World Scene: March 09, 1992

Missions

Listening To The Numbers

Missiologist David Barrett hopes to prove a point: “People are not using their own statistics.”

Barrett says most Christian denominations or missions groups routinely collect data, but few really heed it. “It is as though the U.S. Bureau of Census took its census every 10 years and promptly moth-balled the results,” he says.

Furthermore, it is hard to get missions organizations to work together to be more efficient, Barrett says. His research shows that groups are sending too many workers to some countries, while all but ignoring others. For example, the island of Samoa averages 7,915 indigenous Christian workers per one million residents, yet foreign-missions groups still send another 3,300 workers per million people. Meanwhile, other countries go wanting for Christian workers. In Uganda, there are only 1,229 indigenous Christian workers and 160 foreign missionaries per million people.

People And Events

Around The World

Israel

Israel’s Orthodox and secular Jews are competing for the minds and hearts of the estimated 400,000 Soviet Jewish immigrants, who are largely ignorant of religious tenets, says the missionary newsletter Pulse. Secular Jews hope the immigrants will serve as a buffer between them and the Orthodox, whose numbers are increasing rapidly due to high birth rates. The Orthodox have already circumcised 30,000 immigrants.

Scotland

Church leaders plan to form the Scottish Evangelical Alliance this summer. Billy Graham’s 1991 Scotland crusade helped spur the Scots to active cooperation.

Commonwealth of Independent States (formerly USSR)

Volunteers from 50 churches around Moscow are planning to distribute gospel booklets to every home in the city through a program sponsored by Every Home for Christ of Colorado Springs.

A report by Christian Solidarity International says thousands of orphans populate the former Soviet states. About 19,000 children live in St. Petersburg alone. Many of the children were once classified as “oligophrenic,” a Soviet catchword used to relegate learning-disabled children to society’s backwaters.

Leighton Ford Ministries and Winnipeg’s Mennonite Brethren Communications recently convened an institute to seek unique ways of doing evangelism in the commonwealth.

World Vision, in partnership with the motel chain Best Western International, has begun distributing more than $1 million in food relief in three republics.

Albania

The Albanian Palace of Congresses, in the capital city of Tirana, was once a virtual shrine to atheistic communism. But late last year the featured attraction there was not communist ideology but the Jesus film, a Campus Crusade for Christ evangelistic project.

An estimated 2,000 people turned out for the first Albanian showing of the film in mid-December, including the country’s top government officials. More than 700 indicated decisions for Christ.

“What once was a temple of communism is now being used as a temple of the holy God,” exclaimed the head of the government-controlled Albanian film industry.

Germany

More than one million evangelicals gathered in mid-January in Europe’s German-speaking countries for prayer. And German Chancellor Helmut Kohl reportedly has accepted an invitation to this year’s central evangelical gathering in June in Stuttgart, Germany.

Switzerland

Recent actions by Southern Baptist conservatives in the U.S. to withdraw funds from Ruschlikon (Baptist) Seminary led in January to resignations by two top Southern Baptist Foreign Missions Board officials. Isam Ballenger, vice-president for Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, and Keith Parker, area director for Europe, resigned to protest the perceived “global agenda” of conservative trustees.

Zamba

A Christian Country

Newly elected Zambian President Frederick Chiluba has provoked controversy by declaring that his nation is officially Christian. “Zambia is a Christian country with a tolerance of other religions,” Chiluba said on December 29, 1991, at the State House in the capital of Lusaka. “I, on behalf of the people of Zambia, hereby declare that Zambia is a Christian country.”

Chiluba later defended his position to the press and minority Islamic groups. “This does not mean that we deny other religions freedom of worship,” Chiluba reportedly told a gathering of Christians. “We shall only have to say as Joshua said, ‘Choose today whom you’re going to serve; as for my family and me, we shall serve the Lord.’ ”

Chiluba defeated long-time President Kenneth Kaunda in October.

