Author: Alan Cooperman
Publication: Washington Post
Date: January 13, 2005
URL: http://www.kentaxrecords.com/iaca/php/item_display.php?id=1105668394&type=news
A Virginia-based missionary group
said this week that it has airlifted 300 "tsunami orphans" from the Muslim
province of Banda Aceh to Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, where it plans
to raise them in a Christian children's home.
The missionary group, WorldHelp,
is one of dozens of Christian, Muslim and Jewish charities providing humanitarian
relief to victims of the Dec. 26 earthquake and tsunami that devastated
countries around the Indian Ocean, taking more than 150,000 lives.
Most of the religious charities
do not attach any conditions to their aid, and many of the larger ones
-- such as WorldVision, Catholic Relief Services and Church World Service
-- have policies against proselytizing. But a few of the smaller groups
have been raising money among evangelical Christians by presenting the
tsunami emergency effort as a rare opportunity to make converts in hard-to-reach
areas.
"Normally, Banda Aceh is closed
to foreigners and closed to the gospel. But, because of this catastrophe,
our partners there are earning the right to be heard and providing entrance
for the gospel," WorldHelp said in an appeal for funds on its Web site
this week.
The appeal said WorldHelp was working
with native-born Christians in Indonesia who want to "plant Christian principles
as early as possible" in the 300 Muslim children, all younger than 12,
who lost their parents in the tsunami.
"These children are homeless, destitute,
traumatized, orphaned, with nowhere to go, nowhere to sleep and nothing
to eat. If we can place them in a Christian children's home, their faith
in Christ could become the foothold to reach the Aceh people," it said.
The Web site was changed, and the
appeal was removed yesterday after The Washington Post called to inquire
about it. The Rev. Vernon Brewer, president of WorldHelp in Forest, Va.,
said in a telephone interview the organization had collected about $70,000
in donations and was seeking to raise another $350,000 to build the orphanage.
Brewer said the Indonesian government
gave permission for the orphans to be flown to Jakarta last week and was
aware that they would be raised as Christians.
["We have no knowledge of this,"
Foreign Ministry spokesman Marty Natalegawa said today in Jakarta. "If
confirmed, this would constitute a serious violation of the standing ban
by the Indonesian government on the adoption of Acehnese children affected
by the tsunami disaster and appropriate steps would be taken accordingly."
He added that he did not believe any Indonesian official would have approved
the transfer of the children.] "These are children who are unclaimed or
unwanted. We are not trying to rip them apart from any existing family
members and change their culture and change their customs," Brewer said.
"These children are going to be raised in a Christian environment. That's
no guarantee they will choose to be Christians."
Brewer, a Baptist minister, was
the first person to graduate from the Rev. Jerry Falwell's Liberty University
in Lynchburg, Va., in 1971. He served as a vice president of the Christian
university before founding WorldHelp in 1991. It has since grown to 100
full-time employees in the United States and helps to support indigenous
Christian missionaries in about 50 countries, he said.
Brewer said WorldHelp is an independent
organization but has a friendly, informal relationship with nearby Liberty
University, which held a fundraiser at a basketball game Monday night to
benefit WorldHelp's tsunami relief projects.
"I think Vernon [Brewer] has got
the right approach," Falwell said yesterday. "If Christian ministries can
earn the right to be heard -- you don't preach the gospel to a hungry man,
you feed him, then if he wants to hear something you've got to say, that's
nice, but it's not required."
WorldHelp's primary partners in
Indonesia, Brewer said, are Henry and Roy Lanting, a father-son team who
run an orphanage and school near Jakarta. Roy Lanting is also a graduate
of Liberty University, Brewer said. Efforts to reach the Lantings by telephone
and e-mail yesterday were unsuccessful.
"First and foremost, our intention
is not to evangelize but to show the love of Jesus Christ through our acts
of compassion," Brewer said. "We are not using this open window of disaster
to move in and set up a beachhead for evangelism. That's not the spirit
of what we're trying to accomplish. . . ." The Rev. Arthur B. Keys Jr.,
president of Arlington-based International Relief and Development, a non-religious
aid group that has a U.S. government contract to rebuild the water and
sanitation system in Banda Aceh, said he feared overt evangelizing could
produce a backlash. "I think there's a danger that all international groups
could be tarnished by this," said Keys, an ordained minister in the United
Church of Christ. "I think we have to go out of our way to assure people
that we're there to help, period."
One missionary support group, Advancing
Native Missions based in Charlottesville, said it has raised more than
$100,000 to pay for distribution of food, water and cooking utensils in
Indonesia, Sri Lanka and South India.
Its workers often hand out Bibles
or other religious tracts along with emergency supplies because disaster
victims naturally question the existence of God, spokesman Oliver Asher
said.
"It's easy to be an atheist when
you have no crisis in your life. But have a 50-foot tidal wave sweep your
family and village away, it makes you ponder the big questions in life,"
he said.
Operation Mobilization USA, based
in Tyrone, Ga., has raised about $60,000 to address "both the physical
and the spiritual needs" of tsunami victims, according to its vice president
for resource development, Douglas R. Barclay.
He said Operation Mobilization,
founded in 1957, supports about 3,700 missionaries in 110 countries and
moved quickly to provide water, food and medical supplies after the tsunami
hit. "In these situations, we're not going to go out and blatantly preach
to them, we're just going to demonstrate God's love by addressing their
physical needs and sharing our beliefs one on one," he said.
One of the largest and best-known
evangelical Christian relief groups is Samaritan's Purse of Boone, N.C.,
which is headed by the Rev. Franklin Graham, son of evangelist Billy Graham.
It sparked international controversy by openly mixing evangelization with
its relief work after Hurricane Mitch in Central America in 1998 and the
U.S. invasion of Iraq last year. But it has made great efforts to be "sensitive
to local concerns" in areas hit by the tsunami, Franklin Graham said.
