their crops, they stand forever on the edge of starvation." "If Africa uses this potential properly, parts of the continent will develope into legitimate emerging markets and will receive large inflows of private capital." "US poicy makers rightly regard the Darfur region of Sudan as a humanitarian disaster, and they also view it in geopolitical terms... This means they never get to the crux of the problem. In Darfur and places like it, people are struggling over scarce pastureland and cropland and especially over water."

U.S. News & World Report, http://www.usnews.com/, May 19, 2008. Cover Story: "Fixing the Food Crisis: There are as many potential solutions to the price hikes as causes of them, and none will come easily," by Maianne Lavelle and Kent Garber, and related stories by Matt Bandyk, Kirk Shinkle, and Nancy Shute, p. 36-42. Potential actions discussed: 1. Take a pause on biofuels 2. Improve food aid 3. Produce higher yields 4. Grow better crops 5. Curb the speculators 6. Break down trade barriers 7. Eat less meat 8. Share the crowded planet. Quotes: "Rural financing programs have allowed small farmers to support themselves." "In Malawi in 2006 and 2007... vouchers for fertilizers helped increase production 50%." "Food shortages and sharply rising prices have sparked riots in underdeveloped countries. Global grain stocks are at their lowest levels in decades, and the price of rice has risen 70 percent in the past year." Sites referred to for further information: http://www.oxfamamerica.org/ , http://www.wfp.org/ , http://www.care.org/ , http://www.secondharvest.org/ , http://www.thehungersite.com/ , http://www.freerice.com/ .

Newsweek, October 1, 2007, http://www.xtra.newsweek.com/ , "Giving Globally: The Search for Solutions", p. 51-76. Includes main article, "A Shot of Hope", by Mary Carmichael, with illustrations, charts, and graphs, as well as shorter articles: "Cool, Clear Water," by Christian Caryl; "A Reward for Good Behavior: A billionaire wants to give $5 million to African leaders who rule responsibly," by Emily Flynn Vencat; and "Saving the World is Within Our Grasp: The evidence is in: we can stop diseases like malaria and TB fron killing millions of people each year," by Bill Gates. Gates also lists a few of the groups that are making a difference:
Global fund to fight AIDS, TB and Malaria: http://www.theglobalfund.org/
Save the Children: http://www.savethechildren.org/
Nothing But Nets: http://www.nothingbutnets.org/
Doctors Without Borders :http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/
GAVI Alliance: http://www.gavialliance.org/

Time, March 24, 2008, www.time.com/whatsnext, "10 Ideas That are Changing the World," by Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, taken from his new book, Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, Penguin Press. He is also author of The End of Poverty. Quotes: "Ahmed Mohammed. A native Kenyan and a scientist, he is a leader of sustainable developement in Kenya's drylands." "The defining challenge of the 21st century will be to face the reality that humanity shares a common fate on a crowded planet." "Sustainable developement will not break the bank. The key is to make the right choices in our public investments and to find ways to harness, and channel market forces."

Africa in the News: a summary of articles about Africa in the recent print media

2008-05-21T19:46:00.005-04:00

Here is what I found at our local library, concerning the topic of Africa, in the print media of 2006, 2007 and 2008. Ours is a public library in a city of 50,000 people. I searched both Christian and secular print magazines, journals, and periodicals, both scholarly and popular media, but not daily newspapers:

In Christian- oriented magazines:

Christianity Today, July 2007, Cover: "Health and Wealth in Africa: How the prosperity gospel is taking a continent by storm." "Gospel Riches: Africa's rapid embrace of prosperity Pentecostalism provokes concern and hope," by Isaac Phiri and Joe Maxwell, p. 23 ff. A few quotes in this article:
"Break loose! It is not a sin to desire to be wealthy."-Michael Okonkwo
"Nigerian prophet T.B. Joshua teaches that Jesus death provides both salvation and divine healing."
"The kingdom of God is built on the cross, not on bread and butter."-David Oginde
"In Zambia, only 3 stations click in: MUVITZ, ZNBC, and TBN."

National Catholic Reporter: The Independent Newsweekly, March 30, 2007, Cover: "The Church in Nigeria: Explosive growth, grinding poverty, and a mix of Catholic and African
traditions." "The face of Catholicism's future: strong parishes, booming vocations mark young church," by John L Allen, Jr., Abuja/Kaduna, Nigeria. A few quotes:
"The Nigerian church must be examined critically, because powerful currents of history are about to thrust it into a leadership position."
"It seems the hour of Africa has come."-Ecclesia in Africa, Pope John Paul II, 1995.

America: The National Catholic Weekly, Nov 19, 2007. Cover: "Will Darfur Dance Again: A first- person account," p.9-11, by John H. Ricard, Bishop of the Diocese of Pensacola- Tallahassee, Florida. Has insert article, "Darfur's Humanitarian Crisis," which contains a small map.

Christian Century, October 2, 2007, p. 20-23, "Waiting in Darfur," text and photographs by Paul Jeffrey, a United Methodist missionary. Has 12 good photographs of Darfur crisis region.

