c. 2007 Religion News Service
Amish School Reopens Six Months After Shooting Deaths
WEST NICKEL MINES, Pa. (RNS) Some carrying lunch pails, and all bundled against the cold, Amish children walked to their new school in Lancaster County on Monday (April 2), six months to the day after a gun-toting neighbor walked into their old schoolhouse and shot 10 students, killing five.
Aside from reporters and several marked and unmarked state trooper cruisers, there was no hint of the nightmare that they experienced at the hands of milk truck driver Charles Carl Roberts IV, 32, who lived a mile or so away from the Nickel Mines Amish School.
Authorities believe Roberts had planned to first molest and then murder Amish schoolgirls, but when police arrived quickly he started shooting the children immediately.
Police say he apparently was haunted by a memory of having molested relatives 20 years earlier and was angry at God for the death of his infant daughter in 1997.
The Amish community demolished the old schoolhouse to erase a reminder of the horror experienced there.
Four of the five girls who were shot Oct. 2 have returned to the new school, called New Hope Amish School. The fifth, a 6-year-old, needs a feeding tube and is not able to communicate, according to the Associated Press.
_ Carrie Cassidy
Report Says Only 10 Percent of Britons Attend Church
LONDON (RNS) An in-depth survey by a British charity indicates that more than half of Britain’s adults claim to be Christian, but only one in 10 regularly attends weekly church services.
Tearfund, a Christian relief and development charity, said its poll of some 7,000 men and women over the age of 16 suggests that Christianity remains the dominant faith in Britain, with 53 percent _ 26.2 million _ of the adult population adhering to its beliefs.
But those figures from 2006 also represent a sharp decline from the last British census, in 2001, when nearly three-quarters of adults identified themselves as Christian.
The poll, “Churchgoing in the UK” indicates that only 7.6 million adults in a nation with a total population of more than 60 million go to church each month, and only one in 10 attends each week.
Two-thirds of those polled said the only times they had gone to church during the year were for occasional weddings, baptisms and funerals.
By contrast, a Gallup Poll from late March found that 29 percent of Americans attend church weekly; 24 percent attend at least once a month and 44 percent seldom or never attend.
But in a somewhat surprising finding, Tearfund said Tuesday (April 3) that it found some 3 million adults who either had stopped going to church or had never gone who would consider attending if given the “right invitation.”
It said “a personal invite, a family or a friend attending, or difficult personal circumstances are most likely to encourage people into church.”
“The church for a lot of people is a very strange place these days,” conceded Tearfund president Elaine Storkey, who also lectures in theology at Oxford University. “They are not familiar with what’s going on inside the building, with the form of service, with the way people gather, with what they say, how they pray.”
Keith Porteous, executive director of the National Secular Society, told the BBC that the survey “shows that two-thirds of the UK population have no connection with the church” and that Britain itself had become an “overwhelmingly” secular society.
_ Al Webb
Lawmakers Issue a `Call to Prayer for America’
WASHINGTON (RNS) For one group of congressmen, the buck doesn’t stop at the Capitol or the White House: It stops with God.
The Congressional Prayer Caucus, formed in 2005 by Rep. Randy Forbes, R-Va., on Wednesday (March 28) asked Americans to pray for five minutes weekly for the benefit of the United States.
The prayer caucus, made up of 38 lawmakers from both parties, has a new Web site, http://www.prayercaucus.org, where people can sign up for a five-minute block of time each week to pray for the nation. The goal _ a “call to prayer for America” _ is to have Americans praying for their country 24 hours a day, according to the group’s charter.
“Our newspapers, televisions, and computers are overwhelmed with negative voices. We have become cynical and lost credibility in many of our institutions,” said Forbes. “We hope that God will hear our prayers and heal our land.”
Said Rep. Todd Akin, R-Mo.: “We deal with all kinds of problems in Congress, but I’m still like a little kid in Sunday school. Jesus is always the answer.”
The prayer caucus members are all Christians _ one, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., is senior pastor of St. James United Methodist Church in Kansas City _ but they urged people of all faiths and political persuasions to join in prayer for the nation, especially during the war in Iraq.
