Severe flooding has hit seven provinces in northeastern Philippines in the past month. Operation Blessing has relief efforts in place to help more than 100,000 evacuees affected by the flooding that caused landslides in vast areas. Farms, homes and other small businesses have been damaged or destroyed. Operation Blessing’s immediate goal was to send out relief packs containing blankets, oral hygiene packs, towels and soap to refugees. Staff member also have started to help rebuild homes. (Mission Network News)

GOSPEL FOR ASIA MISSIONARY MURDERED IN BANGLADESH

Gospel for Asia (GFA) leaders in Bangladesh are mourning the death of 25-year old Laxman Das, a graduate from a GFA Bible college and missionary with the organization. He had already established a church in his village in northern Bangladesh. Das was found on the side of a highway near the town of Dangil, approximately 62 miles outside the capital city of Dhaka. Reports show that he died of a severe blow to the head. Police believe he was murdered on the night of Friday, Jan. 6. GFA leaders are awaiting more details from the police investigation. Laxman is survived by his young wife and 5-month-old child. (Mission Network News)

OFFICIALS CRACK DOWN ON RELIGIOUS ACTIVITY IN UZBEKISTAN

The government administration in Tashkent, the capital city of the Central Asian country of Uzbekistan, has launched a sweeping crackdown on religious activity in the city. A range of government agencies have been asked to check on all aspects of the life in the city’s religious communities and report by Tuesday, Jan. 17, on what measures they have taken to “secure stability in the religious and social/spiritual sphere.”

One local Christian who asked not to be identified said these measures will “lead to check-ups and control on religious organizations from the justice ministry at the top down to local mahalla committees. They will control everything except our thoughts and our personal life!”

Anvar Ahmedov, Tashkent’s administration chief who chaired the meeting that adopted the measures and is responsible for their implementation, brushed aside suggestions that this is anything more than routine verification that the law is being obeyed. “There is no campaign against religious believers,” he said. “No special measures are being deployed.”

Uzbekistan already restricts religious life in the country. All unregistered religious activity is banned while many religious communities that are eligible are arbitrarily denied registration. It is “all but impossible” to build new places of worship. Publishing and importing religious literature is also “difficult and subject to tight restrictions.” (Forum 18 News Service)

AUTHOR BRUCE WILKINSON QUITS AIDS MINISTRY IN SWAZILAND

Prayer of Jabez author Bruce Wilkinson, who relocated to Swaziland from his Georgia home in 2002, has quit his ministry focused on defeating HIV/AIDS and retired from active ministry at age 58, reported Christianity Today. One turning point was the inability of Swaziland’s King Mswati III and Wilkinson to agree on a meeting time in New York to discuss Wilkinson’s plan to build homes for aids orphans. A few days after this “perceived snub,” he told the staff at his Dream for Africa organization that he was stepping down and leaving Africa. For months, Wilkinson had negotiated with the Swaziland government for permission to launch his African Dream Center. The center would have housed, educated and fed children whose parents had died of AIDS. Plans also included a golf course and other tourist attractions. Swaziland, located between Mozambique and South Africa, is one of the continent’s smallest nations and has one of the world’s highest HIV/AIDS rates. (Religion Today)

CLERGY URGED TO EXTEND HEALING DURING SANCTITY OF HUMAN LIFE WEEK

As churches prepare to celebrate Sanctity of Human Life Week, Jan. 15-22, Focus on the Family has challenged clergy members to consider recent statistics on abortion in the church when addressing their congregations. A survey by the Alan Guttmacher Institute conducted among women who had abortions found that one in five identified themselves as evangelical Christians. Kim Conroy, director of the event for Focus on the Family, believes it’s time for churches to be proactive on this issue. “Every post-abortive woman sitting in our churches needs to know that there is help and forgiveness available -- and it’s our hope during this Sanctity Week that pastors and other clergy will extend that to her.” Conroy added that while abortion is a tough topic to discuss, especially when considering the emotions of someone who has experienced it firsthand, it is vital that churches prioritize talking about this growing problem. “Justice, mercy and compassion must be at the forefront of the conversation if we truly desire to extend healing to the women in our churches affected by abortion -- both those who’ve already experienced it and those who are right now contemplating it,” Conroy said. (Religion Today/Focus on the Family)

* HCJB WORLD RADIO SHOWS INNOVATION IN RADIO PLANTING MINISTRY

HCJB World Radio continues to display its innovative spirit by helping local ministries worldwide fulfill their dreams of launching Christian radio ministries in their communities. It’s a groundbreaking outreach the organization calls “radio planting,” working with local partners worldwide to put local radio ministries and languages on the air. It’s a term coined by Ron Cline in the early 1990s when he served as president of HCJB World Radio. He is the current chairman of the board.

Starting with a single FM station in Bukavu, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) in 1992, radio planting has become one of HCJB World Radio’s major outreaches with more than 300 outlets in more than 100 countries broadcasting in some 100 languages. Radio plants are on the air in all five of HCJB World Radio’s regions: Latin America, Euro-Asia, North Africa/Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia Pacific.