Christianity Today, March 2007, p. 39 " Inerview by Sheryl Henderson Blunt of Grace Akallo, kidnapped by The Lord's Resistance Army from St. Mary's College in Aboke, northern Uganda 1996-7. She escaped after 7 months and is now a student at Gordon College. She spoke, later, after the interview, to 700 people at the "Peace Within Reach" gathering in Washington, D.C. and received a standing ovation. Other related articles in this issue of CT are listed below, under other articles of related interest.

Charisma, July 2006, p.37-41, "Miracle: Amid war and persecution, Christians are experiencing a revival in Uganda that is marked by church growth, an unprecedented drop in AIDS prevalence and a changing political landscape," by Kyalo Nguku, a journalist based in Nairobi, Kenya, who travelled to Uganda in January 2006 to write the story. Has photos. An insert story, "Healing the Wounds of War: Christians are helping the people of Uganda recover from a 20-year conflict," by Blake Farrington. Quotes in main article:
"Amid war and persecution, Christians are experiencing a revival in Uganda that is marked by church growth, an unprecedented drop in AIDS prevalence and a changing political landscape."
"Uganda pastor Jackson Senyonga says oppression has drawn his nation to God."

Articles of interest but not strictly about Africa:

National Catholic Reporter, May 2, 2008: "Food Riots underscore 'tsunami of need': experts address global crisis at conference in Kansas City." Has map of world featuring 37 countries, under caption, "Rising Prices threaten famine-37 countries in urgent need of food aid." African countries included are: Chad, Central African Republic, Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, Burundi, Zimbabwe, Swaziland, Lesotho, Democratic Republic of Congo, Congo, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mauritania. Thus, 21 out of the 37 countries in urgent need of food aid are in Africa.

Sojourners Magazine, March 2007, p. 12-18, "Cry Freedom: The Modern Global Slave Trade and those who fight it," by David Batstone, with 2 photos. Quotes:
"Widespread poverty and social inequality ensure a pool of recruits as deep as the ocean."
"The commerce in human beings today rivals drug trafficing and the illegal arms trade for the top criminal activity on the planet."

Christian Century, November 27, 2007, p. 22-26 "Sold into slavery: The scourge of human trafficking," by Jonathan Tran, professor at Baylor University. Quote: "Some 87 percent of international trafficing involves women and children who are forced into prostitution."

Christianity Today, March 2007, p. 30 ff, "Free at Last: How Christians world wide are sabotaging the modern slave trade," by Dean Alford. Additional articles, "Amazing Abolitionist: Amazing Grace shows Wilberforce in Action", by Mark Loring, "Most people who are trafficked into the United States we know nothing about", by Kevin Bales, and "On a Justice Mission: The Christian Vision Project", by Gary Haugen.

Part II of this blog will list recent stories about Africa from the secular press, again excluding print media of daily nature (daily newspapers).

Model Prayers For World Christians

2008-05-12T18:09:00.006-04:00

These are some of my favorite mission oriented prayers for "world Christians."They are prayers for God's kingdom work to be accomplished. These prayers are taken from the Bible, the early church, missionaries, and the Book of Common Prayer:

Also when a foreigner who is not of Thy people Israel but comes from a distant country because of Thy great name and Thy strong hand and Thine outstretched arm, who shall come and pray toward this house, hear Thou from heaven, Thy dwelling place, and do Thou according to all which the stranger shall request of Thee, so that all people of the earth may know Thy name and revere Thee, as do Thy people Israel, and that they may realize that this house which I have built is called by Thy name. --II Chronicles 6:32-33 (Solomon's prayer, The Modern Language Bible: The New Berkeley Version)

Therefore will I give thanks unto thee, O LORD, among the heathen, and sing praises unto thy name.--Psalm 18:49 (David's prayer, KJV)

All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the LORD, And all the families of the nations will worship before Thee. --Psalm 22:27 (David's prayer, NASB)

May your ways be known throughout the earth, your saving power among people everywhere. May the nations praise you , O God. Yes, may all the nations praise you. Let the whole world sing for joy, because you govern the nations with justice and guide the people of the whole world. May the nations praise you, O God. Yes, may all the nations praise you.--Psalm 67:2-5 (New Living Translation)

Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me. -- Isaiah 6;8 (Isaiah's response to God, KJV)

Now, Master, thou canst let thy servant go, and go in peace, as thou didst promise; for mine eyes have seen thy saving power, which thou hast prepared for all peoples, to be a light of revelation for the Gentiles, and a glory to thy people Israel. --Luke 2:29-32 (Simeon's prayer, The Moffatt Bible)

These words spake Jesus, and lifted up His eyes to heaven, and said, Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee: As thou hast given him power over all flesh, that he should give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him. And this is life eternal, that they might know thee they only true God, as Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent. I have glorified thee on the earth: I have finished the work that thou gavest me to do... As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world... Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word; That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me... And I have declared unto them thy name, and will declare it: that the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them. -- portions of Jesus' prayer to His Father taken from John 17 (KJV)

