c. 2003 Religion News Service

Reform Movement Urges Members to Spend 10 Minutes Daily with Torah

(RNS) The Reform Jewish movement is gearing up for a small program with a big goal _ to get Jews to spend a mere 10 minutes a day studying the Torah.

Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie, president of the newly renamed Union for Reform Judaism announced the “Ten Minutes of Torah” program at the movement’s recent biennial convention in Minneapolis.

The program, which will begin Nov. 24, will be free of charge to every member of a Reform congregation, and center on an e-mail delivered each business day on the Torah and related Jewish themes.

Each Monday, readers will get commentary on that week’s Torah portion. The other four days of the week, the e-mails will concern topics like social action, Israel, ethics and the “Jewish world,” and include items like calls to action, announcements of programs, updates on Reform congregations in Israel and links to news clippings or comments by notable Jews.

The URJ is hoping that the variety of topics will help Reform Jews, many of whom do not engage in daily Jewish study, see the Torah not as an intimidating text, but as a relevant and enlightening connection to their daily lives.

“We’re looking at the Torah in the broad sense of Torah, the sense that Torah infuses everything we do,” said Emily Grotta, director of communications for the URJ.

Yoffie, who announced the program in his address to the biennial convention, said everyone should be able to find 10 minutes a day to devote to something spiritual.

“If we make time to answer our cell phones a dozen times a day and to check our e-mail five times an hour, surely we can find 10 minutes to contemplate sacred words that nourish the soul,” he told the 4,500 people in attendance.

_ Holly Lebowitz Rossi

North Carolina’s Moderate Baptists Looking to Chart More Independent Way

RALEIGH, N.C. _ After nine straight years of conservative victories within the (Southern) Baptist State Convention of North Carolina, moderates left this week’s (Nov. 10-12) annual meeting determined to chart a more independent course.

Exactly what that course will look like was unclear after the meeting, which ended Wednesday in Winston-Salem. Moderate leaders said they would likely convene a meeting of like-minded congregations to consider their options. At the very least, moderates said they would begin to disengage financially from the state convention. There was little or no talk of forming a parallel convention as some other states have done.

The Rev. David Horton, the newly elected president of the convention, and a conservative pastor from Greensboro, called for unity, but it did not appear moderates were listening any more.

“The messengers gathered in Winston-Salem this week strongly believe the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina should be an appendage of the Southern Baptist Convention,” said the Rev. David Hughes, a moderate pastor from Winston-Salem who lost a bid for the presidency. “It was a vote down party line. It almost didn’t matter who was running.”

Hughes, who proposed reducing by 2 percent the amount of money the convention forwards to the Southern Baptist Convention, received only 40 percent of the vote, or 1,553 to Horton’s 2,280.

The convention also elected Phyllis Foy, a laywoman from Mooresville as first vice president, and the Rev. Brian Davis of East Flat Rock as second vice president. All three winners were endorsed by a state group called Conservative Carolina Baptists.

In other business, the state convention, overwhelmingly defeated a motion to reconsider the expulsion of a Concord church that admitted two gay men as members without repudiating their “lifestyles.”

The Rev. William Sanderson, the president of Conservative Carolina Baptists, said there was still room for moderates, though, clearly, conservatives were now ascendant.

“We didn’t leave when they were in charge,” said Sanderson. “Now they’re saying there’s no place for them.”

The continuing feud between moderates and conservatives began two decades ago within the Southern Baptist Convention and is now unfolding on the state convention level. In North Carolina, more than 300 churches regularly contribute to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, a rival group to the Southern Baptist Convention. A few dozen have formally cut all ties with the SBC, which in recent years called on wives to submit to their husbands’ leadership and declared that only men can serve as senior pastors.

Hughes said that after emotions settle, a meeting of those churches will be called.

“What was helpful this week is that we got clarity,” Hughes said. “That will help moderates move forward instead of staying in a state of suspended animation.”

_ Yonat Shimron

Gay Church Leaders Perplexed by Bush’s Anniversary Letter

WASHINGTON (RNS) Leaders of a predominantly gay denomination say they are perplexed by a congratulatory letter sent by President Bush the same week he was publicly opposing gay marriage.

Officials from Metropolitan Community Churches received a congratulations letter on the 35th anniversary of their flagship congregation in Los Angeles. The denomination was founded in 1968 as a haven for gay Christians, and now claims 43,000 members.

The letter was dated Oct. 14, during the same week Bush proclaimed as “Marriage Protection Week” to oppose gay marriage. The MCC named the same week “Marriage Equality Week” to support gay marriage.

“By encouraging the celebration of faith and sharing God’s love and boundless mercy, churches like yours put hope in people’s hearts and a sense of purpose in their lives,” the Bush letter said, according to a copy provided by MCC.

“This milestone provides an opportunity to reflect on your years of service and to rejoice in God’s faithfulness to your congregation.”

