c. 2005 Religion News Service

Jordan’s King Calls on Muslims to Reject Terrorism in the Name of Islam

AMMAN, Jordan (RNS) Jordan’s King Abdullah II has called on Muslims to redress the image of Islam as a religion of terrorism by rejecting those who “defame” it with violent acts.

“Let us confess that we Muslims have not always fulfilled our obligations towards our religion and towards ourselves,” he said Monday (July 4) before a gathering of 180 Islamic scholars and clergymen from 40 countries.

The International Islamic Conference was organized by the Ahl Albeit Foundation, a semi-independent religious think tank run and partly financed by members of Jordan’s ruling Hashemite dynasty.

“Some Muslims, or those who promulgate `Islamic’ slogans, have defamed Islam and Muslims, and harmed Muslims,” Abdullah said. The Hashemite ruler carries the distinction of being a direct descendant of the Muslim prophet Muhammad through both Sunni and Shiite branches.

“Acts of violence and terrorism practiced by some groups, what is going on in Iraq, Pakistan and other Muslim countries in the form of accusations of apostasy and the killing of Muslims in the name of Islam, do not correspond to the principles of Islam and Islam disavows them.”

Abdullah also criticized violent acts carried out against non-Muslims.

“Islam emphasized the need to respect the rights of minorities and non-Muslims who live within Muslim society,” he said. “It established a clear methodology to honor relations, conventions and agreements between Muslims and other nations and peoples.”

Abdullah said he wants the gathering to map out a way to implement a Jordanian initiative _ dubbed the “Amman Message” and launched last November _ which calls on Muslims to reject extremism, embrace moderation and tolerate other religions.

The launching of a new Arabic TV network to promote traditional Islamic teaching as a way of combatting terrorism is one likely result of the conference hosted by Abdullah, according to the monarch’s adviser for interfaith affairs.

“The Quran says that truth always prevails over falsehood,” said the adviser, American Muslim Joseph Lumbard.

“The only way to really fight an effective war on terrorism is to underline traditional Islam,” Lumbard said. “It’s actually the absence of traditional Islam that has allowed people to manipulate and distort Islam in order to achieve particular political objectives.”

_ Dale Gavlak

Cooperative Baptist Fellowship Drops `Jesus Christ’ From Constitution (RNS) A change in the wording of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship’s constitution _ no longer specifically referring to “Jesus Christ” _ has sparked debate inside and outside the moderate Baptist group.

A committee drafted a change to the constitution’s second article, describing the group’s purpose. The first sentence originally read “to bring together Baptists who desire to call out God’s gifts in each person in order that the Gospel of Jesus Christ will be spread throughout the world in glad obedience to the Great Commission.”

The new first sentence was adopted Friday (July 1) at the fellowship’s annual meeting, as recommended, after a short debate. It reads “to serve Christians and churches as they discover and fulfill their God-given mission.”

Lance Wallace, a spokesman for the Atlanta-based group, said after the two-day annual meeting that a committee drafted the new language to match the wording of the organization’s mission statement. He said the constitution is a legal document rather than a faith statement.

Outgoing fellowship moderator Bob Setzer Jr. said in a statement that spreading the Christian faith remains the group’s focus.

“Why are we committed to `serving Christians and churches as they discover and fulfill their God-given mission’?” he asked. “So we and they can better honor and serve our Lord Jesus Christ.”

But a prominent Southern Baptist leader who has more conservative theological views than some fellowship members questioned what the change says about the moderate group.

“My central concern is what this means about the true nature of the CBF and its commitment to the Gospel of Jesus Christ,” R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., told Baptist Press, the news service of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Fellowship officials declined to comment on Mohler’s remarks.

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In other business during the Grapevine, Texas, meeting, the fellowship inaugurated a new offering, the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Religious Liberty and Human Rights Offering.

Money will be collected at each annual meeting and be used to support efforts by the fellowship and the Baptist World Alliance. Wallace said the offering, which honors the former U.S. president and raised $45,000 during the meeting, aims to replace some funding the alliance has lost since the Southern Baptist Convention withdrew its membership from it in 2004.

The fellowship approved the Rev. Joy Yee, pastor of New Covenant Baptist Church in San Francisco, Calif., as its new moderator. She is the first female senior pastor to serve in that post. Retired Atlanta-area pastor Emmanuel McCall was approved as moderator-elect, the first African-American to be chosen for the position.