Now to Him who is able to do exceeding abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us, to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen. --Ephesians 3:20-21 (Paul's prayer, NASB)

Remember, O Lord, all who in heathen lands are under instruction for Holy Baptism; have mercy upon them and confirm them in the faith; remove all the remains of idolatry and superstition from their hearts, that being devoted to Thy law, Thy precepts, Thy fear, Thy truths, and Thy commandments, they may grow to a firm knowledge of the word in which they have been instructed, and may be found worthy to be made an habitation of the Holy Ghost, by the laver of regeneration, for the remission of their sins through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
--St. Basil the Great (ca. 329-379)

Remember, O Lord, this city wherein we dwell and every other city and country, and all the faithful who dwell in them. Remember, O Lord, all who travel by land or water, all that labor under sickness or slavery; remember them for health and safety. Remember, O Lord, those in Thy Holy Church who bring forth good fruit, are rich in good works and forget not the poor. Grant unto us all Thy mercy and loving-kindness, and grant that we may with one mouth and one heart praise and glorify Thy great and glorious name, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, now, henceforth, and forever. Amen. --St John Chrysostom (ca. 347-407)

O Lord, our Savior, who hast warned us that thou wilt require much of those to whom much is given; grant that we whose lot is cast in so goodly a heritage may strive together the more abundantly to extend to others what we so richly enjoy; and as we have entered into the labours of other men so to labour that in their turn other men may enter into ours, to the fulfillment of Thy holy will; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. --St Augustine of Hippo (ca. 354-430)

O God of unchangeable power and eternal light, look favourably on Thy whole Church, that wonderful and sacred mystery; and by the tranquil operation of Thy perpetual providence, carry out the work of man's salvation; let the whole world feel and see that things that were cast down are being raised up, that those which had grown old are being made new, and that all things are returning to perfection; through Him from Whom they took their origin, even Jesus Christ Thy son our Lord. Amen. --Gelasian Sacramentary, Fifth Century.

In evening prayer God was pleased to draw near my soul, though very sinful and unworthy: was enabled to wrestle with God, and persevere in my requests for grace. I poured out my soul for all the world, friends, and enemies. My soul was concerned, not so much for souls as such, but rather for Christ's kingdom, that it might appear in the world, that God might be known to be God in the whole earth...Let the truth of God appear, wherever it is; and God have the glory for ever. Amen. --David Brainerd (1718-1747, from his diary, he was a missionary to the Delaware and the Seneca Indians of New Jersey and New York)

O Lord our God, arise,
The cause of truth maintain;
And wide o'er all the peopled earth
Extend her blessed reign.
--The hymn sung frequently at worship by missionaries William Carey and Joshua Marshman in India, after the death of their associate William Ward in 1823.

Grant us grace fearlessly to contend against evil, and to make no peace with oppression; and, that we may reverently use our freedom, help us to employ it in the maintenance of justice among men and nations. --A Prayer for Social Justice, Book of Common Prayer, American Revision, 1928

Regarding the Lord's Prayer recorded in Matthew 6:9-13 and Luke 11:1-4, Georg F. Vicedom has said, "One cannot pray the Lord's Prayer without having a world map before his eyes."

May all the nations praise you , O God

2008-04-22T19:51:00.004-04:00

Evangelical Christianity is growing faster than any other religion in the world. Most Christians now live in the "global south" (previously referred to as the developing world or third world). In 1949 there were an estimated 1 million Christians in China; today there are 80 to 100 million. The growth rate of Christianity in India has increased from 1.6% to 3%, to currently about 6%.

In the 13th century Kubla Khan asked for 100 learned men to come to the Far East (China) to teach Christianity. After World War II, General Douglas MacArthur asked for a thousand missionaries to go and preach the gospel in Japan. The church failed both challenges.

Currently, half the missionaries going out are from the "global south", and half from the "western world." Here are the percentages from each area:

North America 39%
Europe 11%
Asia 36% (Korea is the number one missionary sending country in Asia).
Africa 6%
Latin America 5%
The Pacific 3%

Notice that North America and Europe combined are the source of 50% of the missionaries sent out; the last four categories (the "global south") also add up to 50 %.

Some churches in Africa are made up of over 20% orphans and widows. More and more churches are serving the homeless, the jobless, the addicted, and those without a Bible or Christian neighbors or relatives. Many churches only have a Bible or two among the whole congregation. These are some of the great challenges of the church today.

The Biblical model of discipling the nations, especially as seen in the Acts of the Apostles, (or perhaps more accurately "the Acts of the Holy Spirit") is evangelistic church planting. In this model, people and prayer are much more important than programs or property. God uses people who prove the greatness of their God and give Him the glory. Prayer is the primary "strategy."