“We can help in a variety of ways, including programming, technical expertise, radio equipment and training,” said Curt Cole, vice president of international ministries. “Training is the cornerstone of this aspect of our ministry, and we are actively training at all levels of radio expertise in every region. In Latin America we offer quality Spanish satellite programming to new stations that often have little or no experience in program production. The HCJB World Radio Engineering Center in Elkhart, Ind., provides critical consulting and technical support to radio ministries around the world.

“Radio planting has matured into what we now call radio planting and development,” he added. “We see this ministry as much more than just helping with an antenna. In reality, we want to see long-term relationships develop where we partner with local groups around the world to make local radio available in an appropriate context. It’s strategic that we take full advantage of the opportunities which are before us.”

Another of the mission’s first radio plants was in Cheboksary, capital of the Russian autonomous republic of Chuvash, a remote, largely unreached area some 750 miles east of Moscow. HCJB World Radio helped install a studio so local partners could produce programs for broadcast on a secular station.

HCJB World Radio missionary David Kealy and his team taught local Christians how to produce programs and run a local station in 1993. National believers quickly applied what they had learned and began recording their own programs. They bought airtime on a local station . . . five minutes every two weeks, risking persecution and alienation from their friends and workmates.

When Kealy heard what the Christians were doing, he encouraged them, but he also expressed his doubt. “You need to be on the air at least 30 minutes a week to build rapport with your audience,” he insisted.

“However, within a few months I learned that a church was formed -- all because of that five-minute program! And the church is still going strong today. It’s not what we do, it’s what God does!”

Stories like this are becoming increasingly common as HCJB World Radio continues to expand its “radio planting” ministry around the world.

“We’re sharing our passion to communicate the gospel of Jesus Christ to all nations so that people are transformed and become an active, vital part of the body of Christ,” said Cline. “Our partners around the world are catching the vision to use the radio to share Jesus Christ. Many churches are growing because of these new radio ministries. In other cases, churches are being planted as a direct result of the broadcasts.”

HCJB World Radio President David Johnson says radio planting was not the brainchild of anyone on the staff. “We were never clever enough to see that we should do that. God pushed us into it!” Kealy said.

With the fall of the Iron Curtain in the late 1980s, long-time shortwave radio listeners -- many who came to faith in Christ through the broadcasts -- began saying, “We would like to have our own radio station. Can you help us?”

“We started out simply by helping our friends,” Johnson explained. “We knew that for years radio played a role in helping start churches. We often heard stories of people listening to the broadcasts who would start meeting together and form a church.”

The relaxation of laws prohibiting Christian stations in the former Soviet Union and privatization of the media in many countries around the world continues to open up opportunities for religious broadcasting.

“Radio is an effective means of spreading the gospel, discipleship and training,” Johnson added. “As we have become increasingly international in our radio planting, we realize that radio is also an effective tool of communication that is available to the local church. We have opportunities coming at us from every direction. All around the world people are asking for help to start local Christian radio. And most of these believers live in countries that never would have allowed Christian broadcasts even a few years ago.”

Local radio ministries are started in some of the world’s most unlikely locations such as Auschwitz (Osweicim) and Ustron, both in southern Poland. Auschwitz, once infamous for its Nazi concentration camps where an estimated 2.5 million people were sent to their deaths, is now a source of hope for thousands of listeners in the area.

“The city of death has become a beacon of light in Poland,” said Cline. “This is a very strategic station for this day and time in Poland.”

In recent months HCJB World Radio helped plant the first 24-hour-a-day Christian radio station in Kiev, Ukraine, and worked with partners to start a station in the strategic Romanian city of Constanta. This is the eighth station in Romania’s Radio Voice of the Gospel Network. The first station in the network went on the air in Suceava in 1993. Now the network has a vision to reach across Europe via satellite, impacting the entire continent for Christ.

Cole adds that HCJB World Radio is keeping up with the latest technology and trends in broadcasting. “Change is constant,” he said. “Podcasting (audio programming distributed via the Web) is the hottest broadcast technology, but satellite radio is also gaining ground. Digital local radio is doing well in Europe. Livestreaming is reaching a new audience, and we’re actively involved in that. For example, we are streaming Spanish and Arabic programming 24 hours a day. This is reaching a newer, younger audience, and in some cases reaching people in limited-access countries.

“In the coming years HCJB World Radio will work to deepen relationships with key radio station partners worldwide. In addition, we’ll keep seeking out new partnerships, especially in countries where local Christian radio is just now becoming a reality,” Cole explained.

“Shortwave will continue to be the only way to reach some limited-access countries,” he said. “The bottom line is that we will continue to seek the best ways to reach people with quality Christian content, regardless of the medium, and we will do that more and more through our network of partners. We believe that radio still reaches people where they live, but the message is most important. It’s critical that we are constantly evaluating ministry in light of the intended audience.” (HCJB World Radio)

© Copyright 2006 - HCJB World Radio - Colorado Springs, CO USA