Korea and Japan are called, “the closest but the farthest nations.” Yonhap News reports that only 16.7 percent of Koreans have positive feelings toward Japan, while 20.2 percent [of] Japanese have positive feelings for Korea. The Japanese prohibition of hate speech has not extinguished the discriminatory actions against Koreans, and the anti-Japan campaigns in Korea seem to be a political strategy for more support from citizens. A deep gulf still exists between the two nations.
The Christian population in Korea is 19 percent of the total population, while in Japan it is about 0.8 percent. Korea often identifies herself as the “Israel in East Asia.” Japan, to the contrary, is known as the “graveyard of missionaries.”
Source: International Mission Board, November 17, 2021
On October 29 in Kenya, IMB missionaries serving in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Asian Pacific Rim signed a memorandum of understanding solidifying the sending of missionaries from Asia to serve in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Daren Davis, the IMB leader for missionaries serving in Africa, said the signing of the memorandum is a historic step toward seeing Asians engage those in need of the gospel in Africa. Davis [also] acknowledged the decades of missions’ investment in Asian countries.
“We stand here today on the shoulders of those who went before us, people who labored in places where the name of Jesus was not known, and now, from those very places, rise up believers who are going to the nations for the sake of the gospel,” Davis said.
Jeff Singerman, who serves in Africa, said the brutal fact is that there are multitudes of unreached people on the African continent. He sees the signing of the memorandum as an answer to prayer. It is a building block to understanding that Christians from other nations can join the task of seeing African churches sending African missionaries.
Singerman said they will host multicultural training to enable missionaries from Asia to be fruitful and successful in the mission and in the calling that God has given them.
“This collaboration might be the greatest contribution the IMB can make in this generation of missionaries. In other words, facilitating connections with those [with] whom we work, so that they can understand their fulfilling and calling to the missionary task,” Singerman said.
New research on American beliefs about some of faith’s hardest questions highlights both the nation’s biblical illiteracy and the chasm between what various Christian traditions teach. And it holds a few surprises about how people in the pew actually believe things contrary to their own church’s doctrine.
While most of the questions produced clear majority views within the American populace, the detailed analysis among various iterations of Christianity reveals deep differences. And it turns out that the majority view on some questions may part ways with orthodox Christian teaching.
For example, 33% of American adults—including 30% of those who identify as Christian—believe in reincarnation. No major branch of Christianity teaches reincarnation, which also has no support in the biblical text.
Mostar, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as it looked several years ago. Catholicism is dominant on one side of the river and Islam on the other. Now there’s trouble in the region. See the story below and please pray.
Bosnia: Conflict with Seperatists Threatens to Fracture the Nation
World: Knowing the True Story in an Age of Misinformation
Tanzania: Deaf Girl Introduces Her Father to Jesus
Nigeria: Several Killed, Dozens Abducted in Attack on Baptist Church
South Africa: Televangelists, TV Stations and Phone Companies Form an Unholy Alliance
Next week, no Catalyst. My husband and I will be in the middle of a 3,000-mile trip as we move from South Carolina to Hillsboro, Oregon. Could you pray for us as we travel? Northwesterners, I hope to see you at mission events in the region.
Source: Baptist Center for World Evangelism, November 5, 2021
According to Christian Schmidt, the international high representative in Bosnia, the nation is in turmoil and a real possibility exists that it will fracture. The Serb separatists want to recreate their own army, which would split the national force. There is a presence of international forces that have remained in Bosnia due to the Bosnian War, which ended in 1995. Should the Serbs withdraw their men from the national army, Schmidt warns that more international forces would be required within the country to prevent a descent into conflict.
During the Bosnian War in 1992-1995, it is estimated that 100,000 people were killed. The Bosnian genocide, which targeted Muslim men, killed over 8,000 in just three days. Should Bosnia again split in warring factions, many other people will die without a relationship with God. There is a great need for missionaries to take the message of the Prince of Peace to this nation so split by religious differences.
Unfortunately, Bosnia is not the only nation under such pressure. Need help keeping up? Justin Long’s Roundup is a good place to turn. He curates news with an eye for events that affect the unreached and ministry among them.
A disturbing analysis of 4.5 million tweets shows that falsehoods are 70 percent more likely to get shared. This shows it’s not only an inability to decipher what is true that makes fake news so prolific—we also find it alluring, sensational.
