Author:
Publication: Innovative Minds
Date: January 24, 2005
URL: http://www.inminds.co.uk/tsunami.html
At least 234,000 people have been confirmed
killed, thousands missing and millions displaced in several Asian countries
in tidal waves triggered by a 9.0 magnitude undersea earthquake - the world's
biggest in 40 years - which struck deep in the Indian Ocean off the west coast
of Indonesia's Sumatra Island on 26th December 2004.
Tsunami - An Opportunity To Convert
Whilst much of the aid coming from around
the world is purely humanitarian and unconditional, many aid workers have
been alarmed at how some of the American aid is being channelled through missionary
organisations like Southern Baptists' International Mission Board, WorldHelp,
Samaritan's Purse, and Gospel for Asia, which see the tsunami as a rare opportunity
to make converts in hard-to-reach areas. InterAction, the largest alliance
of U.S. based ngo organizations, reports that of its 55 member agencies providing
tsunami aid, 22 are faith-based.
In Krabi, Thailand, a Southern Baptist church
had been "praying for a way to make inroads" with a particular ethnic
group of fishermen without much success, according to Southern Baptist relief
coordinator Pat Julian. Then came the tsunami, "a phenomenal opportunity"
to provide ministry and care, Julian told the Baptist Press news service,[9]
and added "We need to get past the death toll and get focused on the
living -- because that's where our ministry is going to be."[12]
Samaritan's Purse, which is approved by the
White House as a humanitarian organization for tsunami relief donations, are
working with an American missionary Pastor Dayalan Sanders who has set up
base in Sri Lanka, giving him "an opportunity to reach out to his neighbors,
mostly Hindus". Head of Samaritan's Purse, Franklin Graham who considers
Hindus as being "bound by Satan's power" and Islam as "a very
wicked and evil religion" explains "We've come to help in the Name
of the Lord Jesus Christ."[11]
One missionary interviewed by the Telegraph
newspaper[13], who didn't want his surname revealed, was candid about why
he was in Banda Aceh (Indonesia):
"I'm not here to do relief work,"
said John. His calling was missionary work, he admitted. "They are looking
for answers," he said of the disaster victims, whom he described as particularly
good candidates for conversion.
"Now we are befriending them, giving
them food aid, clothes and stuff. We need to make friends with them first
rather than telling them the concept of salvation. Long term that's where
we are heading towards, to save their souls."
Sponsor A Missionary
"This (disaster) is one of the greatest
opportunities God has given us to share his love with people," said K.P.
Yohannan, president of the Texas-based Gospel for Asia.
Their activity in the tsunami hit area of
Tamil Nadu (India) have drawn sharp criticism from local officials. In Akkaraipettai,
Gospel for Asia and Believers Church have set up an orphanage without the
knowledge of the government, said Suriyakala, the district's social welfare
officer. 108 children, mainly Hindus have been taken to the orphanage and
are told to recite Christian prayers six times a day. "As soon as we
get up, we pray," said a 13 year old Hindu child Rajavalli. The church
officials claim "We did not take the children", but recruited them
from the relief camps. They also denied giving out Bibles in the relief camps
and villages even though they were caught giving out Tamil-language Bibles
to the refugees.[20]
Gospel for Asia is seeking to train and send
100,000 native missionaries into the most unreached areas of Asia. Their website
boasts of planting over 10 churches every day.
They run a "sponsor a missionary"
scheme where $30 a month buys an indigenous missionary working covertly among
non-Christian communities. The FAQ for sponsors states that a sponsored missionaries
cannot receive letters from their sponsor as that might blow their cover:
"native missionaries must not be viewed
as working for a foreign agency, as this could severely hinder their work
among the non-Christian communities"[2].
Gospel for Asia has set up a special ministry
to convert Muslims. They offer specific training for working among Muslims,
and provide radio broadcasts in Bengali, Dari and Pashto - targeting the Muslims
of India, Bangladesh and Afghanistan.[3]
Indian Villages Replaced By Christian Communities
In Andhra Pradesh, India, a plan is developing
to build "Christian communities" to replace destroyed seashore villages.
In a dispatch that the evangelical group Focus on the Family posted on its
Family.org Web site, James Rebbavarapu of India Christian Ministries said
a team of U.S. engineers had agreed to help design villages of up to 400 homes
each, "with a church building in the center of them."
