News reports of the recent tragic plane crash in Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo, are just beginning to trickle out. One story getting much attention is focused on the heroic action of 14-year-old April Mosier.

In this Mosier family photo, April Mosier is on the far left.

Adventist Review news editor, Mark A. Kellner, reports:

The young woman, was traveling with her mother, father, and 3-year-old brother from Goma to Kisangani, Congo, where her older brother Keith, 24, has begun a mission project. The Mosiers are all serving with Outpost Centers International, a lay ministry that supports the Seventh-day Adventist Church. The flight did not clear the runway – media reports indicate a tire may have blown out – and the plane crashed into a nearby open-air market. At least 40 people were reported killed; more than 100 survived, reports indicate. April “probably was one of the first ones to get to the opening,” Barry Mosier, her father, said in a telephone interview from Goma two days after the crash. “She was right there, knowing what to do; none of the exit doors were open. She told a man, in Swahili, that ‘We’ve got to get out of there or we’ll die,’” he added. Young April pushed at a panel until a passage large enough for her to get through was found; she then made a run for it. Her father said that April had feared her family had died in the crash; they were later reunited at a local hospital.

Click here for the CNN version.
The Mosier family, originally from Minnesota, has been focused on missions work in southwestern Tanzania. For the full story from Adventist news, click here.

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Posted by Tim Morgan at April 17, 2008 | Comments (1)

The answer, apparently, is no.

Everybody has been a bit overeager about Zimbabwe’s future — but there truly are some hopeful signs as Zimbabweans wait for the results of last Saturday’s elections. The opposition party claims its candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai, beat Robert Mugabe. They've also won a majority in parliament. And no one is contradicting them yet.

Rumor has it Mugabe may concede that he has not won. Some are suggesting his party’s not declaring victory may lead to an actual handing over of power—and that Zimbabwe, in which church-state intrigue is practically an art form, might fare better with the democratic process than Kenya did this winter. “The mere possibility of a transfer of power is a stunning development in Zimbabwe,” Greg Winter says in a New York Times video on the election.

The Zimbabwean pre-reported Mugabe’s declaration of victory, which now seems very unlikely.

IWPR could not get the exact percentage by which Mugabe will be said to have won but the sources said there would not be a run-off, as ZANU-PF will claim Mugabe has clinched more than 50 per cent of the total number of voters cast.

Sources within the ZEC centre - newly christened the National Collation Centre - say Mugabe clearly lost the election to his opposition rival Morgan Tsvangirai, polling only 20 per cent of the vote. He is also said to trail Simba Makoni who garnered 28 per cent.

But commentators say it would be something of a miracle if Mugabe and his party had secured the victory, given more than 85 per cent unemployment, serious food shortages and a collapsed health delivery system.

Not to mention the 100,000% inflation rate.

However, Mugabe hasn’t declared defeat, either. Although polling stations post results on their doors, the government has not released official results, “heightening fears that it is trying to massage the vote in the face of a crushing defeat,” The Guardian reports. Churches are going public with concerns about rigging.

A runoff vote may be the next step.

NPR aired what was practically a post-mortem of Mugabe, detailing his shyness and resentment of Mandela. Mugabe’s life is one of the saddest examples of heroism degraded.

Christianity Today’s past coverage of Zimbabwe includes articles on Mugabe tampering with churches and accusing Pius Ncube.

Posted by Susan Wunderink at April 2, 2008 | Comments (0)

Religion coverage in The Atlantic is typically well done. The magazine's coverage of the neutering of religion from The Golden Compass was interesting for the way it treated both Hollywood and the anti-religious themes of the book on which the movie was based. Though the magazine retains the secular, above the fray, attitude toward faith of its New England founding, it also put Philip Jenkin's article on the New Christendom on the cover in October, 2002, when his book describing the phenomenal growth of non-Western Christianity debuted.

So, the magazine's March cover story (not yet online) on the literal battle between Christianity and Islam in Nigeria is equally well done, despite some mistakes.

Eliza Griswold—daughter of the former presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church—writes from the town of Yelwa, where an attack that killed Christians in church in 2004 brought on a more gruesome response against Muslims killing hundreds. Yelwa is in Nigeria's Middle Belt, which, Griswold writes,

marks the fault line between Christianity and Islam not only in Nigeria, but across the entire continent. A satellite image from Google Earth shows the Middle Belt as a gray-green strip between the equator and the 10th parallel, dividing the fawn-colored dry land from the vibrant sub-Saharan jungle canopy. It also separates most of the continents 67 million Muslims to the north from 417 million Christians to the south.