Despite being the bearers of good news, Christians are not immune to fake news. For example, in the days leading up to the 2020 election in the U.S., the most popular Christian pages on Facebook were being run by troll farms in Eastern Europe. These groups, which work cooperatively to produce and publish provocative and often angering content to social networks, reached nearly half of all Americans.
Our propensity for fake news reflects our propensity for fake forms of the gospel. A 2020 survey by Ligonier Ministries showed that a significant number of evangelicals have a profound misunderstanding about God. “Overall, U.S. adults appear to have a superficial attachment to well-known Christian beliefs,” stated the ministry.
Read more. The complete article includes other links and resources. You might want to watch their recent webinar featuring a panel of international ministry leaders talking about The Good News in a Fake World.
A Deaf girl born into a Muslim family found true community in a Deaf school nearby.
Her family didn’t know sign language, so she felt very alone at home. Rob Myers [of DOOR International] says, “A vast majority of them have grown up in homes where they can’t communicate well with their own parents. It’s very common for Deaf people to have an everyday experience where they’re sitting around the dinner table, and there’s talking and laughing and information being exchanged. And those Deaf kids are cut off from all of that information.”
One day, a DOOR International 2×2 church-planting team visited her school, and she learned the story of Jesus. Her family didn’t take well to her becoming a Christian. They kicked her out, but a Deaf church welcomed her in.
Eventually, her father, a devout Muslim, got sick. The Deaf church paid his medical expenses. Moved by their love, he too embraced Jesus.
Myer says, “In a lot of communities, deaf people are looked down upon, and they’re not thought of as even being capable of having faith or being involved in a faith community of any kind. So when a young Deaf person comes to faith, it actually can transform the entire family.”
Pray the rest of this girl’s family would also encounter the love of Jesus.
Two Christians were killed in an attack on a church service in southern Kaduna state on Sunday, October 31, with eight others slain in earlier assaults on predominantly Christian villages, sources said.
The lethal attack on Baptist worshipers in Kakau Daji village, Chikun County, also resulted in the kidnapping of dozens of Christians from the Sunday service, church leaders said.
“Two Christians were killed in the church during the morning worship service, and many others were taken away at gunpoint by the armed Fulani herdsmen,” Ishaya Jangado, president of the Kaduna Baptist Convention, said in a text message to Morning Star News.
Joseph Hayab, chairman of the Kaduna State Chapter of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), lamented that the Nigerian government has been incapable of stopping such atrocities after years of attacks.
The full story also describes other recent attacks in the area. We looked for an update on this one (were the captives released?) but did not find one.
A related story adds, “To compound matters, a shutdown of state telecom services to help combat bandit activity is understood to have exacerbated the attack. The church was unable to call for help, whilst the bandits have reportedly asked for a higher ransom because they had to travel further for network service to contact the victims’ relations” (Open Doors).
In South Africa, free analog-broadcast community television stations whose programming caters to low-income majority Black townships are broke. To keep the lights on, they take advertising money from startup Pentecostal pastors who promise bewildering miracles and changes of fortune for jobless audiences.
Anele Heli is a 20-something charismatic prophet-pastor in Cape Town, South Africa’s most racially and financially gentrified city. He goes by the moniker Sir Anele, and his weekly TV sermons on Cape Town TV, the largest nonprofit community channel in the city, attract thousands of viewers and thousands more offline. Worshipers are desperate for him to touch their heads and to ease their pain in a country with the world’s highest joblessness rate. “I’m here to change lives on TV,” Heli said. “My sermons heal diabetes, restore lost jobs, reverse divorces.”
Nearly a dozen dubious South African township TV prophet-pastors are on trial for rape, murder, extortion, immigration fraud, and “fake miracles” stunts.
Poor, majority Black township residents in South Africa can’t afford high-quality pay-per-view TV or home Internet broadband. Broke community TV stations are their only source of information. Therefore, fraudster prophet-pastors lie in wait for desperate township TV viewers beset by joblessness, lack of health insurance, or mental health ailments.
[Kudakwashe Magezi, a poet and tech critic in Johannesburg, explains] “Prophet-pastors recoup their money by performing TV ‘miracles’ and aggressively requesting cash donations to a bank account. Cellular phone corporations get a cut of the cash revenue from desperate viewers [through] text messages.”