The same dispatch mention how aid is passed
out at the discretion of their pastors - 50 pastors are drawing up lists of
those families who will receive "an authorized form which will qualify
them to collect their portion of food and clothing".[10]
Abducting Muslim Orphans
Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim
country, lost well over 170,000 people to the killer sea surges. The Indonesian
government estimated that 35,000 children have been made homeless, orphaned
or separated from their parents in Aceh, where Muslims make up 98 percent
of the population.
Jan Egeland, the UN undersecretary for humanitarian
affairs and emergency relief coordination, has highlighted that "There
is a big and consistent rumor that children orphans are now systematically
adopted, kidnapped, taken away to be Christianized in the West. It is happening
but they are isolated cases but we need to stop it immediately."[21]
Subsequently it was exposed in the Washington
Post[18] that WorldHelp, an American missionary group, abducted 300 Muslim
tsunami orphans from the province of Aceh and plans to raise them as Christians
with the aim of one day returning them back to Aceh as Christians missionaries
to convert the Muslim population.
The Rev. Vernon Brewer, president of WorldHelp,
initially claimed that the Indonesian government has given him permission
to take the children and that he had "explicitly" told them that
the children would be raised as Christians - these claims were later proved
to be lies.
On their web site, WorldHelp present the tsunami
disaster 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.
The appeal said WorldHelp 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," it said. "If we can place them in a Christian children's home,
their faith in Christ could become the foothold to reach the Aceh people."
Brewer said his organization had collected
about $70,000 in donations and was seeking to raise an additional $350,000
to build the Christian orphanage.
WorldHelp is based in Virginia : 1148 Corporate
Park Drive, Forest, VA 24551. It was founded in 1991 by Rev. Vernon Brewer
and now have missionary bases in 50 countries. Their collaborators in this
abduction were local missionaries Henry and Roy Lanting, a father-son team
who run a Bible school in Manadol. Henry, 59, received his missionary training
at Dallas Theological Seminary, and his son Roy, 27, is a U.S. citizen and
graduated from Moody Bible Institute in Chicago.
After the publicity sparked a furor in Indonesia
WorldHelp seems to have abandoned its plan for these 300 orphans. But the
Washington Post Jan 15 edition notes that:
'WorldHelp now is seeking other Indonesian
orphans to be placed in a Christian home and will make every effort to ensure
that the $70,000 it has raised is used for the purposes that donors intended,
Brewer said in his e-mail to supporters.'
And their website also talks of other countries:
'..we will also be identifying children in
other countries who have been orphaned..'[4]
Their other projects include "Bibles
for Iraq"- under the guise of humanitarian relief they enter Iraq to
distribute Arabic bibles. They have missionary teams in Jordan and Egypt working
on the project. Brewer sees Iraq as a spiritual war with Muslims cast as Satan:
"It's so clear to me that this conflict
in Iraq is a spiritual war ... between Satan and Jesus Christ."[5]
On their website they are urging people to
donate quickly before the elections come:
"Christianity is just starting to spread
throughout Iraq. But it could be choked off at any moment if the wrong people
come into power in Iraq in the elections at the end of January. We only have
a few more weeks.."[5]
Food In One Hand... Bible In The Other
Many groups are exploiting peoples need for
food and water as a means to distribute bible tracts and other missionary
texts. Colorado Springs-based Focus on the Family include excerpts from a
Christian book written by Dobson, founder of the influential media ministry,
in 300,000 survival packets bound for the region.
Judy Billings from International Bible Society,
also based in Colorado Springs, explained "With the disaster, people
are open to God's word. They're in a crisis."[6] So when the tsunami
struck, the group prepared the distribution of 100,000 Christian texts.
The American Tract Society has released the
new Gospel tracts entitled "When Disaster Strikes"[7] for donation
to Victims Relief Ministries who are sending more than 200 workers to Sri
Lanka. The leaflets to be distributed to tsunami survivors tell them to prepare
for death. The tracts, which describe in detail famous disasters and tragedies
from around the world, suggest that people can only be 'saved' if they confess
their sins and accept Jesus as their lord and saviour.