"Look out among the nations, observe and be astounded, be amazed; for I am doing a work in your day, which you would not believe, if it were told you."--Habakkuk 1:5 (The Modern Language Bible: The New Berkeley Version, Zondervan Publishing House)

"Send us around the world with the news of your saving power and your eternal plan for mankind. How everyone throughout the earth will praise the Lord! How glad the nations will be, singing for joy because you are their King."--Psalms 67:2-4a (Living Bible, Tyndale House Publishers)

"I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my salvation unto the ends of the earth."--Isaiah 49:6 (KJV)

"All the ends of the world shall remember and turn unto the Lord: and all kindreds of the nations shall worship before thee. For the kingdom is the Lord's: and he is the governor among the nations"--Psalms 22:27-28 (KJV)

Africa: the challenges and the progress

2008-04-21T17:51:00.002-04:00

In Africa the most important challenges are considered by most experts to be governance related. Corrupt and totalitarian regimes have resulted in wars, revolutions, conscription of child soldiers, genocide, slavery, and other atrocities.
However, in many countries in Africa there are challenges of a physical nature which may actually be the primary challenges:
1. Tropical diseases. For instance, malaria kills more than 3 million people each year in Africa, more deaths than from AIDS or any other infection. Malaria is also the top killer of children under 5; about 75% of malaria deaths in Africa are in children under 5. Only 5% of Africa's children sleep under mosquito or bed nets. Malaria, by itself, accounts for 10% of all Africa's disease burden.
2. Agriculture. Crops are dependent on rain, and since there is no irrigation in the dry areas like the Sahel, famines, food shortages, hunger, and malnutrition are frequently seen.
3. Infrastructure. Lack of roads, ports, airports, power plants, and sanitation are pervasive problems.

Yet, there are also many positive developements:
1. The poverty rate has dropped 6 percentage points in the past 7 years.
2. The economic growth rate has been 6% per year in recent years in sub-Saharan Africa.
3. The struggles against AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, measles, smallpox, polio, black fever (visceral leishmaniasis) and guinea-worm disease have all produced some results, in some cases impressive results. Anti-retrovirals and treated bednets are now available to many more people, because of recent initiatives.
4. More children and women are in school.
5. More women are engaged in the political process.
6. The Achievement in Africa Leadership Prize, established by Sudanese billionaire, Mo Ibrahim, as part of his foundation, is giving $5 million annually to a democratically elected sub- Sahara African leader. The leaders will be judged by how they perform in eight categories, including the security of citizens, the rule of law, economic opportunity, and political freedom. To collect the prize the leader must leave office when the term ends, with no cloud over the tenure in office.
7. Evangelical Christianity is growing. These evangelicals in Africa are more optimistic about Africa's future, and are very involved in the positive developements occuring. Growing churches, some of these being megachurches, have been a very positive influence for good.

Please pray for Africa. I suggest you start by praying for a country, or a people group: its leaders, its churches, its people, etc. Perhaps a country where you have friends or acquaintances, or where your church has missionaries, would be the best place to start.

The Christian's Trademark is Love (1 John 2: 7-11)

2008-04-21T16:28:00.004-04:00

Coca Cola, McDonalds, and Nike are the best known brands or trademarks in the commercial world today.
The outstanding trademark (distinguishing characteristic) of the Christian is love- love for his brother in Christ, and also for his fellow man created in God's image.
Barriers of nationality, social standing, race, and gender are torn down, in and through Christ. There should be such a spirit of forgiveness within the body of Christ that nothing can part us (just like in the marriage vow).
Without true repentence, it must be noted, there can be no true forgiveness.
If you are an unbeliever, you are walking around in the dark like a blind man.
Martin Lloyd Jones, the great evangelical preacher of mid-20th century England, sayed that the way of the world is to hide itself, frequently in a mask of superficial chivalry.
The power of the gospel is in the magnitude of the grace of God, and in the explosiveness of God's love! And, this power should also be seen in our love to others, through Him.
Let us in the church truly love one another.
Let no divisions of social standing, or race, or nationality, or physical differences rob us of our unity; we have the commonality of the same Savior and Lord.
Let us be willing to give up our perceived freedom, in order not to be a stumbling block to a perceived weaker brother in Christ.
Christ (and the cross) focused worship, will be followed by action. Love will flow to one another. Love for God will be translated into love for our brother.

Acknowledgement: Parts of a sermon preached on the text 1 John 2: 7-11 by Pastor Andy Lutz in early March, 2008, were the basis of much of these notes.

Mission quotes, prayers, reference books for "world Christians"

2008-04-19T17:37:00.017-04:00

God does not call every Christian to be a missionary, but He does call every Christian to be a world Christian. John Piper defines a world Christian as one "so gripped by the glory of God and the glory of His global purpose that he chooses to align himself with God's mission to fill the earth with the knowledge of His glory as the waters cover the sea (Habakkuk 2:14)."

The following are some of my favorite quotes, spanning 2700 years, that exalt God and His mission in the world:

Jesus Christ: "Just as the Father sent me forth, so I send you."-John 20:21b

The Apostle Paul: "It has always been my ambition to preach the gospel where Christ was not known, so that I would not be building on someone else's foundation."-Romans 15:20

The Prophet Isaiah: "Here am I; send me."-Isaiah 6:8

Quintus Septimus Florens Tertullian (CA. 160-225): "See how those Christians love one another."

