c. 2006 Religion News Service

Carter Leads Baptists in Issuing New `Covenant’

(RNS) Former President Jimmy Carter, the nation’s most famous ex-Southern Baptist, has forged a “Baptist Covenant” with Baptist groups that do not embrace Southern Baptists’ conservative tilt.

Carter met with 17 Baptist leaders for four hours at the Carter Center in Atlanta on Monday (April 10) and urged the various churches to overcome racial, cultural and geographic differences to form a “genuine prophetic Baptist voice in these complex times.”

“The most common opinion about Baptists is we cannot get along together,” Carter said in a statement, adding that he has been “grieved by the divisions” within the 16 million-member Southern Baptist Convention.

Carter, a Sunday School teacher at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Ga., severed his ties with the Southern Baptist Convention in 2000. He has since called for greater cooperation among other Baptist groups.

“We should reach out to other traditional, or moderate, Baptists and form a partnership that would greatly strengthen what we do,” Carter said in a 2001 speech. “If there are other Baptists who don’t respond, forget them. Forget them, and move on as Christians and as Baptists, just following Jesus.”

The “North American Baptist Covenant” issued after this week’s meeting was signed by representatives of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, Canadian Baptist Ministries, American Baptist Churches USA and historically black Baptist churches including the National Baptist Convention USA Inc. and the National Baptist Convention of America, among others.

“(Participants) reaffirmed their commitment to traditional Baptist values, including sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ and its implications for public and private morality,” the statement said.

“They specifically committed themselves to their obligations as Christians to promote peace with justice, to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, care for the sick and the marginalized, welcome the strangers among us and promote religious liberty and respect for religious diversity.”

The group also voiced support for the Baptist World Alliance, a global umbrella group representing 80 million Baptist Christians. The Southern Baptist Convention withdrew its membership from the global alliance in 2004, citing a perceived “leftward drift” in the organization.

_ Kevin Eckstrom

United Methodist Church Resumes Recruitment of Missionaries

(RNS) The United Methodist Church is again looking for new missionaries, three years after drastic budget cuts forced the denomination to suspend its recruiting program.

The church is searching for at least 20 new missionaries over the next two years to serve in countries throughout the world, including a first ever mission in Thailand.

“This is a real shot in the arm for the organization,” said the Rev. Elliott Wright, a church spokesman, “to go back to serving a global community. And now we are looking for new talent.”

“The Next Missionary May be You” program is looking for missionaries to serve in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East for a period of three years. Currently, the church’s Board of Global Ministries provides full support to 229 missionaries worldwide, and partial backing to 120 more. In order to serve as a missionary, candidates must be Christian, although not necessarily, Methodist, and the holder of a bachelor’s degree.

In 2002 and 2003, the church felt the sting of a falling stock market and declining investments. Many parishioners were laid off and out of work, forcing the denomination to make cuts totaling $12 million.

Wright says that 50 percent of the church’s revenue had come from stock market returns at that time, but that giving never decreased.

Since that time, Wright says, the church has reallocated funds to support the international program, which has lost some members to retirement and attrition.

“We want to get to the place where we can have a sustainable level numerically, to replace and find new personnel in a timely manner,” Wright says. “But it always grows slowly.”

_ Nate Herpich

British Scientific Academy Rejects Creationism, Intelligent Design

LONDON (RNS) Britain’s top scientific academy says there is no place in the nation’s schools for the teaching of creationism, the Bible-based version of the origins of life on earth, or its offshoot theory of “intelligent design.”

The Royal Society, the prestigious national academy of science, insisted in a Tuesday (April 11) statement that “young people are poorly served by deliberate attempts to withhold, distort or misrepresent scientific knowledge and understanding in order to promote particular religious beliefs.”

An education department spokesman in Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government said flatly that neither creationism nor intelligent design, which claims that nature is so complex that only an intelligent force could have created it, is taught in British schools.

But the scientists’ broadside appeared aimed at a resurgence in creationist thinking, particularly in three academies run by the Emmanuel Foundation, a private organization in northeast England backed by multi-millionaire car dealer and Christian evangelist Peter Vardy.

The foundation’s director of schools, Nigel McQuoid, is a literal believer in the biblical account of God’s creation of the earth in six days.

In its toughest statement yet on the issue, the Royal Society demanded that the government make sure that students in state-maintained schools and academies “are not taught that the scientific evidence supports creationism and intelligent design in the way that it supports evolution.”

“The theory of evolution is supported by the weight of evidence,” it said. “The theory of intelligent design is not.”

Professor David Read, the society’s vice president, said the scientists “felt that it would be timely to publish a clear statement on creationism and intelligent design as there continues to be controversy about them in the U.K. and other countries,” particularly the United States.

He said the Royal Society “fully supports questioning and debate in science lessons, as long as it is not designed to undermine young people’s confidence in the value of scientific evidence.”

_ Al Webb

German Catholics Protest MTV Plans for `Popetown’ Cartoon

(RNS) A television cartoon about a senile pope, sexy nuns and a trio of criminal cardinals conspiring to become the world’s richest people has caused widespread protests in Germany before it is even aired.

Although “Popetown” is not set to premiere on MTV until May 3, a trailer in which Jesus Christ has climbed down from the cross to watch TV _ still with his crown of thorns and a slogan (“Don’t just hang around. Have a laugh.”) in the background _ has already generated an intense backlash from German Catholics.

At the urging of the Central Committee for German Catholics, many Germans have e-mailed protests to MTV. Additionally, Stern magazine reported Tuesday (April 11) that dioceses in heavily-Catholic southern Germany are considering a lawsuit against MTV for disturbing the public peace.

MTV pulled the ad after the German Bishop’s Conference appealed to the German Advertising Board. It still plans to air the show.

Stefan Vesper, general secretary of the central committee said the issue is not just the offensive nature of the show. “The nature of the advertisement and its placement during the Easter season is intolerable,” he told the Berliner newspaper on Tuesday.

Joachim Herrmann, the head of the Christian Socialist Union political party in Bavaria also criticized the advertisement as “especially tasteless” in the Tagesspiegel (Daily Mirror) and questioned whether MTV would also air such a cartoon if it focused on the life of an imam.

In the show, the character Father Nicholas has to carry out the orders of a childlike pope who likes to travel by pogo stick. Meanwhile, a group of cardinals devises new money making schemes, including the sale of orphans into slavery.

The British cartoon was originally aired on BBC in 2004 until Catholic protests forced its withdrawal. A New Zealand attempt to air the show in 2005 also ended after Catholic protests.

_ Niels Sorrells

Quote of the Day: Richard Thompson, president of the Thomas More Law Center

(RNS) “(The ACLU and the courts are) basically cleansing America of religion and particularly Christianity. It’s almost like a genocide. It’s a sophisticated genocide.”

_ Richard Thompson, president of the Michigan-based Thomas More Law Center, commenting for The Toledo Blade on his group’s defense last year of teaching intelligent design in Dover, Pa., classrooms as an alternative to evolution. In December, a federal judge ruled that inserting intelligent design into Dover’s science curriculum violates the constitutional separation of church and state.

MO/RB END RNS