Bible In One Hand.. Other Hand Empty
In Sri Lanka one American missionary group
- Antioch Community Church from Waco, Texas, have even angered local Christian
leaders by their overt proselytizing. Relief camp residents have complained
that these Americans have staged plays on Jesus and got their children to
draw pictures of him, they have held group prayers where they tried to heal
a partly paralyzed man and a deaf 12 year-old girl.[17]
W. L. P. Wilson, 38, a Buddhist, disabled
fisherman with a sixth-grade education, said he allowed the Americans to pray
three times for the healing of his paralyzed lower leg because he was desperate
to provide for his wife and three children again. He said the Americans were
trying to convert him to Christianity but that he was in "a helpless
situation now" and needed aid. "Whenever I ask for help they always
mention God, but they do not give any money for treatment."
The Rev. Duleep Fernando, a Methodist minister
based in Colombo, brought the Americans to the camp here. Mr. Fernando said
they had described themselves as humanitarian aid workers. He and other Sri
Lankan Christian leaders say raising religion with traumatized refugees is
unethical.
"We have told them this is not right,
but now we don't have any control over them," said Mr. Fernando.
The Rev. Jimmy Seibert, the senior pastor
of the Waco church, said in a telephone interview that the church would evaluate
whether the group's members should identify themselves as aid workers. But
he said the church believes missionary work and aid work "is one thing,
not two separate things."
The church's Web site says the Americans are
one of four teams - for a total of 75 people - dispatched to Sri Lanka and
Indonesia who have persuaded dozens of people to "come to Christ."
According to the Waco church group's Web site,
its teams in Sri Lanka and Indonesia are performing "children's ministry,"
seeing "many people saved" and continuing to "minister to families
and children through prayer and evangelism." The congregation uses small
groups called "cell churches" to attract new members.
A January 18th posting from the team in Indonesia
says the country's devastated Aceh Province is "ripe for Jesus!!"
"What an opportunity," it adds.
"It has been closed for five years, and the missionaries in Indonesia
consider it the most militant and difficult place for ministry. The door is
wide open and the people are hungry."
Remember Afghanistan?
Two members of the Antioch Community Church,
Dayna Curry & Heather Mercer, have already been arrested in the past for
using aid work as a cover for missionary work in Afghanistan in August 2001.
They were part of a larger group of missionaries
who were caught in Afghanistan by the Taliban. The group were distributing
Persian language Bibles and Pashtu-language children's books about the life
of Jesus Christ. There were several slides depicting the life of Christ. They
showed flash cards for learning the Bible in local languages[14] and the Jesus
Film on dvd[15]. One of the groups were caught using Bibles to teach English.
They ran extensive English-language classes for Afghans throughout the country.
After their release Dayna Curry and Heather Mercer admitted to proselytizing
and said if given the chance they would do it again. They where warmly received
by President Bush who referred to them as "courageous souls".
The Jesus Film website describes how their
co-ordinators for the middle east, John and Ashli, organized a small delegation
of western women to go to Afghanistan to convert Afghans by showing the "JESUS"
film, which is available in 887 languages, to people who have never seen a
television:
"a woman who hides a small, portable
DVD player and tiny speakers strung around her neck, under her burka. She
knows that Muslim men will never search (touch) a woman. She goes from home
to home, sets up the equipment and shows "JESUS!" Another couple
has shown "JESUS" to 27 families who all came to Christ!"[16]
Convert Or Starve
The India News reported on 16 Jan 2005[19],
that Christian missionaries refused aid to a Hindu village devastated by the
tsunami because they did not agree to convert to Christianity:
Villagers furious with Christian Missionaries:
[India News]: Samanthapettai, Jan 16 : Rage
and fury has gripped this tsunami-hit tiny Hindu village in India's southern
Tamil Nadu after a group of Christian missionaries allegedly refused them
aid for not agreeing to follow their religion.
Samanthapettai, near the temple town of Madurai,
faced near devastation on the December 26 when massive tidal waves wiped it
clean of homes and lives.
Most of the 200 people here are homeless or
displaced , battling to rebuild lives and locating lost family members besides
facing risks of epidemic, disease and trauma.
Jubilant at seeing the relief trucks loaded
with food, clothes and the much-needed medicines the villagers, many of who
have not had a square meal in days, were shocked when the nuns asked them
to convert before distributing biscuits and water.