_ Adelle M. Banks

Nine Catholic Women to be `Ordained’ as Priests in Canada

TORONTO (RNS) Nine Roman Catholic women plan to defy the Vatican by taking part in an ordination ceremony outside the blessing of the official church.

The ceremony, the women say, will make them the first female Roman Catholic priests and deacons ordained in North America.

The ordination ceremony for the eight Americans and one Canadian is scheduled for July 25 aboard a rented tour boat on the St. Lawrence River in eastern Ontario, following a conference on women as priests at Carleton University in Ottawa.

Organizers consider the location for the event to be in international waters, beyond the jurisdiction of any diocese.

Archbishop Anthony Meagher of Kingston, Ont., said the jurisdiction issue is “irrelevant because there is no ordination.

“To attempt an ordination this way is to step outside the church. If someone decides they don’t want to be Catholic, there is nothing we can do. There is no need for me to get out into a rowboat and announce that what they are doing is wrong,” he told Catholic News Service.

But the women contend the ordination will be valid.

“The women who will be ordained on the St. Lawrence Seaway are Roman Catholic, and they are following God’s call to service,” said Joy Barnes, executive director of the Virginia-based Women’s Ordination Conference, one of several groups involved in the ceremony. “They are taking a prophetic step in the path of Jesus Christ, who was also silenced by his own religious leaders.”

The event is modeled on a similar ceremony on the Danube River between Austria and Germany in 2002, when seven women were ordained by a schismatic bishop.

Two of the previously ordained women, Christine Mayr-Lumetzberger of Austria and Gisela Forster of Germany, will be ordaining four women as priests and five as deacons on the St. Lawrence. The two say that in 2003, they were made bishops by Catholic bishops in good standing with Rome.

That same year, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger _ now Pope Benedict XVI _ excommunicated the “Danube Seven” after they refused to retract their vows. The women participating in the ceremony realize they could be punished in a similar manner.

As a priest, “I would not be recognized or accepted or celebrate the sacraments,” conceded one of the candidates for ordination next month, Canadian Michele Birch-Conery, a 65-year-old former nun who was ordained in a second ceremony on the Danube last year.

However, she said in an interview, “privately, with those who ask, especially in small faith communities I will (celebrate sacraments). If through some unexpected acceptance, I were invited … to preach a homily or concelebrate a mass, I would go.”

_ Ron Csillag

Journalist Bill Moyers Honored by Baptist Organizations

(RNS) Bill Moyers, veteran reporter and ordained Baptist minister, has been honored by two Baptist organizations.

Moyers was given the Lifetime Achievement Award at the American Baptist Convention in Denver, Colo., Saturday (July 2). In a separate honor, Wake Forest University Divinity School and the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty have created a program named after Moyers and his wife, Judith, a long-time children’s advocate.

James and Marilyn Dunn, friends of the Moyerses, donated $100,000 to the school in Winston-Salem, N.C., a Baptist Joint Committee statement reported. Starting in the spring of 2006, graduate students may apply for the Moyers Scholar program, which will provide one recipient a year with a semester internship at the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty in Washington, D.C.

“The name `Moyers’ has become a part of speech for all aware Americans,” said James Dunn, resident professor at Wake Forest Divinity School and president of the Baptist Joint Committee endowment. “To suggest that someone is a `Moyers’ means that he or she is informed on theology, infused with integrity and, in speaking truth to power, fortified with courage.”

The partnership between the two groups will aid the school in recruiting students interested in pursuing church-state studies and also “honor two great Americans,” Dr. Bill J. Leonard, dean of the Wake Forest Divinity School, said in a statement.

Moyers served as a reporter for CBS and PBS, and as press secretary for President Lyndon Johnson. He has won more than 30 Emmy Awards and was a founding organizer of the Peace Corps during the Kennedy administration. He earned his Bachelor of Divinity from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

_ Heather Horiuchi

Quote of the Day: Russell D. Moore, of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

(RNS) “It’s time to do something about all the Darwinism in our evangelical churches. No, I’m not talking about church members holding to the ideology of natural selection put forward by Charles Darwin’s infamous `Origin of the Species.’ Instead, I mean the ways in which we inadvertently pick up the `Survival of the Fittest’ mentality _ and put it to work in our evangelism, our missions and our congregational business meetings.”

_ Russell D. Moore, in “Darwinism in the Church Business Meeting” in the June/July issue of SBC Life, the journal of the Southern Baptist Convention.

MO/RB END RNS