Because of the 20th century explosion of Christianity in Africa, by the year 2050, Griswold writes, the demographic and geographic center of Christianity will be in northern Nigeria, where the country's Muslims live. This fact makes any tensions in the country religious ones. With 140 million people, oil revenues that never seem to help the people (half of whom live on less than a dollar a day) thanks to government corruption, and a changing regional climate that has wiped out many traditional livelihoods, the country has plenty of tensions.

“Every crisis is automatically interpreted as a religious crisis,” an Anglican archbishop says. “But we all know that, scratch the surface and it's got nothing to do with religion. It's power.”

Power, in this democracy (despite massive corruption) is a numbers game. Christians and Muslims compete for numbers—converts. And to do that, they not only use intimidation (Griswold quotes Archbishop Peter Akinola saying that Muslims do not have a monopoly on violence), Christians and Muslims appeal to want what Nigerians need most—prosperity.

Pentecostalism has brought along American prosperity theology. (Griswold doesn't seem able to separate Pentecostalism from prosperity theology.) And, in the competition for souls, Nigeria's Muslims have come up with an Islamic approach to making people wealthy.

Griswold suggests that, while violence between Christians and Muslims is still a threat, this sort of competition—non-violent pursuit of winning hearts and minds—is growing.

Hopefully she's right. The stories of murder, rape, and intimidation (all justified by either side's scripture) are horrifying. Yet, Griswold doesn't offer much to hang that hope on other than the story of an imam and a pastor who gave up leading militias to work together for peace. It's inspiring, but she gives little evidence of their effectiveness. And Griswold, despite her father's Christian leadership, doesn't seem to fully understand the Christianity she's reporting on, much less Islam. For example, she says Pentecostals “share an experience of the Holy Spirit, or the numinous, that offers the gift of salvation and success in everyday life.” (italics are mine. At least she didn't spell it like Rob Bell.) And Muslims have yet to show that they can treat minorities as equals, instead of "protected" classes or worse.

Still, the article, and it's companions by Alan Wolfe (on how religiosity really is decreasing with modernization) and Walter Russell Mead (on American evangelical political moderation) are worth reading.

Posted by Rob Moll at February 10, 2008 | Comments (2)

In Washington this week, conservatives held a press conference on Thursday to call public attention to efforts in Congress to "radically" rewrite PEPFAR, President Bush's signature program to fight HIV/AIDS globally.

In their press statement, these conservatives said:

In his 2008 State of the Union, President Bush said:
"Our Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief is treating 1.4 million people. We can bring healing and hope to many more. So I ask you to maintain the principles that have changed behavior and made this program a success." Instead, the Democrats have decided to radically change or abandon the principles of this widely successful program. Their radical rewrite will pour billions into the hands of abortion providers with little or no regard for the pro-life, pro-family cultures of recipient countries. It also strips provisions that ensure priority funding for the highly effective abstinence and fidelity programs, which have reduced HIV rates in African nations that have implemented it. The Democrat proposal also strips the provision that forbids grants to groups that do not have a policy explicitly opposing prostitution and sex trafficking--a provision designed to combat exploitation of women in recipient countries.

In addition to members of Congress, Saddleback church's senior pastor Rick Warren and author Chuck Colson attended the press event. A transcript of remarks are not available. But most if not all of these conservatives will speak out in favor of the controversial program designations that:

* 33 percent of prevention funding go toward programming that promotes sexual abstinence before marriage and sexual fidelity within marriage; and,

* The grant ban should be maintained on groups that do not have a policy statement opposing sex trafficking and prostitution.

The 33 percent represents tens of millions of dollars available for such programs, which liberals and others brand as basically a waste of money.

Critics of PEPFAR's existing prevention programs are turning up the heat rhetorically. Pamela Barnes, head of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS foundation said on Thursday:

Proposals to maintain partisan, ideologically-driven mandates that constrain countries’ abilities to respond to their own epidemics threaten the continued success of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).

One sympathetic blogger notes:

The bottom line is that not providing people with what they need to protect themselves is a sin. The abstinence earmark skews the programs and gives short shrift to all the other prevention efforts that need to be undertaken as well.

Somewhat caught in the middle are organizations such as Physicians for Human Rights, which has laudably held out hope that a strong consensus can emerge involving evangelicals, health groups, and liberals for reauthorization for PEPFAR.

And, they are aiming for $50 billion, not the $30 billion that the Bush administration has asked for. This afternoon, PHR media coordinator/AIDS Campaign Katie Krauss released an exclusive statement to CT via email, which in part says:

We were surprised to see a great deal of controversy regarding PEPFAR reauthorization recently, and wanted to explain what we are after. We want PEPFAR to be a bigger program so that it can save more lives. It's already started at least a million people on HIV treatment.