Heated arguments broke out as the locals forcibly
tried to stop the relief trucks from leaving. The missionaries, who rushed
into their cars on seeing television reporters and the cameras refusing to
comment on the incident and managed to leave the village.
Disappointed and shocked into disbelief the
hapless villagers still await aid.
Director Of Crusades Heads Tsunami Team
On January 12, a confidential email from the
hate monger Jerry Falwell, who previously called the Prophet Muhammad a "terrorist"[7]
and is currently Chancellor of Virginia-based Liberty University, revealed
a secret missionary agenda behind a plea for donations to support relief work
in tsunami hit countries.
According to the email, Liberty University's
"Director of International Crusades" will head a team sent to the
region to distribute relief supplies. "In addition we will be presenting
the Gospel to tens of thousands of persons through distribution of Gospel
tracts written in the native languages of the area. Our ultimate purpose for
this first mission is to set the stage for many other missions trips to this
Asian region by hundreds of Liberty students in the months to come,"
said the email.[8]
Baltimore-based World Relief, the humanitarian
arm of the National Association of Evangelicals, also see their missionary
work as a two stage process. Initially the focus is on humanitarian aid while
looking for opportunities to later encourage conversions in southern Asia.
World Relief spokesman Chris Pettit cited
as a model the group's work helping war-ravaged Cambodians in the early 1990
s. Long after the crisis, World Relief workers revived their relationships
with residents and encouraged them to build churches. Pettit said there are
now 300 churches in the Cambodian areas where they worked.
"Historically, the best approach is to
provide help and build trust, and then through that trust, opportunities arise.
We plant the seeds," he said.
More Imperialism
The U.S. government has said it hopes American
tsunami aid improves its image abroad, particularly with Muslims. Yet when
asked about the missionary hordes unleashed on the tsunami survivors, State
Department spokesman Edgar Vasquez said "We can't control them, they
are free to do what they're going to do."[9]. Many observers see this
as yet another facet of American imperialism and empire building.
"When the missionaries came to Africa
they had the Bible and we had the land.
They said "Let us pray."
We closed our eyes.
When we opened them
we had the Bible and they had the land."
Bishop Desmond Tutu
[1]http://www.gfa.org/gfa
[2]http://www.gfa.org/gfa/sponsorlearnmore/faqs
[3]http://www.gfa.org/gfa/muslim_ministry
[4]http://www.worldhelp.net/home/featured.asp?documentID=3799
[5]http://www.worldhelp.net/home/featured.asp?documentID=3797
[6] Proselytizing during relief efforts divides Christian groups , 17 Jan
2005, Eric Gorski, Denver Post
[7] On CBS programme "60 Minutes" in 2002.
[8] http://www.baou.com/newswire/main.php?action=recent&rid=2014
[9] In Asia, some Christian groups spread supplies - and the word, BY JIM
REMSEN, Knight Ridder Newspapers, 9 Jan 2005.
[10] http://www.family.org/fmedia/misc/a0035010.cfm
[11]http://www.samaritanspurse.org/index.asp?section=Projects&page=projects_news_122704.txt
[12] Baptist Press, In Aceh, survivors and aid workers mourn the dead, focus
on the living, by Alan Brant 7 Jan 2005.
[13] Christians on mission to convert tsunami survivors, Sebastien Berger,
22/01/2005 Daily Telegraph
[14] Taliban present evidence against aid group, Associated Press 6 Sept 2001.
[15] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3076809.stm
[16] http://www.jesusfilm.org/progress/special.html?type=regular&id=159
[17] Mix of Quake Aid and Preaching Stirs Concern, By DAVID ROHDE, January
22, 2005, New York Times
[18] Christian group's plan for orphans Muslim children will be raised by
missionaries, Alan Cooperman, Washington Post, Thursday, January 13, 2005
[19] http://news.newkerala.com/india-news/?action=fullnews&id=60729
[20] Critics say some Christians spread aid and Gospel, by Kim Barker, Chicago
Tribune 22 January 2005
[21] British Muslims Counter Tsunami Proselytizing, IslamOnline 14 Jan 2005.
Mustafa Abdel-Halim
