c. 1996 Religion News Service
Atlanta pastor chosen Church of God general overseer
(RNS) Church of God leaders, moving on from a dispute with their ousted top official, Thursday (Aug. 8) selected the pastor of a prominent Atlanta church as their new general overseer.
The Rev. Paul L. Walker, 64, senior pastor of Mount Paran Church of God in Atlanta, has been chosen to succeed Robert White, who was accused of insubordination by the church’s governing council because he reportedly kept $40,000 in profits from religious books he had written rather than turning the money over to the denomination. After an 11-week investigation, White was ousted in July.
Walker was selected by the 3,500-member general council, which gave him a standing ovation at the denomination’s 66th General Assembly in Indianapolis. The general council is composed of the ordained ministers in attendance at the biennial session.”I stand before you overwhelmed,”said Walker, who has served 36 years as pastor of the Atlanta church. The Mount Paran congregation is regarded as one of the denomination’s most influential churches.”I stand before you overwhelmed by the responsibility it entails,”he said.”I stand before you overwhelmed by the accountability to God.” The general council’s nomination is expected to be ratified by the General Assembly on Saturday.
The 4 million-member church is one of the world’s oldest Pentecostal denominations. It has congregations in 130 nations.
Burned churches are getting grants to help rebuild
(RNS) More money is on its way to mostly black, Southern churches that have been victims of arson.
Officials of the National Council of Churches and the Southern Baptist Convention have each announced additional disbursements of donations to help churches that have lost sanctuaries and other property to fires.
The National Council of Churches has made a second round of grants totaling nearly $500,000 to help churches that are trying to rebuild. Recipients include Central Grove Missionary Baptist Church, Kossuth, Miss.; Mount Pleasant Missionary Baptist Church, Kossuth, Miss.; Salem Baptist Church, Fruitland, Tenn.; New Liberty Baptist Church, Tyler, Ala.; and Matthews-Murkland Presbyterian Church, Charlotte, N.C.
Central Grove Missionary Baptist Church also will receive an emergency grant of $1,445 for 75 folding chairs. The church has only eight lawn chairs in the donated temporary structure where congregants are worshiping until their church can be rebuilt.
The NCC, an ecumenical organization of 33 Protestant and Orthodox denominations, has allocated a total of $1.4 million in grants to help 14 churches.
In addition, the Southern Baptist Convention released $50,000 from a special fund it established to help churches that have been victims of arson. Southern Baptists have now distributed a total of more than $293,000 to 14 state Baptist conventions, whose officials must then give the money to affected churches in their regions.
Other organizations are still collecting money or determining how to distribute contributions.
The Congress of National Black Churches, which recently received a $100,000 donation from the Anti-Defamation League and the National Urban League, is assessing which churches have the greatest need for assistance, said Juliette Davis, director of public relations for the Washington-based group, which represents eight historically black denominations.
The Christian Coalition has collected $175,000 from two”Racial Reconciliation Sundays”in July and is hoping to meet its goal of $500,000 to $1 million. The Coalition is waiting to receive money pledged from more than 700 congregations, said the Rev. Earl Jackson, the group’s national liaison for urban development.”Some of those pledges are very, very substantial,”he said.”Many of them are in the thousands of dollars.”
Update: Hume calls for new law after abortion, embryo flaps
(RNS) In the wake of bitter moral controversies in Great Britain involving abortion and the destruction of frozen embryos, Cardinal Basil Hume called Thursday (Aug. 8) for changes in British law to better protect unborn human life.
Hume, in a statement, said the nation had reached a”moral cul-de-sac”from which there was no satisfactory way out in its acceptance of abortion and in vitro fertilization as a means of treating infertility.
The cardinal’s comments were prompted by the worldwide attention focused on two ethical debates surrounding the beginning of life: a British law that required the destruction of some 3,300 frozen embryos that had remained unclaimed by their creators after five years, and reports that a woman pregnant with twins sought an abortion because she could not afford to raise both children.”I would urge that alternative and morally acceptable methods of treating human infertility be investigated, funded and pursued, so that (in vitro fertilization) with its low success rate becomes recognized as replaceable,”Hume said in his statement.”At the very least, there should now be an end to the creation and freezing of new spare embryos,”Hume said.
Britain is still faced with the dilemma of what to do with existing”spare”frozen embryos, Hume said, and all suggestions for dealing with them are fraught with moral difficulties.”On balance I would myself argue that the `least worst’ solution is to allow such embryos to die,”Hume said.”It is the deplorable result of a bad law and a profligate technique,”the cardinal added.