St. Basil the Great (ca. 329-379): "Remember, O Lord, all who in heathen lands are under instruction for Holy Baptism; have mercy upon them and confirm them in the faith; remove all the remains of idolatry and superstition from their hearts, that being devoted to Thy law, Thy precepts, Thy fear, Thy truths, and Thy commandments, they may grow to a firm knowledge of the word in which they have been instructed, and may be found worthy to be made an habitation of the Holy Ghost, by the laver of regeneration, for the remission of their sins, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen."

St. John Chrysostom (ca. 347-407): "Remember , O Lord, this city wherein we dwell and every other city and country, and all the faithful who dwell in them...Grant unto us Thy mercy and loving-kindness, and grant that we may with one mouth and one heart praise and glorify Thy great and glorious name, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, now, henceforth, and forever. Amen."

St. Augustine of Hippo (or, Latin name, Aurelius Augustinus, 354-430): "A whole Christ for my salvation, a whole Bible for my staff, a whole church for my fellowship, and a whole world for my parish." "You made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You."
"...grant that we whose lot is cast in so goodly a heritage may strive together the more abundantly to extend to others that we so richly enjoy...to the fulfillment of Thy holy will; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen."

St. Columba (or Columcialle, ca. 521-597): "For the love of Christ."

St. Francis of Assisi (1181-1226): "Preach the gospel at all times, and when necessary use words."

Ramon Llull (or Ramon Lull or Raymond Lully, ca. 1235-1316): "He who loves not lives not; he who lives by the Life cannot die."

John Wycliffe (ca. 1330-1384): "I believe that in the end the truth will conquer."

Desiderius Erasmus (ca. 1466-1536): "The Scriptures should be translated into all tongues."

St. Francis Xavier (1506--1552): "We are therefore determined to make our way into China at all costs, and I hope in God that the upshot of our journey will be the increase of our holy faith, however much the devil and his ministers may persecute us. If God is for us who can overthrow us."

John Knox (1505-1572): "A man with God is always in the majority."

Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700-1760): "I have only one passion and it is Him, only Him"

Phillip Doddridge (1702-1751): "Awake, my soul! Stretch every nerve, And press with vigour on; A heavenly race demands thy zeal, And an immortal crown."

William Carey (1761-1834): "Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God."

Adoniram Judson (1788-1850): "The prospects are as bright as the promises of God."

David Livingstone (1813-1873): "I place no value on anything I have or may possess, except in relation to the kingdom of God." "For my own part, I never ceased to rejoice that God has appointed me to such an office. People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa. Can that be called a sacrifice which is simply paid back as a small part of a great debt owing to our God, which we can never repay?...I never made a sacrifice."

James Hudson Taylor (1832-1905): "I shall have no claim on anyone for anything. My only
claim will be on God." "The Great Commission is not an option to be considered, but a command to be obeyed."

Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834-1892): "A church that does not exist to reclaim heathenism, to fight evil, to destroy error, to put down falsehood, a church that does not exist to take the side of the poor, to denounce injustice and to hold up righteousness is a church that has no right to be."

Alexander M. Mackay (or Mackay of Uganda, 1849-1890): "But I shall not give up, please God, even temporarily, my plans for the interior, unless all avenues being closed, it would be sheer madness to attempt to carry them out."

John G. Paton (1824-1907): "...if I can but live and die serving and honoring the Lord Jesus, it will make no difference to me whether I am eaten by Cannibals or worms; and in the Great Day my resurrection body will arise...in the likeness of our risen Redeemer."

William Borden (1887-1913): "No reserves, no retreats, no regrets." "Say no to self and yes to Jesus every time."

Samuel Zwemer (1867-1952): "The prospects for the evangelization of all the unoccupied fields are 'as bright as the promises of God.' Why should we longer wait to evangelize them?...God can give us power for the task. He was sufficient for those who went out in the past, and is sufficient for those who go out today." "He that believes in Christ does what he can not do, attempts the impossible and performs it...What is it but the glory of the impossible!"

Charlotte Diggs ("Lottie") Moon (1840-1912): "God has first claim on my life." "Surely there is no greater joy than saving souls."

George Vicedom: "One cannot pray the Lord's Prayer without having a world map before his eyes."

John Stam: "Where He leads me I will follow. As for us, may God be glorified, whether by life or death."

Jim Elliot: "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep, to gain what he cannot lose."

John Piper: "Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exists because worship doesn't. Worship is ultimate, not missions, because God is ultimate not man."

And here are a few better reference books for World Christians:

Bryant, David, IN THE GAP, InterVarsity Press, 1979.

Castle, Tony, LIVES OF FAMOUS CHRISTIANS: A Biographical Dictionary, Servant Books, 1988.

DeRidder, Richard R. and Roger S. Greenway, LET THE WHOLE WORLD KNOW: Resources for Preaching on Missions, Baker Book House, 1988.

Johnstone, Patrick and Jason Mandryk, OPERATION WORLD: When We Pray God Works, WEC International and U.S. Center for World Mission, 2001.