Some things are more valuable due to their rarity. For instance, solar eclipses are cool at their present rate. If they happened daily, we’d be annoyed. You may value people who exemplify Proverbs 31 because you don’t see them very often. (I mean the first seven verses, of course. Most women I know check the boxes on the second part of the chapter!)
An opportunity of exquisite rarity has just been offered to us. Last week the US State Department launched a program called Sponsor Circles that allows five American citizens to band together to help an Afghan family get going in the US. Not just give them a winter coat and a phrasebook, but enough to take them the whole nine yards from being a precarious and mystified stranger to being a productive community member.
The website for Sponsor Circles exuberantly reads, “No matter where you are located in the United States, you can welcome a newcomer and provide them with the practical support they need to get settled by serving as a certified sponsor circle. As a sponsor circle, you and your neighbors will take on tasks like finding initial housing, stocking the pantry, connecting children to school, providing initial income support, and helping adults to find employment.”
This amazing opportunity is not unprecedented. Americans could privately sponsor refugees under a short-lived program President Reagan initiated in 1986 called the Private Sector Initiative. While it was active, 16,000 refugees entered the US via private sponsorship, including thousands of Pentecostal Christians fleeing persecution in the Soviet Union.
It should be noted that, as in many efforts like this, Canada has led the way. Over the past 50 years, private sponsors have welcomed more than 350,000 refugees to Canada. Way to go, eh?
By now you may be wondering some of the same things I am:
Is this safe? What if we mess up?
Like first-time parents, we wonder, “What if we drop the baby?” The good people behind Sponsor Circles promise to help with the application process and training. Once you’re approved, they’ll link you with an agency that will help with tricky questions and challenging bureaucracy.
Jesus’s words from Luke 14 also apply, “Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it? For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you, saying, ‘This person began to build and wasn’t able to finish.’”
This isn’t a mobilization challenge you execute over a weekend, take a victory lap, and be done. This calls for careful prayer and consideration. And some money!
How much does it cost?
Groups of five sponsors commit to raising $2,275 for each member of the Afghan family to be hosted. This money will be used for the initial setup and care of the family.
In terms of time, Circles commit to preparing for the family’s arrival, then helping with their adjustment for at least three months.
What does the Sponsor Circle need to actually do?
According to the website, Sponsor Circles are responsible to support the Afghan newcomer(s) with the following:
Secure housing
Provide basic necessities
Provide time-bound income support
Assist in completing required changes of address
Connect to legal assistance
Support in obtaining a Social Security card
Support newcomer in selective service registration as appropriate
Support in accessing medical services
Support in accessing available benefits
Enroll children in school
Provide English language support
Provide job search advice and support
Provide community orientation
Complete 30-day and 90-day reports
Does that list feel a little daunting to you? Me, too. This effort qualifies as radical hospitality. At my little church, we have nearly an apartment’s worth of stuff we’ve collected over the past few weeks to help set up an apartment for an Afghan family. It’s one thing to gather the material for a house. It’s a whole other deal to help a family establish their home in the US.
Can we take our family to church?
Proselytizing is not allowed. The guidelines are similar to those of other refugee resettlement agencies. At the same time, when a family asks you why you’re doing this, you can share what the Bible says and what Jesus has done for you.
OK, I’m intrigued. What’s next?
Pray. Give God a chance to say, “No, this astounding opportunity I’m giving the Church is not for you.”
Ask God who he might want to link you up with for this adventure.
Start asking people to consider joining you.
Pray together and get the green light from God.
Start raising money and working on your Welcome Plan.
My head is still spinning thinking what an amazing door God has opened up for us. This is an opportunity to do the right thing, extend care to people whose lives have been turned upside down, and offer hope and home to people who’ve had little of either lately.
Can I ask you to do one more thing?
Forward this email all over the place: to your pastor and others pastors you know, to missions directors, to people who might have interest and money but no time to give, to people who might have time but no money, to friends who are just now retiring and wondering what to do with themselves, to young people ripe for a challenge, and to that sweet, old lady at church who you just know knows how to pray.
I’d love to hear your response to this. Please tell me what you’re dreaming, so I can be your biggest cheerleader.