“Prayer knows no political boundaries,” said Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind. “These are anxious times for our nation, but we are called by God not to be anxious.”
The Rev. Barry Lynn, head of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, said lawmakers should “stick to their constitutional duties and leave religious decisions to individuals.
“Religion is too important to become a political football,” Lynn said.
_ Philip Turner
Famed Chapel in `Da Vinci Code’ to Get a $14.1 Million Makeover
LONDON (RNS) A medieval Scottish chapel that became a tourist magnet after its starring role in “The Da Vinci Code” is about to get a state-funded $14.1 million overhaul.
The 15th century Rosslyn Chapel, in Scotland’s Midlothian area, has been granted the restoration money by the Heritage Lottery Fund, set up by the British Parliament 13 years ago, and Historic Scotland, established by the province to safeguard and promote its own heritage.
Under a five-year conservation program, the chapel will get a new roof and repairs to its stained glass windows and stonework _ plus a new visitors’ center to cater to the tens of thousands of tourists that now turn up every year, thanks largely to the Da Vinci Code phenomenon.
Author Dan Brown gave Rosslyn Chapel a key role in his novel, which has sold more than 40 million copies, and the hit movie that followed. His suggestion that the church and its elaborate carvings contained secrets and treasures surrounding the relationship between Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene triggered massive interest.
Some 120,000 tourists visited Rosslyn last year, up from just 30,000 six years earlier, before the book came out. Currently, as many as 1,000 visitors on peak days troop along the chapel’s floors inside its increasingly fragile walls.
There have been growing concerns that the chapel has become the victim of its own popularity. Andrew Russell, managing trustee of the Rosslyn Chapel Trust, told The Scotsman newspaper that he hopes to “manage down” the number of visitors closer to about 60,000 annually.
Whether the restoration funding will help him meet that goal may be questionable, since a considerable amount of the money will go to building a new reception area, exhibition space and cafe.
“We hope that the association with `The Da Vinci Code’ will die away into a more targeted kind of audience,” he said.
_ Al Webb
Groups Angry After Home-schooled Girl Removed from Family
BERLIN (RNS) Christian groups are angry after a German court removed a home-schooled girl from her family, saying the decision hurts the girl and highlights German antagonism toward home schooling.
The girl, Melissa Busekros, 15, was held back in the seventh grade at the end of 2004 because of poor grades. Her parents, Hubert and Gudrun, opted to home-school her. The girl’s siblings continued to attend class normally.
However, the Youth Services Department of the southern German city of Erlangen decided earlier this year that the arrangement was harming the girl. She was placed in a psychiatric facility Feb. 1 and transferred to foster care two weeks later. That decision was upheld by a superior court on March 12, according to a Web site run by the International Human Rights Group.
Home-schooling groups see this as a direct attack. “This is the worst thing the home-schooling movement has ever faced in Germany,” Joerg Grosseluemern, who is active in groups like The Initiative for German Home School Families and the Network for Educational Freedom, told Spiegel Magazine.
In a posting on its Web site, the city of Erlangen says the case is more complicated. It said the decision to remove Melissa from her family had nothing to do with home-schooling; under German law, she is old enough that she no longer has to attend school.
Rather, the city argued, officials were concerned about the girl’s welfare and felt she should go to psychiatric counseling. Citing a lack of cooperation from the parents, the city went to court to separate her from her family. She has since been diagnosed as having a “school phobia” and an unnatural dependence on her father.
U.S. Christian groups have rallied around the family, organizing prayer meetings, letter-writing campaigns and even proposing a boycott of German goods until the girl is returned to her family.
_ Niels Sorrells
AP, Dallas Morning News Win Wilbur Awards
(RNS) Religion writers for the Associated Press will be recognized for their work in the series, “The New Missionaries” at the 2007 Wilbur Awards, to be presented April 28 in Louisville, Ky.
Other newspapers to be presented with awards include The Dallas Morning News for best religion section and Lancaster (Pa.) New Era for “Lost Angels: The Amish School Shootings.”