Moreau, A. Scott, editor, EVANGELICAL DICTIONARY OF WORLD MISSIONS, Baker Books, 2000.

Piper, John, LET THE NATIONS BE GLAD: The Supremacy of God in Missions, Baker Boooks, 1995.

Richardson, Don, ETERNITY IN THEIR HEARTS: Revised, Regal Books, 1984.

Stearns, Bill and Amy, CATCH THE VISION 2000, Bethany House Publishers, 1991.

Tucker, Ruth A., FROM JERUSALEM TO IRIAN JAYA: A Biographical History of Christian Missions, Academie Books (Zondervan Publishing House), 1983.

Winter, Ralph d. and Steven D. Hawthorne, PERSPECTIVES ON THE WORLD CHRISTIAN MOVEMENT: A Reader, William Carey Library, 1992.

The Orphan's Cause

2008-02-28T07:09:00.003-05:00

"Pure and genuine religion in the sight of God the Father means caring for orphans and widows in their distress..."James 1:27 (New Living Translation). The Amplified Bible explains further: "to visit and help and care for the orphans and widows in their affliction and need..."

The orphan's cause is carefully highlighted in The Bible. The word orphan or fatherless (Hebrew: yatom, Greek: orphanos) occurs at least 41 times in the Bible, 39 times in the Old Testament and twice in the New Testament. The New Testament passages are James 1:27 and John 14:18. In some manuscripts the word is in Mark 12:40 as well.

The word orphan or fatherless (Greek: orphus, Latin: orbus) means "bereft of parents or of a father." The word "orphanos" in the Greek is used in the Bible in the more general sense of being "desolate", "comfortless". or "friendless". In the King James (Authorized) Version the word is rendered "fatherless" instead of "orphan" , except in Lamentations 5:3 where the word "orphan" is used. Newer translations, however, mostly use the word "orphan" rather than "fatherless".

From earliest times, caring for orphans was a priority concern of the Israelites, and even of some surrounding nations. Yet God's people were often chastised by the prophets for neglecting and defrauding the orphans. God works on their behalf (Deut. 10:18) and condemns those who oppress them (Deut. 27:19, Mal. 3:5). When men fail the orphans (Ps. 27:10), God shows special concern (Ps. 10:14,18; 48:15; 146:9; Hosea 14:3 cf. John 14:18). The orphan is directly contrasted with the wicked in Psalms 146:9.

We definitely see a priority, even a mandate, for aiding and for caring for the orphans, as well as other helpless and hopeless of the world. Orphans, widows, and aliens (or foreigners) are often mentioned in the same Bible passage, as in need of our help and support.

The orphan cause is, therefore, very important, especially now when there are so many orphans and abandoned children in the world because of AIDS, wars, genocide, famines, and poverty. Remember to pray for the orphans, and for specific orphan ministries and Christian adoption organizations.

"See the orphan as the opportunity, not the tragedy." -Paul Myhill, World Orphans

Invisible Soldiers

2008-02-28T06:40:00.002-05:00

Children are trapped as conscripted soldiers in the conflicts of at least 13 countries around the world. They are usually denied access to humanitarian groups. Often they are abducted, raped, and killed.
The children are victims of 58 waring groups in these 13 countries. The 13 countries, in alphabetical order are: Afganistan, Burundi, Central African Republic (C.A.R.), Democratic Republic of Congo (D.R.C.), Myanmar, Nepal, Somalia, Sudan, Chad, Columbia, Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Uganda. Several countries, where things have improved, are no longer on the U.N.'s list, including Ivory Coast and Sierre Leone.
Please pray for the children, the countries, and the leaders of these countries. Pray for the leaders of the waring factions, as well, that God would turn their hearts to end this child abuse.

"THE KINGS HEART IS IN THE HAND OF THE LORD; HE DIRECTS IT LIKE A WATERCOURSE WHEREVER HE PLEASES."- Proverbs 21:1

William Whiting Borden (1887-1913): No Reserves, No Retreats, No Regrets

2008-02-26T21:07:00.007-05:00

William Borden, a relatively unsung hero of the Student Volunteer Movement, died at the age of only 25 in Cairo, Egypt, never having realized his goal of sharing the gospel of Christ with Muslims in China.
Heir of the vast Borden fortune, he was converted under the ministry of D.L Moody, graduated from Yale, attended Princeton Seminary, signed the "Princeton Pledge" as the result of Samuel Zwemer's preaching, gave away hundreds of thousands of dollars to Christian organizations (while at the same time refusing the luxury of an automobile), and later joined Zwemer, who was then in his first year in Cairo. Samuel Zwemer, himself, went on to become the most recognized and scholarly missionary to the Middle East of the modern era. Zwemer also conducted Borden's funeral.
During his first year at Yale, William Borden started a Bible study with his room mate, which then grew to 150 freshmen. By his senior year the Bible study involved 1,000 of the 1,272 students.
In Cairo, he rode his bike around the steamy streets distributing tracts. His motto became: "Say no to self and yes to Jesus every time."
He died, after only 4 months in Cairo, of spinal meningitis. He was buried at the American Cemetary in Cairo.
Borden Memorial Hospital in Lanzhou, China was named after him.

