c. 1999 Religion News Service
Lyons’ Florida congregation keeps him on as pastor
(RNS) The Florida congregation where the Rev. Henry J. Lyons is pastor has decided to retain him as its leader despite his being found guilty in a state trial of grand theft and racketeering related to his roles as president of the National Baptist Convention, USA.
Grady Irvin, one of Lyons’ lawyers, said members of Bethel Metropolitan Baptist Church in St. Petersburg made the decision at a meeting that lasted several hours Thursday (March 4).
They accepted”the recommendation of the board of deacons that Rev. Lyons shall stay on as pastor of Bethel Metropolitan Baptist Church and that that support at this time will continue until all of his appeals have been exhausted,”Irvin told Religion News Service.
Lyons, who has not indicated any plans to resign, is scheduled to meet with members of the board of directors of his predominantly African-American denomination on March 16 in St. Petersburg.
Asked how Lyons is doing, Irvin said:”He’s doing as well as can be expected under the circumstances.” Lyons was found guilty Feb. 27 by a six-member jury of swindling more than $4 million from corporations that wanted access to the names of denomination members to sell them products and trying to steal more than $200,000 from the Anti-Defamation League, money which Lyons had promised to donate to burned black churches in Alabama. Much of that money was returned to the ADL, at its request, and given to other burned churches.
Lyons’ co-defendant Bernice Edwards, a former public relations director for the denomination, was acquitted. He still faces a federal trial in April on a 54-count indictment charging him with extortion, tax evasion and money laundering.
The verdict has drawn a range of reactions from supporters who think Lyons should remain in charge of the denomination unless he is sent to prison, to candidates for the NBCUSA’s presidential election this September, who think he should already have resigned.”I think Dr. Lyons should have stepped aside when the controversy first broke,”said the Rev. William Shaw, pastor of White Rock Baptist Church in Philadelphia, and a contender for the presidency.”It’s a painful thing,”he said of the verdict.”It’s not a cause for rejoicing at all.” The Rev. E.V. Hill, a board member of the NBCUSA from Los Angeles and a Lyons supporter, said he was”stunned”and”confused”by the verdict, but he saw no reason for Lyons to resign.”We’ll overcome,”he said of the denomination.”We are the descendants of slaves who survived a long trip across the Atlantic, so we’re overcomers. We’ll survive.”
Pope warns media against spreading”destructive counter-values” (RNS) Pope John Paul II warned the communications media Friday (March 5) they need the ethical guidance of the Roman Catholic Church to avoid the risk of spreading”destructive counter-values.” In an address to the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, John Paul urged the council to make a study of”the ethical dimension of media culture and of the power of the media over people’s lives and over society in general.””A vital aspect of cooperation between the church and the media is the ethical reflection which the church proposes, without which the world of social communications, potentially so creative, can harbor and spread destructive counter-values,”he said.
John Paul gave his backing to proposals that the council prepare a document offering ethical guidance to the communications media.”In a field where cultural and financial pressures can sometimes blur the moral vision which should guide all human realities and relationships, this task represents a challenge for the pontifical council,”he said.”But it is one that is deeply in tune with the church’s essential mission to spread the good news of God’s kingdom.” Justice Blackmun remembered for his faith, stand for civil liberties
(RNS) Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun, who died Thursday (March 4), was remembered as a member of the United Methodist Church whose passionate support for civil liberties was born out of his faith.
Blackmun, who was 90, was best known for writing the majority opinion in Roe V. Wade, the case that upheld the constitutional right of women to have abortions.
His role in that case earned him the eternal vilification of anti-abortionists. He reportedly received more than 60,000 pieces of hate mail during the two decades that followed that 1973 ruling.
However, others praised Blackmun as a passionate backer of individual liberties and church-state separation.”In his affirmation of the right of women to be moral decision-makers in their own lives and in his passionate defense of the rights of minorities and dissenters from majoritarian control, he added flesh and sinew to America’s promise of expansive rights and freedoms for all its citizens,”Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, said of Blackmun.”Justice Blackmun was one of the Supreme Court’s great advocates of church-state separation and freedom of conscience,”said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
The Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice noted Blackmun’s death with a resolution that said he”will be remembered as one of the court’s most important champions of individual conscience, reproductive rights, women’s rights, religious liberty and church-state separation.” Blackmun was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Richard Nixon and was seen as a conservative in his early days on the court. But by his retirement in 1994 at age 85, the life-long Republican was viewed as one of the court’s last liberal voices.
Just before he left the court, he wrote an opinion urging an end to capital punishment.”Many members of the United Methodist Church and the National Council of Churches, which have long opposed the death penalty, applauded Blackmun’s opinion,”United Methodist News Service, the denomination’s official news agency, said in reporting Blackmun’s death.
The news service called Blackmun”one of United Methodism’s best-known voices.”UMNS said Blackmun frequently read the Bible during Sunday services at Washington’s Metropolitan Memorial United Methodist Church, where he was a long-time member.”He had a great love for the Scripture and was really a scholar of the biblical literature,”said the Rev. William Holmes, who retired in 1998 after 24 years as Metropolitan Memorial’s senior pastor.”He also had a great love for the United Methodist Church as a denomination.” The Rev. Bill Lawrence, the church’s current senior pastor, said of Blackmun:”He was active in the fellowship life of the church. He would greet people during coffee hour Sunday morning. His life was an expression of his faith.”