The Rev. Troy Perry, founder and moderator of the church, said Bush was sending “a very mixed message” to a denomination that performs 6,000 same-sex weddings each year.

The Rev. Neil Thomas, senior pastor of the Los Angeles church, was equally perplexed. “How does one denounce the right of gays and lesbians … and suggest they are incapable of having healthy marriages in one moment, and in the next rejoice in God’s faithfulness to a gay and lesbian congregation that performs such same-sex marriages?”

Conservative activists at the Family Research Council, meanwhile, said the letter “looks troubling” and have asked the White House for an explanation. A White House spokeswoman was not immediately available for comment.

_ Kevin Eckstrom

Pope Say Consumerism Helps to Spread Depression

VATICAN CITY (RNS) Pope John Paul II warned Friday (Nov. 14) that a consumerist society preoccupied with material well-being has helped to make depression the most common psychiatric disease in the Western world.

Addressing participants in a conference on depression, the Roman Catholic pontiff offered the experience of religious faith as a valid treatment for the depressed because it “opens them to hope and presses them to choose life.”

The pope recommended meditating on the Psalms, reciting the Rosary and taking part in the Eucharist as avenues of escape from depression, which he said is “always a spiritual trial.”

More than 600 experts from the psychiatric, health care and religious worlds are attending the three-day (Nov.13-15) international conference organized by the Pontifical Council for Pastoral Health Care.

“The spread of depressive states has become worrying,” the pope told them at a Vatican audience. “They reveal human, psychological and spiritual fragility that at least in part are induced by society.”

It is important, he said, to recognize that depression can be a response to messages of the media that “exalt consumerism, the immediate satisfaction of desires and the race to an ever better material well-being.”

Depressed people need to regain “self esteem, faith in their own capacity, interest in the future and the will to live,” John Paul said. They need to be part of “a community of faith and life in which they can feel themselves welcomed, understood, sustained and, in a word, worthy of loving and being loved.”

“On the spiritual route,” he said, “reading and meditating on the Psalms, in which the sacred author expresses his joy and anguish in prayer, can be of great help. Reciting the Rosary permits finding in Mary a loving mother, who teaches how to live in Christ. Taking part in the Eucharist is a source of interior peace both through the effect of the word and the bread of life and through becoming part of an ecclesial community.”

John Paul said the family, schools, youth movements and parish associations have roles to play in preventing the disease.

“The phenomenon of depression tells the church and all of society how important it is to offer to people, and especially to the young, models and experiences that help them to grow on the human, psychological, moral and spiritual plane,” the pope said.

_ Peggy Polk

Church of Scotland Official Urges Bush to Explain Iraq Mission

LONDON (RNS) A leading member of the Church of Scotland has welcomed the visit to Britain next week by President George Bush on the grounds it gives the U.S. president an opportunity to give a convincing explanation of the reasons for war against Iraq _ “something our own prime minister (Tony Blair) has so far failed to do and seems now to wish to avoid.”

Recalling the views expressed by this year’s general assembly on the issue, the convener of the Kirk’s Church and Nation Committee, the Rev. Alan McDonald, said the denomination had stressed the central role the United Nations ought to have had and ought still to have in dealing with the situation in Iraq.

“Therefore the committee welcomes President Bush’s visit as the chance for him to demonstrate the kind of international cooperation his administration has found so difficult on a whole range of issues,” he said.

The committee also welcomed the president’s visit “so that he and the American media representatives who will accompany him may have the chance more closely to listen to the views of the people of the United Kingdom.”

Citing Blair’s recent statement that the task now is not to argue about what had been but to work for the future, McDonald said: “We believe a just and peaceful future can only be reached by a truthful confrontation and acknowledgement of the past.”

_ Robert Nowell

Herbert Rosedale, President of Cult Watchdog Group, Dead at 71

(RNS) Herbert Rosedale, who served as president of the cult watchdog group American Family Foundation, died Nov. 4. He was 71.

Rosedale had suffered from cancer, the organization said.

The Manhattan lawyer became involved in cult issues in the late 1970s, assisting neighbors concerned about the Unification Church’s attempt to purchase property in Chappaqua, N.Y., for a training camp. It marked the first of his pro bono legal services over a quarter century.

Since 1998, as president of the foundation, Rosedale presented or advised clergy, families and others in legal suits related to cult activity.

The Bronx, N.Y., native was a guest lecturer and served as counsel for the New York City Jewish Community Relations Council Task Force on Cults and Missionaries and the New York Interfaith Coalition of Concern About Cults.

_ Adelle M. Banks

Quote of the Day: Parvina Nadjibulla, Methodist Global Ministries Specialist

(RNS) “People of faith are often not loud enough.”

_ Parvina Nadjibulla, Resources Center specialist in the Women’s Division of the General Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church, commenting on the need for churches and international organizations to press for human rights. She spoke Monday (Nov. 10) during the World Council of Churches’ advocacy week in New York.

DEA END RNS