The annual awards, sponsored by the Religion Communicators Council (RCC) honor secular media who communicate religious issues, values and themes in their news coverage.
Other recipients include:
_ National Magazine: Newsweek, “Billy Graham in Twilight”
_ Editorial Cartoon: John Sherffius, Boulder Daily Camera
_ Fiction Book: “The Best People in the World” by Justin Tussing
_ Non-fiction Book: “Water from the Well” by Anne Roiphe
_ Television (Drama): “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Nevada Day Part 1&2”
_ National Television News: CBS News Sunday Morning, “Muslim in America”
_ Local Television News: KWQC-TV, “Big Church/Little Church”
_ Television Documentary: Vision TV, “Evangelical Tourism”
_ Dramatic Feature Film: Every Tribe Entertainment “The End of the Spear”
_ Melissa Stee
Fla. Bishop Rejects `Good Neighbor’ Proposal on Dissident Churches
(RNS) A top Anglican panel has recommended a “good neighbor” approach to solving disputes between six Episcopal breakway parishes in Florida and their bishop, but the bishop almost immediately rejected the plan.
Episcopal parishes in conflict with their bishop over gay rights and church politics could be placed under the oversight of a different bishop in a nearby diocese, the 13-member Panel of Reference recommended.
Under the plan, Bishop Samuel Johnson Howard of Jacksonville, Fla., would delegate his authority to a neighboring bishop acceptable to him and the dissenting churches.
But Howard rejected that idea, saying the parishes have already abandoned the Episcopal Church by linking up with foreign bishops from Africa, according to The Living Church magazine, an Episcopal journal.
Both Howard and Church of the Redeemer in Jacksonville appealed to the Panel of Reference for assistance in solving the dispute. The panel said their recommendations could be applied to the five other breakway parishes as well.
Until the Church of the Redeemer is willing to be in communion with the Diocese of Florida and the Episcopal Church, “they remain by their own choice outside the church and we we see no point at this time in discussing further implementation of the panel’s recommendations,” Howard wrote in a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, according to The Living Church.
The panel was created by Williams, the de facto leader of global Anglicanism, to mediate disputes. Neither the panel nor Williams hold power to enforce the recommendations.
The six Florida parishes have been battling Howard since the 2003 election of an openly gay man as bishop of New Hampshire. Howard did not support the election. The parishes said he should move further to withdraw from “sacramental fellowship” with the Episcopal Church, according to the panel.
When Howard refused to withdraw, the six parishes sought oversight from foreign Anglican churches, including the national churches of Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda.
_ Daniel Burke
Virginia Baptist Executive to Lead Southern Baptist Agency
(RNS) An executive of a Virginia Baptist group has been appointed as the new president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s domestic missions agency.
Geoff Hammond, senior associate director of the Southern Baptist Conservatives of Virginia, will officially begin his position with the North American Mission Board in early May.
Hammond has been a church-planting missionary for the state convention, helping it start new churches, and has a history of missionary life. He was born to missionaries in Nigeria and served as a missionary to Brazil, reported Baptist Press, the Southern Baptist Convention’s news service.
“I grew up as a kid looking at North America as a place that already had the Gospel,” he said. “That was until I came here. The longer I am here, the more I am convinced that we need to see North America as a mission field.”
Hammond, 49, succeeds Bob Reccord, who resigned last April from the agency based in Alpharetta, Ga. Two months before his resignation, a state Baptist newspaper raised questions about Reccord’s management practices.
_ Adelle M. Banks
Baylor Tops Relevant List of Best Christian Colleges
(RNS) Baylor University topped the list of Relevant Media Group’s first-ever ranking of top Christian colleges and universities in the United States.
Five colleges, ranging in size and location, made the list. Calvin College ranked second, followed by Pepperdine University, Wheaton College and Biola University.
The list, created by Relevant’s magazine editors, was compiled to offer readers a chance to preview available Christian campuses that ranked high on a scale of academics, student life and spiritual life.