Women
African women are especially vulnerable to HIV--more than 60% of adults in subSaharan Africa are women, and as many as 75% of young people with HIV there are women and girls. We want PEPFAR to really go after this problem and develop science-based programs (with local authorities and local NGOs that understand the culture) to solve it.

Integrating AIDS Services with Reproductive Health Services and basic health care
There is some money now to treat AIDS in parts of Africa, but no money for basic health care or for reproductive health services (NOT including abortion; it's illegal to use US tax dollars for abortion). So now there are clinics where women are dying in childbirth, when right next door women with AIDS get much better medical care. Our field nurses and doctors have seen this first hand and find it very frustrating. What is needed is one place where women can get regular health care and AIDS care—integrated health care. This would also help the many women who are too embarrassed to walk into an AIDS clinic, fearful they will be abandoned by their families if people find out they are HIV-positive.

Programs that prevent mother-to-child transmission and treat both mom and dad for HIV after baby is born. These are called Prevention of Mother-to-Child Transmission Plus programs. They keep both mom and dad alive (instead of just baby, as regular prevention of mother-to-child transmission programs inadvertently do), stabilize communities, and prevent untold misery.

Africa's health worker shortage
There is also a desperate need for more health workers—according to the World Health Organization at least a million more are needed. Many clinics operate with one or two health workers, who may be on call around the clock, every day and see 100 patients per day. Or there may be no health care at all because of the shortage. We want PEPFAR to train and retain at least 140,000 more health workers, and help build long-lasting solutions to this crisis.

Abstinence
In prevention, as always, we've supported lifting the abstinence earmark because the overwhelming evidence is that abstinence-only programs (for adults) don't work; see the 2006 report from the General Accounting Office that showed that they impeded effective AIDS prevention. Of course we support abstinence for kids.

For adults, we support a comprehensive approach where education about condoms, abstinence, communication, fidelity, etc. is available. In other words, provide all the information, and let the adult decide what will work best for them. [Much more research is needed to better understand what is driving the very high infection rates in subSaharan Africa.]

Saving lives by keeping up with the epidemic. If funded at $30 billion over five years, the US would be treating only 100,000 new patients per year, when millions of people will die without treatment. We want more money to expand HIV treatment (and prevention) to keep up with the pandemic.

The PEPFAR reauthorization is under active consideration at the committee level in the House and Senate. Billions of aid dollars and many lives hang in the balance within this bill -- which is likely to be among the few major pieces of legislation to move through Congress in this election year.

tmorgan@christianitytoday.com

Posted by Tim Morgan at February 8, 2008 | Comments (0)

Believing that the casualties and violence in Kenya were being grossly underreported, the Kenyan blogging community put together Ushahidi.com. Ushahidi means “witness” in Swahili. The website is mapping out occurrences of violence throughout Kenya, asking witnesses to submit incidents on a detailed form on a computer or by SMS. Kenyan NGOs verify the reports before they are shown on the map.

Erik Hersman, who blogs at WhiteAfrican.com, is trying to get the word out, “In hopes that by reaching out and talking to a broad selection of media more people will hear about it and that the news of Ushahidi will trickle down to the Kenyans who need it most.”

Could this be the future of crisis aid? Through this site, people are not only able to set the record straight about what’s really happening (“There is still a ban in place on live broadcasts related to the election here and this seems to be one way of ensuring that information is not being choked off by the government,” writes one blogger), they’re also able to communicate with those who have the resources to help them. Some recent posts include:

Some displaced families are going hungry. Rowdy mobs are stopping villagers from taking food to the starving women and children whose property has been looted from the tea estates where they were working. These are third generation workers being evicted in retaliatory attacks. Someone should provide enough security so that the villagers can feed these people without fear.

* * *
Yes there is a lot of need specially food, Mosquito nets for those i saw in Oyugis, they dont have food and i was thinking that if we could get some money we can buy some flour and then we transport them there and give them. I used my own tranport money just to look if things have come back to normal in those places and at least there is movements of vehicles although fares is double due to fuel cost which is very high at the moment. . . I want to thank you all for doing this for Kenyans specially when people are really in need. May God bless you all.

Public radio's The World yesterday reported on the website, which went live last Wednesday.

Posted by Susan Wunderink at January 15, 2008 | Comments (0)

As the explosive violence following Kenya’s disputed elections appears to be cooling, a humanitarian crisis is left in its wake. About 250,000 Kenyans have fled their homes to escape violence. In the country’s western Rift Valley region alone, the scene of some of the country’s most horrific bloodshed, about 100,000 people need immediate assistance, including food and clean water.

