Asia/Pacific Updates

God as Eccentric Host

God is the comic shepherd who gets more of a kick out of that one lost sheep once he finds it again than out of the ninety and nine who have the good sense not to get lost in the first place. God is the eccentric host who, when the country-club crowd all turn out to have other things more important to do than come live it up with him, goes out into the skid rows and soup kitchens and charity wards and brings home a freak show. The man with no legs who sells shoelaces at the corner. The old woman in the moth-eathen fur coat who makes her daily rounds of the garbage cans. The old wino with his pint in a brown paper bag. The pusher, the whore, the village idiot who stands at the blinker light waving his hand as the cars go by. They are seated at the damask-laid table in the great hall. The candles are all lit and the champagne glasses filled. At a sign from the host, the musicians in their gallery strike up "Amazing Grace."

        -- Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy & Fairy Tale

God Revealed

God revealed is God known. He is not so completely known that he can be predicted. He is not known so thoroughly that there is no more to be known, so that we can go on now to the next subject. Still, he is known and not unknown, rational and not irrantional, orderly and not disorderly, hierarchichal and not anarchic.

      -- Eugene Peterson, Reversed Thunder

The Spiritual Beauty of Christ

The spiritual beauty of Christ is Christ-in-action -- Christ loving, and Christ touching lepers, and Christ blessing children, and healing the crippled, and raising the dead, and commanding demons, and teaching with unrivaled authority, and silencing the skeptics, and rebuking his disciples, and predicting the details of his death, and setting his face like a flint toward Jerusalem, and weeping over the city, and silent before his accusers, and meekly sovereign over Pilate ("You would have no authority over me unless it had been given you from above," John 19:11), and crucified, and praying for his enemies, and forgiving a thief, and caring for his mother while in agony, and giving up his spirit in death, and rising from the dead -- "No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again" (John 10:18). Such is the glory of Christ.

            - John Piper, God is the Gospel

Urgent Prayer for Orissa

Just received from our missionaries in India:

I have had a call from our PHC Pastor Mohan Digal in a 'refugee camp in Orissa' saying he and his brother Stephenson are on the radical Hindus' 'hit list' to be killed. Then he said in the newspaper 'SANWAD' thay announced that both of them 'had committed suicide'. Even though they are in a so called protected camp, their lives are in danger. It seems most of the Christian ministry staff are the target for assasanation. We must lift them up in our intercessory prayers. The violence is spreading, so do keep all of us in your prayers.

India Persecution Continues

India's north-eastern state Orissa continues to be in the grip of gory anti-Christian riots. Scores of Christians, including some nuns, have been burnt alive. An estimated 4000 homes and 115 churches have been destroyed in the region. Even Christian orphanages have not been spared. 

About 20,000 people have been displaced, most of them huddled into 14 squalid government-run camps across Kandhamal. Thousands remain missing or hiding in the jungles.

The violence has recently spread to Mangalore, where churches and prayer halls have been attacked by Hindu extremists. Most of the shops, businesses and schools in the area have been closed for reasons of safety.

For more information, go here.

An Unusual Work

George Whitefield (1714 – 1770): God’s Unusual Evangelist George Whitefield looked out over a sea of faces darkened by coal dust from the pits. He saw “white gutters made by their tears, which plentifully ran down their black cheeks.” It was late winter 1739, the third day that Whitefield had preached the gospel to this unlikely crowd, known for their godlessness. These men (estimated at twenty thousand) were a terror when provoked, and the preacher rightly feared they might attack him. Still, he was confident of God’s providence, and so he preached on—with great effect.   To a significant degree the Church had lost contact with the neighborhood where the poorest people lived and worked. The clergy of the day held little hope for their conversion to Christ and for the moral reform of their communities, but Whitefield was determined to try. When he saw that the area God had laid upon his heart had no schools or churches, he took to the outdoors.   When God has an unusual work to do, He raises up unusual men. George Whitefield was such a man. His parents owned an inn, and his earliest years were spent in its coarse and ungodly environment. He was not a man of great stature, and he had a squint, which his enemies in later life exploited with the nickname, “Dr. Squintum.” Yet from his unpromising background, he went up  to Pembroke College at the University of Oxford and was later ordained as an Anglican clergyman. He would emerge from its rarified confines as an evangelist for people at all levels of society.   Whitefield is a prime example of anointed service outside the minister’s comfort zone. Ignoring physical danger and the threat of “professional suicide,” he was faithful to God’s calling—and God used him mightily to stoke the fires of the Great Awakening. Whitefield took great risks and enjoyed great manifestations of God’s power.      Many pastors pray for Awakening in this day. To this end, they might well follow Whitefield in the prayerful question, “Lord, is there an unusual work for me to do?”       - from The Kairos Journal

Myanmar Disaster Relief Update

Here is an update from our national leader on the relief efforts for the cyclone victims in Myanmar:

As I reported to you earlier about the damages of our 11 church buildings in cyclone area, 2 churches are being rebuilt and completed through your financial help. But still praying for the 9 church rebuildings.

To support and help food and clothing for the suffering of our people your financial support made their survival for the last two months.

Altogether, the cyclone affected members of our people are 87 families and need to be supported their food for the next one year. Thank you for you and our people in IPHC are a part of this suffering.

See the photo album at left for pictures of relief work and rebuilding.

To give to the disaster relief effort, go here.

India Update: Floods and Persecution

These updates just in from our missionary Hobert Howard in India:

"The Monsoon is not as active as before, but is still alive. Before the end of the month, we expect two more hard spells of rain, lasting several days each. Sometimes these 'Latter Rains' are the hardest and most damaging of the whole 3 month Monsoon. At least 2 1/2 million people in Bihar, Jharkhand and Nepal are badly affected by the devastating flooding. It seems it is unprecedented, in living memory. 
Supt. Reuel Marandi has told me quite a number of our people have been the victims of the floods.  Many of their mud houses have collapsed." 

"The terrible persecution of Christians in Orissa continues in a major way. Our 3 Digal Pastors there report our people have all fled their homes and so far as is known all of their homes have either been burned, damaged or vandalized. They cannot go to even see. They are still in the jungle with about 120 believers. We are arranging some monetary help. Pray for them. An appeal from church leaders has been made to the Prime Minister and Supreme Court to stop the terrible violence unleashed by radical Hindus against the Christians."  

See the page at right for details of specific incidents of persecution.

Is Doctrine Dull?

"We may call Christian doctrine exhilarating, or we may call it devastating; we may call it revelation, or we may call it rubbish; but if we call it dull, the words have no meaning at all. That God should play the tyranny over man is a dismal story of unrelieved oppression; that man should play the tyrant over man is the usual dreary record of human futility; but that man should play the tyrant over God and find Him a better Man that himself is an astonishing drama indeed. Any journalist, hearing of it for the first time, would recognize it as news; those who did hear it for the first time actually called it news, and good news at that; though we are likely to forget that the word Gospel ever meant anything so sensational.

 

"It is the dogma that is the drama—not beautiful phrases, nor comforting sentiments, nor vague aspirations to loving-kindness and uplift, nor the promise of something nice after death—but the terrifying assertion that the same God who made the world, lived in the world and passed through the grave and gate of death. Show that to the heathen, and they may not believe it; but at least they may realize that here is something that man might be glad to believe."

                                                                                -- Dorothy Sayers

Apostolic Office

"Apostolic office is never the taking of some official powers that are then at the disposal of the office-bearer. Rather, it is being taken into the service of the Word, the office of testifying to something with which one has been entrusted and which stands above its bearer; so that he fades into the background and is just a voice that enables the word to be heard in the world." -- Joseph Ratzinger