Week of October 10, 2005
Southern Baptist International Mission Board has announced employees of
that agency will be allowed five days of paid administrative leave to
help in Hurricane Katrina disaster relief. “Without affecting any other
(paid time off) or administrative leave, you can have a full week to be
involved in this disaster relief,” agency President Jerry Rankin
recently told staff members. “We want to do our part.” Employees may
serve with whatever organization they choose – Southern Baptist
Disaster Relief, the Red Cross or other teams. Without the allowance,
staff who wished to be personally involved in on-site relief efforts
would have had to take personal vacation time. Staff members will be
eligible for the five days of paid leave as long as Katrina relief
efforts continue.
Louisiana College has scheduled its annual Sanders Lectureship in
Biblical Studies for Oct. 18-20 at 10:50 a.m. Emir Caner, dean of
the College at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth,
Texas, will serve as the keynote speaker. The lectureship is designed
to bring a Bible teacher or scholar to the campus of the Pineville
school in order to lead the community in a study of the Bible. The
Lectureship was endowed in 1985 by members of First Baptist Church of
Lafayette to honor Pastor Perry Sanders on the occasion of his 25th
anniversary as minister at the church. For more information on the
event, persons may call (318) 487-7137.
Tennessee Baptist leaders recently rejected a proposal from Belmont
University to allow up to 40 percent of the Nashville school’s trustees
to be non-Baptists. Currently, all trustees must be members of churches
affiliated with the Tennessee Baptist Convention and be approved by
convention messengers. The proposal was contained in a “covenant”
agreement rejected by the convention’s Executive Board on a
secret-ballot vote of 44-29. Belmont President Bob Fisher said he is
disappointed in the outcome. “Moving forward, Belmont’s board of
trustees will evaluate the message they believe is embedded in the vote
and decide if there is anything else we can do to try to maintain this
relationship,” he said. Belmont trustees said adding non-Baptist
Christians would have made the board more representative of the
school’s increasingly diverse nature. Under the rejected plan,
Tennessee Baptists would have retained a “super majority” of 60 percent
of trustees, assuring continued control of the school. Belmont has
4,300 students and receives about $2.3 million a year from the
convention, representing about 2.8 percent of its revenue. Under the
rejected plan, Belmont would have spent all convention funds on aid for
Tennessee Baptist students.
The North Carolina lieutenant governor broke a Senate tie recently to
pass a bill that would allow a state lottery. Supporters have been
trying to legalize the lottery in North Carolina for 20 years. The
governor is almost sure to sign the measure – he has championed the
issue since his election in 2001. The lottery appeared all but defeated
earlier. However, when two opponents of the move were absent,
supporters pushed the vote through with the help of the lieutenant
governor. The lottery measure passed by just two votes in the state
House. It calls for revenue to be funneled to public school
construction, college scholarships and other school programs. The move
makes North Carolina the final state on the East Coast to start a
lottery.
Representatives from two Baptist-affiliated colleges say their schools
will comply with the NCAA’s decision to ban the use of American Indian
mascots and logos by sports teams, although one of the schools is
appealing. The Mississippi College Choctaws and the Chowan College
Braves are among the original 18 schools targeted by the NCAA before
the Florida State Seminoles, Utah Utes and Central Michigan Chippewas
appealed and then won the right to continue the use of their mascots.
Mississippi College, which is the second oldest Baptist college in the
world, named its mascot after a band of Native Americans in the area,
the Choctaws. Even if forced to comply with the NCAA rule, Mississippi
College would not need to replace many logos or sports uniforms, school
officials said. At Chowan College in Murfreesboro, N.C., school
officials have appointed a committee to study the issue, but they have
yet to hear directly from the NCAA regarding their Braves nickname.
School officials said their school is sensitive to both the NCAA’s
intentions and to the American Indians, but the very name of Chowan
College is Indian. The campus, with about 800 students, is located
between the Chowan and Meherrin Rivers in Northeastern North Carolina,
and both rivers are named for Indian tribes.
