Day: July 1, 2015

Missions Catalyst News Briefs 7.1.15

1. WORLD: Wars and Statistics
2. INDIA: Holiday Wars
3. LEBANON: Muslim Leaders Condemn Persecution of Christians
4. WORLD: Refugees, Crisis or Opportunity?
5. INDONESIA: Former Jihadist Starts Jesus Communities

Listen to Josh Lavender sing Hope in Jesus.

Greetings!

How do you communicate hope? Before we can communicate hope to others we must learn to make them feel welcome. I am finding that the tools that a missionary needs to communicate well are also needed close to home. The pluralistic West hosts many subcultures, even where I live in upstate New York. In light of that, my pastor sent me a helpful list of seven things to say to church visitors and from the same source ten things you should never say (Thom Rainer).

Even more helpful is this list of things to avoid saying in an honor/shame context (HonorShame.com). The explanations are SO helpful. I think some of my relatives are from an honor/shame subculture!

Communicating hope must also be done with prayer. Are you praying this Ramadan for Muslims? Here are some ways to pray for Muslims besieged by war (Zwemer Center).

Communicating hope in Jesus,

Pat

Sources: various via Pat Noble, June 2015

Did you realize that Monday, June 29 was the one-year anniversary of the declared “caliphate” by ISIS? It bought to mind  an interview with Philip Jenkins by The Gospel Coalition which discussed Jenkins’ latest book, The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade. Meanwhile, many evangelicals in the U.S. and elsewhere are despairing about the moral decline of society.

All this causes me to think about social changes, especially those that are ideologically driven. How is the enemy leveraging ideologies? How do we pray, or act? The first thing may be to recognize when what we’re hearing is propaganda and to combat it, if only in our own minds, with hard facts. Since data is inherently boring, I try to find information presented with great graphics, like those from INContext and Missiographics.

Some creative types use their art to humanize the data. Check out Hard Data, a five-minute video and music piece illustrating military data about casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. Jump in and watch from 8:50 to 10:10 to hear the artist describe this work (Flowing Data). Another great data visual about war is an interactive 15-minute piece, The Fallen of World War II (Neil Haloren). While the civilian and military deaths have gone down, the number of “other casualties” of conflict, refugees and internally displaced people, has risen steadily. See a New York Times visualization of the flight of refugees around the globe.

But back to holy wars and the utopian ideals that often drive them. Their appeal may be that they give hope to those who have none. Scripture calls hope, specifically “the hope set before us” as believers, the anchor of the soul (Hebrews 6:18-20). And take a look at the context: this hope is for “we who have fled for refuge.” We can keep praying for more of those seeking social change or simply seeking refuge to know such a hope!

Source: World Watch Monitor, June 29, 2015

As you may have seen, June 21 was the first-ever International Yoga Day, observed from New Delhi to New York. In yoga’s birthplace, India Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself led a yoga session attended by 37,000 people in the heart of Indian capital. June 21 also was a Sunday, and that’s why several of India’s Christian organizations voiced their opposition—not to yoga itself, but to another big national event scheduled on a Christian holy day.

“It’s not that we do not welcome yoga, minus its (Hindu) religious connotation, since it has merits for mind exercise and relieving stress. However, the hype and overboard is just too much,” said [a senior Presbyterian church leader in the north-east of India and former leader in the National Council of Churches in India].

Yoga Day is the latest of several attempts by India’s government to hold high-profile events on Christian holy days. The government declared a nationwide observance of “Good Governance Day” on Christmas. It convened a national conference of judges on Good Friday. India’s education minister has said yoga would become part of the federal school curriculum, and a top official of one of India’s 29 states told a Catholic convention that Christians should start reciting Hindu mantras as part of their worship services.

» Read full story.

Source: Mission Network News, June 16, 2015

Amnesty’s 35-page report The Global Refugee Crisis: A Conspiracy of Neglect blames the world and its leaders for failing to “fix” desperate circumstances currently surrounding 50 million people.

“The global refugee crisis may be fueled by conflict and persecution,” part of the report reads, “but it is compounded by the neglect of the international community in the face of this human suffering.”

About two-thirds of the world’s refugees have been in exile for more than five years, many of them with no end in sight. Approximately 86% live in developing nations; Turkey, Lebanon, and Pakistan each host over one million refugees.

Outlining crises in the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia, [Amnesty] calls for a “paradigm shift” in the way people view the global refugee crisis. It also blames the global community for refugee deaths.

“The current approaches to the world’s many refugee crises are failing—and the toll in lives lost and lives blighted is far higher than many armed conflicts.”

» Read full story.

» See also: The Global Refugee Crisis in Unprecedented and Getting Worse (VICE News), A Record Year in Misery: the World Has Never Seen a Refugee Crisis This Bad (Foreign Policy), the four-minute video Interview with a Refugee Pastor (IAFR), summaries of a Brookings panel on Europe’s Migration Crisis, the moving Diary of a Teenage Refugee (Tearfund), and Migrant Deaths Worldwide (Carnegie Council). Many refugees are coming from a country many people have never heard of: Eritrea. Read about why they are fleeing what has been called the “North Korea of Africa.”

Source: Catholic News Agency, June 17, 2015

The leaders of four branches of Islam in Lebanon gathered earlier this month to issue a joint statement in the face of sectarianism and the rise of the Islamic State, denouncing attacks against Christians in the region.

“In the name of religious, humanitarian and national principles, the summit condemns religiously motivated attacks against Eastern Christians, including attacks against their homes, villages, property, and places of worship, when in fact the Prophet had recommended that they be respected, protected, and defended,” the participants said in a June 2 statement.

Such attacks, “like those suffered by other Muslims and non-Muslims belonging to other faiths and cultures, like the Yazidis, are tantamount to aggression against Islam itself,” they added, according to abouna.org, a site edited by Fr. Rif’at Bader, a priest of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem.

The June summit included representatives of the Sunni, Shia, Druze, and Alawite communities.

» Read full story.

Source: Joel News, June 23, 2015

Raharjo (not his real name) was a school drop-out on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi looking for work, when he was recruited by a jihadist organization. Like many young Muslim men, he was paid to attack Christian villages with the aim to force the Christians out of the area. However, as a result of the increased “war on terror” by the United States after the 9-11 attack, his group fell apart and he lost his job. Raharjo returned to Jakarta, traumatized and depressed. There he joined a punk group and started to use heroin.

One night Raharjo had a dream. A person who introduced himself as Jesus (Isa) spoke to him in “bright and strong language” and told him to “Follow me!” In the dream Raharjo decided to follow this person. When he woke up, he found himself healthy, sober, and without any desire to use drugs.

His newfound faith struck deep roots in Raharjo and changed him over time. He introduced all his gang members to his new Christian friends, and one after another began to take an interest in Jesus.

The method they used to “discover Jesus” was simple: they followed the instructions of the Quran to read the Gospels and also parts of the Old Testament. Questions that arose were answered cautiously. In this way the young men were able to discover their faith by themselves.

» Learn more or subscribe to Joel News.

» Readers might also be interested in a recent report from CBN News about Muslims turning to faith in Jesus in response to atrocities committed by Islamic extremists, though some of its claims seem a bit, well, extreme.