Estimates vary, but about 65 percent of Zambia’s 8.5 million people are considered Christian. Less than half of 1 percent are Muslim, and about 20 percent are animists.

Pakistan

Muslim Law Threatens Religious Freedoms

Banto Masih, a Pakistani Christian in Lahore, was accused last August by a Muslim acquaintance of “insulting the Prophet Muhammad.” Bailed out after his accuser tried to stab him at a court hearing, Masih is scheduled for trial early this year. If convicted, he will be sentenced to hang to death, as required by Islamic law.

When Pakistan’s controversial Shari‘a Act instituting Islamic law was ramrodded through Parliament in May 1991, the nation’s three million Christians were confused. Was the new set of statutes simply an innocuous step to appease the Muslim establishment, as some minority religious leaders hoped? Or was it a serious reversal of the long-standing legal and constitutional guarantees of religious freedom for Pakistan’s non-Muslim minorities?

Cases like Masih’s now have Christians worried. According to the legal counsel for Masih, the majority of court proceedings against non-Muslim citizens since passage of the 1991 Shari‘a Act are being determined by the precepts of Islamic law. Attorneys report that in civil cases of mixed-religion marriages, the courts are now imposing upon the non-Muslim partner Muslim laws governing marriage, divorce, and child custody. Christian partners are also denied contact with their families.

“The Christians and other minorities … are the worst affected,” claims Najam Sethi, editor of the Friday Times in Lahore, “although in theory the Shari‘a Act says that Islamic law doesn’t apply to minorities.… Actually, that isn’t so.” Pakistan’s Christian population is made up predominantly from the lower economic strata and is 70 percent rural. Slightly less than half the group is Catholic. The largest Protestant denomination, the Church of Pakistan, was formed 20 years ago in a merger of the Methodist, Presbyterian, Church of Scotland, and Anglican churches, founded primarily by European missionaries. It now includes some 400,000 members.

One Christian leader terms the Shari‘a Act a continuation of the “Islamic psychological blackmail” wielded by both the late President Zia ul-Haq and his protégé, the current prime minister, Nawaz Sharif. “No one could say no when Zia asked in a referendum, ‘Do you want Islamic rule?’ ” he says.

A virtual dictator for 11 years, Zia introduced the harsh Hudood Ordinances requiring stoning, whipping, and amputation to punish certain crimes, and he also instituted the Federal Shari‘a Court to bring state judicial decisions under Islamic review. After six years of heated national debate, Sharif’s version of the final bill was watered down in an effort to placate Muslim factions that quibbled over definitions of Islamic law and its authority over the courts, constitution, and government leaders.

The vague wording of the final text, however, has invited broad interpretation of the actual provisions of the law. “It’s an ambiguous document,” notes Jamshid Rahmat-Ullah, a Christian lawyer in Lahore. He questions who is actually interpreting the vague sections of the act. “One clause says that minorities have a right to practice their ‘ways of life.’ But who is going to define that? A Muslim maulana [cleric]? Or a Christian church leader?”

The Supreme Court of Pakistan thus far has sidestepped the issue by throwing out every case in which lower courts have called for Islamic punishments.

“This is very dangerous,” says editor Sethi, “because the legal structure is there to Islamize the entire legal structure. Right now, the political will is not there. But tomorrow, the supreme court could come under pressure from a fundamentalist regime.”

Kanwal Feroze, editor of Lahore’s only Christian magazine, Shadaab, says it appears to be in the overall current interests of the government to stall on the implementation of Islamic law. “If it was being enforced in a real sense, we Christians couldn’t publish anything about our religion. We couldn’t hold our [annual Christian] conventions, either, because they are evangelistic, and it’s considered an attack against Islam to ask people to become Christians,” Feroze says.

“The Shari‘a Act is in cold storage; they are not enforcing it,” Feroze says. But for Banto Masih, facing a possible death sentence in a Lahore courtroom, the reality of Islamic law may have begun a slow, irreversible thaw.

By Barbara Baker, News Network International, in Pakistan.

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