Hume ruled out as”morally unacceptable”the idea of finding couples prepared to”adopt”spare embryos to be implanted in a woman’s womb, as one Vatican official recently suggested. Hume said the proposal raises substantial practical difficulties and theological problems.
On the abortion issue, Hume said the fact that present abortion law allowed the destruction of one of a pair of healthy fetuses _ a case brought to light by a newspaper interview with the doctor involved _ showed how little protection was available for the unborn.”The first and most fundamental duty of any society is to protect human life,”said Cardinal Hume.”The law in this country fails to do this and it must be changed.” The Vatican, meanwhile, said the twin controversy was another example of the”culture of death”at work in society.”Behind and with her (the mother) stands a cohesive, indulging and permissive front which thinks it is right and convenient to kill a child already conceived … only because it could be a burden for a single mother,”the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano said in an editorial.
Reducing the number of fetuses for women carrying twins or triplets is a common but seldom discussed problem in the United States as well, the Associated Press reported.
The procedure is called selective reduction or fetal reduction.”We probably are doing an average of one to two a week,”said Dr. Norman Ginsberg, a fertility expert at Chicago’s Illinois Masonic Medical Center.
The procedure was initially used to abort fetuses with genetic defects, but in recent years its use has increased with the rising number of in vitro fertilization pregnancies. In vitro fertilization typically involves implanting several embryos in the womb in hopes that at least one will result in a pregnancy. If a multiple pregnancy occurs, extraneous fetuses may be destroyed.
Chilean Lutheran leader quits amid money questions
(RNS) The U.S.-born president of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Chile (IELCH) has quit under pressure from Chilean church officials and also has resigned from the Lutheran ministry amid an investigation of his misuse of church funds, the Chilean church has announced.
According to a statement from the denomination, William Gorski’s resignation was prompted by”the lack of transparency (openness) in his work, the concealment of important information and the deliberate misinformation”he gave church officials.
The statement said Gorski has acknowledged”administrative irregularities which he committed as president of the church.” Four days before demanding the resignation, a suspicious fire at the denomination’s headquarters destroyed the financial records of the church, the statement said.
Gorski was serving in Chile as a missionary of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), the 5.2 million-member denomination headquartered in Chicago. He was also fired as an ELCA missionary and on July 17 resigned as a pastor of the ELCA. “Based on … financial information that came from the ELCA … serious discrepancies were discovered that led us to suspect the commission of grave crimes that should be investigated by Chilean”secular authorities, the statement said.
No dollar figure was placed on the amount of funds Gorski is believed to have misused.
Gorski, while no longer a pastor or missionary, remains an employee of the ELCA’s Division for Global Mission and will remain in Chile to cooperate with church and civil authorities investigating the scope of the”irregularities,”church officials said.
Ordained in 1976, Gorski had been a missionary to Chile since 1978. He was elected president of the Chilean church in 1986.
Missionary killed in Alaska air crash
(RNS) Thomas Liederbach, a pilot for a group called Lutheran Missionary and Pilots, was killed Monday (Aug. 5) while delivering Bibles to a remote northwestern Alaskan village, the Associated Press reported.
Liederbach, a pilot with 40 years of flying service, was killed when his airplane went down about 30 miles north of Nome.
AP said the crash was detected when the Alaska National Guard picked up an emergency signal from the mountains north of Nome.
Quote of the day: The Rev. James A. Wiseman, chairman of the department of theology at The Catholic University of America, on life on Mars.
(RNS) On Tuesday (Aug. 6) scientists announced that their study of an ancient meteorite believed to have fallen to Earth from Mars suggests the possibility of past life on Mars. The Rev. James A. Wiseman, chairman of the department of theology at The Catholic University of America, in a statement Thursday (Aug. 8), praised the scientists for their caution. He said the discovery should pose no problem for people of faith:”Theologically, I see no problem one way or the other. Personally, I have always suspected that there are forms of life elsewhere in this immense universe, in which planet Earth is almost infinitesimally small compared to the whole cosmos, some of which is beyond reach of our most powerful telescopes. If theologians, or theists in general, take seriously what is meant by the phrase `an omnipotent God,’ it should not be surprising at all if signs of this Creator and Life-giver’s power were to be found throughout the universe.”
MJP END RNS