“We felt it was important to offer our readers an insight into the Christian college opportunities that are out there,” Media Group founder and CEO Cameron Strang said. “We knew there were a handful of Christian-affiliated schools that offer a balanced worldview, top-notch academics and a great spiritual climate.”
The schools that made the list were selected for having special “traditions,” and close “proximity to Relevant churches,” editorial director Cara Davis said. For example, Baylor University has designated a special hour each week called the “Dr. Pepper hour,” when students and faculty mingle over sodas.
Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., one of the smallest colleges on the list, “most closely embodies the Relevant worldview,” Davis said, which she described as centered around an “intersection of faith and culture.”
Pepperdine’s many international campuses and summer residential programs around the world earned the school in Malibu, Calif., a place on the list.
Wheaton College outside Chicago, known for its “strong honor code,” ranks 11th in the nation in the total number of graduates who earn doctorates.
On the outskirts of Los Angeles, Biola University involves its students and faculty in 200,000 hours of community service each year.
Davis said that although many students choose to attend state schools, Relevant’s college picks is a resource to show there are Christian schools that can still offer the “Relevant” lifestyle.
The Orlando, Fla.-based Relevant Media Group publishes Christian books, Relevant magazine and other products aimed at the 18-34 age group.
_ Melissa Stee
Woman Says Eating Smuggled Monkey Parts is Part of Her Religion
NEW YORK (RNS) In a clash of cultures playing out in Brooklyn federal court, a Staten Island woman claims she has the right to eat monkey parts in keeping with her religious beliefs.
That’s hooey, counter prosecutors, who contend that Mamie Manneh Jefferson illegally imported pieces of protected wildlife that carry the risk of “numerous” infectious diseases.
In addition, they argue, the Liberian native failed to show that eating the meat shipped from Guinea “arises from a sincere religious belief.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan E. Green has asked a judge to reject Jefferson’s motion to dismiss smuggling charges against her. District Judge Raymond J. Dearie could rule on the motions after hearings in mid-April.
If ultimately convicted on the federal charge, the 39-year-old defendant, also known as Mamie Manneh, could face up to five years in a federal penitentiary, a fine, or a combination of the two.
She is currently serving a two-year state prison sentence in an unrelated case for running over her husband’s girlfriend in the parking lot of a movie theater in February 2006. The victim survived.
Jefferson’s legal troubles began Jan. 12, 2006.
Federal agents at JFK International Airport allegedly discovered 65 pieces of illegal smoked bushmeat _ including monkey skulls, limbs and torsos, along with antelope parts _ buried beneath smoked fish in a shipment to Jefferson from Guinea. The primate parts comprised green monkey and hamadryas baboon _ animals protected by law, prosecutors said.
Agents later found 33 pieces of dried, smoked bushmeat in the garage of Jefferson’s home. According to court papers, she said they were a “gift from God” sent from someone in Minnesota.
In moving to dismiss the federal case, Jefferson’s lawyer, Jan A. Rostal, said the prosecution _ apparently the first of its kind regarding African bushmeat _ violated her client’s right to “religious free exercise.” She branded it as “overkill.”
Jefferson is a member of a church that blends Christianity with African Traditional Religion. As part of their religious practices, they eat boiled, blessed bushmeat on Christmas and Easter and at “ritualistic events” such as weddings and baptisms, believing it brings them “closer to God.”
Green countered in court papers that Jefferson’s likening of bushmeat to Easter ham or Thanksgiving turkey put it in the realm of “cultural and traditional norms.” Although fellow church members submitted affidavits attesting to bushmeat consumption, none described eating green monkeys or hamadryas baboons as a “sacred tradition or part of a religious exercise,” he said.
_ Frank Donnelly
Quote of the Week: Pope Benedict XVI
(RNS) “In the communion of saints, it seems we can hear the living voice of our beloved John Paul II.”
_ Pope Benedict XVI, speaking at a Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica on Monday (April 2) to mark the second anniversary of the death of Pope John Paul II. The Vatican is currently considering a move to beatify John Paul, which would put him one rank below sainthood.
END RNS
