c. 2003 Religion News Service
Evangelical Associations Launch `Operation Iraqi Care’ Prayer Effort
WASHINGTON (RNS) The National Association of Evangelicals and other evangelical ministries have launched “Operation Iraqi Care,” an initiative to encourage prayer for the Iraqi people as their country recovers from war and Saddam Hussein’s regime.
“Today we are mobilizing Christians worldwide to pray for the Iraqi people,” the Rev. Ted Haggard, president of the NAE, announced Thursday (May 22) at the National Press Club.
“We know that God desires a better future for the Iraqi people.”
Haggard, a Colorado megachurch pastor, said the coming months will be a key time for Iraqis to decide about principles of individual freedom and liberty.
“These next few months of decision-making will set the stage for all future Iraqis,” he said. “And that’s why we want to serve them.”
Haggard, who leads another online prayer effort called the World Prayer Team, said he is asking evangelical Christians and “people of prayer everywhere” to sign up at http://www.operationiraqicare.org to pray for Iraqi people in specific cities.
The World Prayer Team, the Presidential Prayer Team and the Christian Emergency Network are additional sponsors of the effort.
Haggard hopes people also will donate to World Relief, the NAE’s relief and development arm, to help meet physical needs in the region. The organization hopes to work with local Iraqi churches to assist in rehabilitation of schools.
Haggard said people joining the effort will be sent e-mails with “prayer points,” information about key people and issues that can be the topics of prayers.
“We’re not talking about any specialized intelligence,” he said. “We’re talking about general information that’ll help people pray in a more meaningful way.”
Haggard said this effort is not designed to evangelize Iraqi Muslims.
“This is not specifically an evangelistic endeavor,” he said. “Right now we’re very concerned about the freedom for the people of Iraq and we’re concerned about the well-being of the people of Iraq.”
_ Adelle M. Banks
Reform Jews Oppose Flag-Burning Amendment
WASHINGTON (RNS) Reform Jewish leaders say they oppose a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning because limiting free expression would “degrade” the national banner.
On Wednesday (May 21) the House Judiciary Committee approved an amendment that would allow Congress to prohibit flag burning. The bill now heads to the full House, where it enjoys strong support.
Mark Pelavin, associate director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, said a ban on flag burning would undermine the principles of free speech and expression embodied in the flag.
“With deep reverence and respect for the American flag, we believe that if the rights of all are not safe, then the rights of none are safe,” Pelavin said in a letter to House members.
Pelavin said American Jews, as a religious minority, are “particularly sensitive to efforts that weaken the safeguards of pluralism and free expression.”
If passed by two-thirds of the House and Senate, the amendment would need approval from three-quarters of the states within seven years. The House has passed similar bills four times since 1995, and the Senate has failed twice to gather enough votes to pass the ban.
In 1989, the Supreme Court overturned state laws that ban flag burning as an unconstitutional limit on free speech. The flag-burning amendment would invalidate that ruling.
_ Kevin Eckstrom
Protestant Pastor, Church Members Slain in Colombia
(RNS) A Protestant pastor and three other members of a small rural church in northern Colombia, including an 80-year-old church elder, were murdered earlier this month in what human rights and church activists describe as a continued pattern of intimidation and violence against civilians by members of Colombia’s armed factions.
The recent killings, said the Council of Evangelical Churches of Colombia, a coalition of Protestant denominations, have “produced a new threat against defenseless civilian victims.”
A group of 25 armed men killed Miguel Mariano Posada, 52, pastor of an evangelical church in the community of Baltazan in the northern coastal province of Cordoba. Also killed, church officials said, were Ana Bernice Giraldo Velaquez, 25, a teacher and church secretary; Natividad Blaudon, 80, the church elder; and Julio Torres, 16, a community member.
A statement by the evangelical council and the church-based peace group Justapaz did not detail who might have committed the murders, which occurred May 6 in what was described as an isolated rural community, reachable only by river, in an area where several armed groups are active.
But in the last year Colombian church groups, as well as human rights organizations in Colombia and the United States, have criticized both Colombia’s leftist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries for targeting and murdering Roman Catholic and Protestant church leaders in the country’s ongoing, 40-year civil war.
Some 30 clerics and pastors in Colombia were killed in 2002, according to New York-based Human Rights Watch. A report released in 2002 by the evangelical council and Justapaz said that Colombia’s Protestant churches _ many of them small, independent congregations in rural areas, like the church in Baltazan _ find themselves under assault, in large part because they are in the very areas where an intensifying war between armed groups is now under way.
Such churches are by and large poor. Many of them are apolitical while others are committed to working for the cause of peace, observers said. Whatever their theological orientation, they are often targets because they provide sanctuary for community members. Even doing that, observers said, can be seen as taking sides in the conflict by some of the armed groups.
“The majority of victims in the Colombian conflict continue to be civilians,” Justapaz said in a statement urging armed groups to respect human rights in Colombia. “The increasing militarization of the country will only heighten death and displacement among the civilian population already struggling under the burden of economic and social injustice and decades of civil war.”
_ Chris Herlinger
Prosecutors Fight Cincinnati Archdiocese for Access to Records
(RNS) Prosecutors in Cincinnati complained Tuesday (May 20) that Catholic officials have not cooperated with a court mandate to release internal documents related to sexual abuse by priests.
Prosecutor Mike Allen, in briefs submitted to the 1st Ohio District Court of Appeals, said the Archdiocese of Cincinnati has made “misleading and inaccurate” statements about records that were ordered released last year.
“Representations made by the archdiocese with respect to this matter are at best seriously misleading, and in fact appear to be outright false,” Allen said in a brief filed before a May 27 hearing, according to the Associated Press.
Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk has wrestled with prosecutors over the release of church files, which he says are private. Last year he said he would not release documents until he saw a subpoena; he was one of the first to be called in front of a criminal grand jury investigating the scandal.
As part of a compromise last year, the church agreed to the appointment of a “special master” who would determine which files should be released. Allen complained that the church has not granted the mediator access to all the files.
“Any suggestion along those line is absolutely false,” church lawyer Mark VanderLaan told the Associated Press.
Quote of the Day: Seminary President R. Albert Mohler Jr.
(RNS) “America must realize the awful fact that hundreds of thousands of fertilized human embryos _ human beings _ are in cold storage in the reproductive laboratories of America. This is an ethical challenge of unspeakable proportions.”
_ R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., commenting on recent reports that close to 400,000 frozen embryos are stored at fertility clinics across the country. He was quoted by Baptist Press, the news service of the Southern Baptist Convention.
DEA END RNS