In his Bible he had written these lines, one at a time, over a short period of time:

NO RESERVES
NO RETREATS
NO REGRETS

For further Study:

Broomhall, Alfred J., Hudson Taylor and China's Open Century, volume 7, Hodder & Strougton and O.M.F., 1989. Section: "It is Not Death to Die."

Campbell, Charles Soutter, William Whiting Borden: A Short Life Complete in Christ, 1909.

Erdman, Charles Rosenbury, An Ideal Missionary Volunteer: A Sketch of the Life and Character of William Borden, London: South Africa General Mission, ca. 1913.

Taylor, Mrs Howard, Borden of Yale '09, Philadelphia: C.I.M., 1913. Moody Press reprint 1923.

The Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College has an archive 0n William Borden.

David Livingston: The Smoke of a Thousand Villages

2008-02-26T20:31:00.003-05:00

"I direct your attention to Africa...I go back to make an open door for commerce and Christianity." David Livingston (1813-1873) spoke these words before an elite audience in Cambridge, England, in 1867, while on furlough from Africa.
Livingston, both missionary and explorer, and trained in both theology and medicine, travelled 29,000 miles in Africa, starting in 1840, in an attempt to reach "the smoke of a thousand villages", where the gospel had never been preached. His goals, in doing this, were to extend the Kingdom of Christ and to see slavery abolished.
In Africa he contended with many difficulties, which would have broken many men: jungle fever, drought, wild animals, superstition, slavery, hostile tribes, foreign traders who opposed his mission and exploited the nationals, and even sharp critics back in England.
He recommended training nationals in order to do away with dependency on the Europeans.
His resonse to critics and others was, "We can afford to work in faith, for omnipotence is pledged to fulfill its purpose."
When he died at Lake Tanganyika, in what is now Zambia, his attendants carried his body 1500 miles to the coast, and later one of them even attended his funeral service in Westminster Abbey, England. His wasted body had been found in a position of prayer. His diary was found to read: "I am trying to establish Christ's Kingdom in a region wider than Scotland...Fever seems to forbid it, but I shall work for the glory of Christ's Kingdom, fever or no fever."

Reference books:

Blaikie, W.G., D.D., The Personal Life of David Livingstone, Murray, 1910.

Campbell, R. J., D.D., Livingstone, Benn, 1929.

Charles, Eizabeth, Three Martyrs of the Nineteenth Century: Studies from the Lives of Livingstone, Gordon, and Patteson, London, Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge, 1889. 396p.

Coupland, Sir R., Livingstone's Last Journey, Collins, 1945.

Fraser, Mrs. A. K., Livingstone and Newstead, Murray, 1913.

Hughes, Thomas, Life of Livingstone, NY: John B. Alden Publisher, N.D. (ca. 1910). 204p.

Johnston, Sir H. H., Livingstone and the Exploration of Central Africa, Philip, 1891.

Livingstone, David, Missionary Travels, Murray, 1857. Narrative of Expedition to the Zambesi, Murray, 1865. Last Journals, ed. H. Walter, Murray, 1874. Cambridge Lectures, ed. W. Monk, Deigton Bell, 1860. Zambezi Expedition Journals, ed. J. P. R. Wallis, Chatto and Windus, 1956.

MacNair, James I., Livingstone The Liberator, London and Glasgow: Collins Clear-Type Press, 1940. 382p., index, endpage map, 16 illustrations.

Matthews, B., Livingstone the Pathfinder, Oxford University Press, 1932.

Moreau, A. Scott, editor, Evangelical Dictionary of World Missions, Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2000.

Morrison, J.H., The Missionary Heroes of Africa, NY: Doran, 1922.

Northcott, Cecil, Livingstone in Africa, Lutterworth, 1957.

Seaver, George, David Livingstone: His Life and Letters, the definitive biography of the great missionary-explorer-scientist who opened up Africa, NY: Harper & Brothers Publishers. 650p., index, 6 maps, frontispiece photo of Livingstone in 1864.

Simmons, J., Livingstone and Africa, E. U. P., 1955.

Stanley, Sir Henry M., How I Found Livingstone, Sampson Law, 1872.

Tucker, Ruth A., From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya: A Biographical History of Christian Missions, Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1983.

The African Bush-millions of lives saved?