Restorers promise Christmas Eve mass in Basilica of St. Francis
(RNS) The Upper Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi, which suffered severe earthquake damage in 1997, will reopen for the first Mass of the”Holy Year”on Christmas Eve _ its structure sound but many of its precious frescoes still in fragments, restorers of the church in Assisi, Italy, reported Friday (March 5).
The Roman Catholic Church will open celebrations of the Holy Year of 2000, known as the jubilee, at Christmas.”We can now say that the rash promise made at the moment of the earthquake of September 1997 to celebrate the Christmas mass of the jubilee in the Upper Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi will be kept,”Antonio Paolucci, coordinator of restoration, told a news conference.
But, Paolucci said, when worshippers raise their eyes to the newly repaired vaulting of the medieval cathedral, they will see the images of frescoes by Giotto and Cimabue projected on plain gray walls rather than the actual frescoes, which crumbled into fragments in the two earthquakes that struck the region on Sept. 26, 1997.
Giuseppe Basile of the Central Institute for Restoration said the earthquakes caused the collapse of 144 square yards of frescoes. The 11 earthquake victims included two monks and a restorer crushed to death under the rubble in the basilica.
Workmen recovered more than 100,000 fragments, some as small a fingernail, Basile said. Restorers, relying heavily on computer analyses, meticulously sorted the fragments according to color, brush strokes, form, border and other elements.
They have been able to reassemble much of the frescoes of eight saints that fell from the arch at the entrance and, in theory, can reattach them to the walls, Basile said.
But the fate of sections of vaulting depicting Sts. Matthew and Gerolamo and showing gold stars in a blue sky is uncertain and will be discussed by an international panel of art experts meeting in Assisi Sept. 22-24 to study the basilica’s 13th and 14th century frescoes and stained glass.
Giorgio Croci, a structural engineer on the faculty of Rome’s La Sapienza University, said structural restoration has left the basilica in far better shape to resist damage from future tremors.”The vaults were in a condition to make you shudder after some 15 earthquakes that have hit over the centuries, and rubble was weighing down the roof. Many of the critical girders in reinforced cement no longer existed,”Croci said.
Now, he said, the vaults are supported from inside by ribs in a composite material made of laminated wood lined with Kevlar, a fiber”more resistant and much lighter than steel,”which is used in aeronautics and ship-building. Mario Serio, the representative in the regions of Umbria and the Marches of the Ministry of Culture, said that so far Assisi has received $32 million to restore the basilica, augmented by”modest but important international contributions.” This is only the start, Paolucci said.”It will take years and a great deal of money to complete the work,”he said,”but I must say that two years ago I was very pessimistic. Today the prospects are more optimistic.”
British Methodist group to offer degree in children’s evangelism
(RNS) The Scripture Union and Cliff College, a Methodist institution, have joined forces to launch a new college degree program in children’s evangelism and nurture.
Graduates of the program will be validated by Sheffield University, which already validates a master’s degree in evangelism offered by Cliff College.
The first course will begin with the new academic year in September.
The program aims to equip a new breed of evangelists to enable children to find a Christian faith for themselves. A children’s evangelist trained in this way would normally work within the context of religious education programs in schools.
Officials of the Scripture Union said the degree program is not aimed at encouraging indoctrination or brainwashing but, rather, said spokesman Gethin Russell-Jones, that”children should not be excluded from the opportunity to hear the good news.””We want children to be able to grow and develop as persons and to be able to know God for themselves,”he said.
Decline in Welsh-speaking worshippers could spell end for school
(RNS) For the past 40 years there has been a Welsh-speaking primary school in London for the children of Welsh-speakers living in the English capital. But now, according to it leaders, its future is threatened because of the decline in Welsh-speaking churchgoers.
For the past 36 years Ysgol Gymraeg Llundain _ the London Welsh School _ has been accommodated at the Welsh Presbyterian Church. But the declining congregation _ there are now fewer than 10 worshippers at the Sunday service _ will close at the end of June, throwing the school and its small student body into an uncertain future.
The church is one of nine Presbyterian churches in London providing services in Welsh. There are also four Congregational chapels, one Wesleyan Methodist, and one Baptist church that offer services in Welsh. All are struggling.
And while the Welsh in London may wish to maintain the language, their churchgoing habits are very much on the decline.
The Welsh language probably hit its low point in the 1960s, when the poet Saunders Lewis, Roman Catholic convert and founder of Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party, delivered a BBC lecture in 1962 warning that Welsh was in danger of extinction.
In 1901, 50 percent of the people of Wales spoke Welsh, but the proportion has been steadily declining _ to 20.8 percent in 1971, 18.9 percent in 1981, and 18.5 percent in 1991. However, the 1991 census recorded a marked rise in the number of children and young people under 25 speaking Welsh.
Welsh is one of the Celtic family of languages, descended from the language spoken in Britain in Roman times. Its literature dates back to the late sixth century.
Quote of the day: Peter Piot, executive director of UNAIDS
(RNS)”For millions of girls and women worldwide, it is clear that violence, AIDS and human rights abuses are experienced as three strands of the same traumatic reality.” _ Peter Piot, executive director of the United Nations AIDS program, speaking to the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women on the connection between the spread of the AIDS virus and violence against women.
DEA END RNS
