WHF helping desperate Pakistani families
About 600 families in Pakistan’s Sindh province are receiving desperately needed food supplies, thanks to the generosity of Christians who have donated to the Southern Baptist World Hunger Fund. Bags of staple foods are being assembled by teams of disaster relief volunteers trained by Baptist Global Response, an international relief and development organization, with a total of $12,500 from the World Hunger Fund, said Francis Horton, who with his wife Angie directs BGR work in South Asia. For $25 per family, a food bag contains 44 pounds of flour, 12 pounds of rice, along with oil, lentils, spices, sugar, tea and soap.
Task force calls for 50-50 Ky./SBC funding
After eight months of discussions, the Kentucky Great Commission Task Force has released its report. Among the report’s four recommendations: a call for the Kentucky Baptist Convention’s mission board to move to a reallocation of Cooperative Program funds that results in a 50 percent split of CP receipts (after shared administrative expenses) between the KBC and the Southern Baptist Convention by 2017-18. The report will be voted on by KBC messengers at the Nov. 16 annual meeting in Lexington. Recommendation No. 2, described by task force chairman Hershael York as “the one that’ll certainly get the most discussion,” calls for the KBC to start by moving to a 53.28/46.72 percentage allocation split between the KBC and SBC, respectively, for the 2011-12 Cooperative Program budget.
‘Big Day’ to focus on personal evangelism
Southern Baptist churches have an opportunity to set aside one “Big Day” this fall to focus on the importance of every individual being prepared to share their faith. Also known as Soul-Winning Commitment Day, the event can be customized with a variety of training opportunities, sermon ideas and other tools to reflect the needs of individual churches, according to Dick Church, church evangelism and resource coordinator for the North American Mission Board’s personal evangelism team. The mission board sponsors the annual emphasis, which has a suggested date this year of Oct. 3. All resources can be downloaded free at www.thebigday.org.
Protect religious hiring rights, group urges
Southern Baptist church-state specialist Richard Land and 10 Baptist college presidents joined other American religious leaders Aug. 25 in urging Congress to protect the hiring rights of faith-based organizations that receive federal grants. The request came only two days after a federal appeals court delivered an important victory for the hiring practices of federally funded religious organizations. The letter – with 108 signers, including heads of many of the country’s most prominent Christian organizations – went to all the members of the Senate and House of Representatives. It asked them to resist attempts to amend federal law to prevent religious groups that receive government funds from making employment decisions based on their faith.
Texas pastors call for immigration overhaul
Several Houston-area Southern Baptist pastors are among the signers of a declaration calling for secure borders and a compassionate and just overhaul of the federal immigration system. The Houston-based U.S. Pastor Council’s “Pastors’ Declaration on Border Security and Immigration Reform” calls for “principled leadership and the laying aside of partisan politics” to address illegal immigration and border security “rapidly, justly and humanely with equal regard” to the law and to the “God-given value of every individual.” The declaration calls for the crisis to be addressed in three successive steps: border security, immigration system reform, and a “just process to legal status for specified illegal immigrants.” As of Aug. 24, more than 350 ministers from a variety of denominations had signed the declaration. Richard Land, president of the SBC’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, announced over the summer his support for a border-security first approach that creates a path to legal status for certain illegal immigrants.