2008-02-20T20:31:00.000-05:00

It was AllAfrica.com, not NBC, CBS or the New York Times, that recently acknowledged that President Bush's policies "have saved millions of [African] lives and lifted others from abject poverty." It wasn't an American, but Irish rock star and African activist, Bob Geldof, that said Bush "has done more than any other president so far", though it was "unexpected of the man". He talks about "the triumph of American policy", but chides the American media for ignoring the Bush legacy in Africa.
The African public and media, however, have noticed Bush's commitment to helping Africa, as we saw as thousands lined the route all the way between the airport and Dar es Salem, in Tanzania. Some danced wearing "Bush" shirts and waving American flags.
Why does Bush get so much more respect in Africa than elsewhere?
Bush's aid programs have targetted AIDS and Malaria, two of the biggest killers in Sub-Saharan Africa. The massive 5 year, $15 billion AIDS relief drive has increased the number of people on anti-retrovirals from 50,000 to 1.3 million.
The 5 year, $1.2 billion anti-malaria project has provided 25 million Africans with insecticide- treated mosquito nets, an effective yet simple solution to what is still the the biggest infectious-disease killer in Africa.
The Millenium Challenge Corporation started under Bush has approved $5.5 billion to 16 countries, 9 of which are in Africa. The assistance is limited to countries that support democracy and a free market economy, invest in health and education, and fight corruption.
Bush increased developement and humanitarian assistance to Africa from $1.4 billion his 1st year in office, to $4 billion per year currently.
In tiny Benin, his first African stop, Bush has promoted an anti-malaria program, the training of 1000's of teachers, as well as judicial, financial, and port reform. Tanzania, Rwanda, Ghana, and Liberia are also being visited by Bush. These countries , though poor , are making progress in regards to economic growth, better living conditions, and the rule of law, all with U.S. aid.
Bush says " My trip here is a way to remind future presidents and future Congresses that it is in the national interest and in the moral interests of the United States of America to help people."
Please pray for wisdom for our President and his staff, and for these nations in Africa, that the money, medicines, and training provided, will have lasting impact into future generations. May we as individuals and NGO's, also do whatever we can to help, as we pray for God's leading.

African Revivals of the 20th Century

2008-02-17T08:47:00.003-05:00

Revival! A People Saturated With God, by Brian H. Edwards (Evangelical Press, 5th impression, 1997) lists five Christian revivals that have taken place in Africa, all in the 20th century. Errol Hulse's Give Him No Rest: A Call to Prayer for Revival, Evangelical Press, 1991, also describes some of these revivals.
1) 1904 South Africa, at Fransch Hoek
2) 1910 Malawi
3) 1930's onwards East Africa, especially Uganda
4) 1937-1943 Ethiopia, Wallamo Tribes
5) 1953 Congo (Zaire)

1) Regarding the first African revival of the 20th century, this is written by Edwards: "In 1904 at Fransch Hoek in South Africa a Young People's society heard of the Spirit elsewhere and a prayer meeting of 12 was soon attended by 600."
2) In Malawi in 1910 the events are similar, as described in Edwards book: "An elder began to pray confessing before all the sin of having cherished a spirit of revenge for an evil done him. Then another began to pray, and another and another, til 2 or 3 were praying together in a quiet voice, weeping and confessing, each one conscious of the other. Suddenly there came the sound of a rushing wind...It was the thrilling sound of 2500 people praying audibly, no man apparently conscious of the other...Not noisy or discordant, it filled us with great awe."
4) In Ethiopia in 1937 after 9 years of work by Western missionaries there were only 48 known indiginous believers. In 1943, after period of cruel persecution by fascist Italian colonialists, missionaries returned to find 10,000 believers. this increased to 240,000 in 1950, and to 3.5 million Christians in 1990.
Pray that God will bring more revivals like these to Africa and elsewhere.

For Further Reading about Revival, and also African Revivals:

Brown, Michael L., The End of American Gospel Enterprise, Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, Destiny Image Publishers, 1989.

Coleman, Robert, The Spark That Ignites, Minneapolis: World Wide Publications, 1989.

Duewel, Wesley, Revival Fire, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House, 1995.

Edwards, Brian H., Revival: A People Saturated with God, Evangelical Press (UK), 1997.

Hulse, Errol, Give Him No Rest: A Call to Prayer for Revival, Evangelical Press (UK), 1991.

Johnstone, Patrick and Jason Mandryk, Operation World: When We Pray God Works, WEC International and Paternoster Lifestyle (UK), 21st Century Edition, 2001.

Jones, Martyn-Lloyd, Revival, Westchester, Illinois: Crossway Books (a division of Good News Publishers, 1987, 2nd printing 1988, forward by J.I. Packer.

Moreau, A. Scott, Evangelical Dictionary of World Missions, Baker Books and Paternoster Press, 2000.

Morrison, J. H., The Missionary Heroes of Africa, George H. Doran (NY), 1922. Reprited by Negro Universities Press (A division of Greenwood Publishing Corp.), 1969.

Olford, Stephen F., Heart Cry for Revival, revised edition, Memphis, Tenn.: Encounter Ministries, 1987.

Orr, J. Edwin, The Eager Feet, Chicago: Moody Press, 1975.

Prime, Samuel, The Power of Prayer, Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1991 (reprint of an 1859 classic).

Ravenhill, Leonard, Revival God's Way, Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1983.

Rice, John R., We Can Have Revival Now, Wheaton, Illinois: Sword of the Lord Publishers, 1990.

Wallis, Arthur, Revival: The Rain from Heaven, Old Tappan, New Jersey: Fleming Revell Company, 1979.

White, John, When the Spirit Comes with Power, Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1988.