Producers of “Left Behind: World at War” are enlisting churches instead
of movie theatres to premier the end times film Oct. 21. The producers
hope their movie will provide churches with an enormous opportunity for
outreach into their local communities. Peter Lalonde, CEO of
Cloud Ten Pictures that produced the movie, said a reason for the
church release is to allow pastors at least 10 minutes after the film
is shown to speak directly to the audience about Christ. In addition to
churches, the film also will be shown in prisons beginning Nov. 18.
Churches still have time to purchase the license to show the latest
Left Behind film and may learn more by visiting
www.leftbehind-worldatwar.com/churchtheatricalrelease.
Despite decades of court rulings to the contrary, a majority of
Americans say they believe religion should have a larger role in the
nation’s public schools and that organized voluntary prayer should be
allowed, a new Gallup poll indicates. The poll of 1,001 American adults
found that 60 percent of adults believe religion has “too little of a
presence” in public schools and that 76 percent favor amending the U.S.
Constitution to allow voluntary prayer in schools. The Gallup poll
indicates 27 percent of Americans say religion has about the right
amount of presence in public schools, while 11 percent say it has too
much. Twenty-three percent oppose a constitutional amendment to allow
voluntary prayer in public schools. The number of people in favor of an
amendment has held mostly steady for more than two decades – from 81
percent in 1983 to 78 percent now. Still, Americans prefer a moment of
silence. By a 69 percent to 23 percent margin, adults say that if given
a choice, they would prefer a “moment of silence for contemplation or
silent prayer” in their local schools instead of a “spoken prayer.”
Minnesota has become the second state to require abortion doctors to
offer to women considering a late-term abortion a form of pain relief
for their unborn child. Gov. Tim Pawlenty signed the Unborn Child Pain
Prevention Act into law in July, enabling Minnesota to join Arkansas as
the only states with such a law,. The measure applies to women who are
more than 20 weeks into their pregnancy, providing information on the
pain experienced by an unborn baby of that age during an abortion and
offering anesthesia if they decide to undergo the procedure. Similar
federal legislation has been introduced in Congress. The bill is the
Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act (S. 51 and H.R. 356).
For the fourth consecutive year, the President George Bush
administration has refused to forward money to a controversial United
Nations family planning fund linked to support of China’s coercive
population control program. The State Department announced that $34
million designated by Congress for the U.N. Population Fund would be
withheld this year. As it has each year since 2002, the department
determined that contributions to the organization would violate the
1985 Kemp-Kasten amendment, which prohibits family planning money from
going to any entity that, as determined by the president, “supports or
participates in the management of a program of coercive abortion or
involuntary sterilization.” Officials in many parts of China have
practiced a forced population control program for about 25 years in an
attempt to curb the birth rate in the world’s most populous country. A
law codifying the policy throughout China went into effect in 2002. The
policy limits couples in urban areas to one child and those in rural
areas to two, if the first is a girl. The program has been marked by
coercive sterilization and abortion – and infanticide, especially of
females, also has been reported.
Aspiring screenwriters who create movies with storylines that help
increase man’s love for and understanding of God have been invited to
enter their work in a new contest where the top three winners will
receive prizes totaling $50,000 and the chance to have Hollywood
executives notice their scripts. The Templeton Foundation and the
Christian Film & Television Commission recently announced the
contest and have set an early entry deadline for Nov. 25 and a late
deadline Jan. 6. First place for the John Templeton Foundation Kairos
Prize for Spiritually Uplifting Screenplays is worth $25,000, and
runner-up awards will be $15,000 and $10,000 each. “We hope the
establishment of the Kairos Prize will encourage talented young
screenwriters with new ideas and a great respect for the biblical faith
to move forward on that project they have in their mind and to inundate
Hollywood with moral, inspirational movies,” a foundation spokesperson
said. For more information, visit www.kairosprize.com.
A recent Barna Research Group study of religious trends in the nation’s
86 largest metropolitan areas and 27 most-populous states found that:
• Involvement in adult small groups is most prolific in Shreveport.
• The market with the highest percentage of adults who consider
themselves Baptist is Shreveport. Meanwhile, the market with the
highest percentage that claims allegiance to the Roman Catholic church
is Baton Rouge.
• Personal evangelism efforts were most common in two states – Alabama and Louisiana.
• Atheists and agnostics were hardest to find in Missouri and Louisiana.