“People are being forced to drink unsafe water, risking diarrhoeal diseases, infection and severe dehydration," said Wubeshet Woldermariam, country director for the U.K.-based aid organization Merlin. “The longer the crisis continues, the greater the risk to people’s health. If peace isn’t restored within the next few days, disease and severe dehydration are very real threats.”

Woldermariam’s warning comes amid today’s hopeful news that there will be negotiation talks this Friday between Kenya’s incumbent president, Mwai Kibaki, and opposition leader, Raila Odinga, who claims the Dec. 27 election was rigged.

Over the weekend, the two men were urged toward negotiation by Ghanaian president John Kufuor, top U.S. official for Africa, Jendayi Frazer, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, among others. Today, Kibaki invited Odinga to his residence to discuss ways to solve the election standoff and quell violence. His invitation came only hours after Odinga cancelled nationwide protest rallies slated for Tuesday, which were expected to exacerbate violence.

“The only way to restore the Kenyan people’s rights and confidence in the system is that the political leaders have to stop the violence, because innocent people are dying,” said Ms. Frazer, according to the BBC. “They’ve been cheated by their political leadership and their institutions.”

A statement released today by Kenya’s Ministry of Special Programs puts the election-related death toll at 486.

Yesterday, January 6, trucks deployed by the U.N. World Food Program carried 670 tons of food to the capital city of Nairobi, and to Eldoret, a Rift Valley town near Kiambaa, where last week 30 people were burned to death inside the Kenya Assemblies of God Church after it was set ablaze by rioters. Only miles away from last week’s blaze, some 9,000 Kenyans have found shelter from gang-related violence in Eldoret’s Sacred Heart Cathedral. Hundreds are being added to their ranks daily.

In a letter reprinted in U.K.’s Daily Mail, Sacred Heart Bishop Cornelius Corir reported on the scene:

“These are not poor famine victims looking for food or refugees fleeing a war zone. They are ordinary, hard-working people who have, overnight, lost everything they had. Among them are teachers, farmers, taxi drivers, and other people with small businesses. All are now destitute—burned out of their homes and told by machete-wielding youths either to leave or be killed. . . . Of course, the wounds will take a very long time to heal. Yet I am still hopeful. My faith and belief in my countrymen makes me very confident we shall overcome the darkness that has fallen over this land.”

Posted by Katelyn Beaty at January 7, 2008 | Comments (2)

I've rarely been a big fan of Hollywood-style, lefty social activism. But two cheers for activist-actress Mia Farrow for taking on the continuing genocide in the Darfur region of western Sudan.

The situation in Darfur could be resolved in a matter of days and weeks if the Bashir regime in Khartoum was willing to abide by its commitments. A nation-state loses its legitimacy when it permits its own citizens to be slaughtered at will with no consequences locally, nationally, or internationally.

Here's a recent comment about Darfur from the highly credible International Crisis Group:

The Darfur conflict has changed radically in the past year and not for the better. While there are many fewer deaths than during the high period of fighting in 2003-2004, it has mutated, the parties have splintered, and the confrontations have multiplied. Violence is again increasing, access for humanitarian agencies is decreasing, international peacekeeping is not yet effective and a political settlement remains far off.

The bottom line is that the innocent still die daily inside Darfur as the interagency wrangling and political realities prevent the peace-keeping forces from moving into position with the necessary resources.

There is a student organization in Canada, Dream for Darfur. It's doing good work in raising funds for advocacy and care.

But other organization, Olympic Dream for Darfur with support from Mia Farrow, is upping the stakes for corporate America and the Beijing Olypics. ODD is pressing China and American corporate sponsors of the Beijing Olympics '08 to influence the Islamicist regime in Sudan to end the genocide.

Farrow's recent commentary in the Wall Street Journal states more of the staggering facts of how the killing is crossing borders and hitting even the relief worker population in the region:

This week, Oxfam's director in Sudan, Alun MacDonald said, "Our staff are being targeted on a daily basis. They are being shot, robbed, beaten and abducted." The security situation, he insisted, "is the worse since the entire conflict began." Seven aid workers were killed in October, according to Mr. Macdonald. "These aren't conditions we can keep working in."

For Christians, the Save Darfur Coalition is an faith-friendly and evangelical-supported organization that draws in local churches and community organizations.

They have a zip code-friendly database that provides ready access to like-minded folks who are burdened to stop this killing. I put in my local zip code in the western suburbs of Chicagoland and found about 10 groups.

This is the kind of grassroots effort that in time will bear fruit.

Pray for Darfur.

Posted by Tim Morgan at December 13, 2007 | Comments (0)