Family members and activists have appealed to the international community to intervene in the planned execution of Son Jong Nam, 48, a North Korean Christian who has been sentenced to public execution. Multiple agencies protested Saturday, April 22, outside the government complex in South Korea, calling for efforts to rescue Son Jong Nam. This is the first time that an appeal has been issued to prevent the known execution of a named individual in North Korea from taking place. The execution was expected to take place before the end of this month. Son is imprisoned in the basement of the National Security Agency in Pyongyang where he has been tortured. He is accused of betraying his country and sharing information with South Koreans. The charges apparently stem from his visit to China where he met with his brother and spoke about life in North Korea and his connection to Christianity. In 1997 Son Jong Hoon, together with his wife, son and brother, defected to China where he became a Christian -- both serious crimes in North Korea. (Christian Solidarity Worldwide)

PAKISTANI CHRISTIAN CLEARED OF ‘BLASPHEMY’ AFTER 5 YEARS IN JAIL

Local sources in Pakistan reported that Pakistani Christian Parvez Masih has been found not guilty of “blasphemy” and released after spending the last five years in prison. Masih was arrested in April 2001. As headmaster of a Christian school in Lahore, he was accused of blaspheming the Islamic prophet Mohammed after some of his students asked him about Mohammed’s 9-year-old wife Aisha. He simply mentioned her name and told them to look up more information in the Koran.

Todd Nettleton of Voice of the Martyrs says such cases are not unusual. “The blasphemy law in Pakistan often is used as a weapon if you have a dispute, if it’s a property dispute, if you have an argument,” he explained. “The police are open to locking up Christians. They’re open to hearing these charges. In the case of Parvez Masih, it then took five years to work through the court system to allow him to be released.”

Despite the situation being faced by Christians, outreach in the country continues to grow. “Christians obviously know they’re facing persecution, and they know that this law is out there,” Nettleton said. “They just have to be cautious and be graceful in the way they communicate while at the same time being very clear with the message of the gospel, being very clear about what they believe.” (Voice of the Martyrs/Mission Network News)

MUSLIM MOB SUSPECTED OF ATTACKING CHURCH LEADER’S HOME IN NIGERIA

The latest attack on Rev. Ali Buba Lamido, 47, the Anglican bishop of the Wusasa diocese in Nigeria’s Kaduna state, began as the past year’s previous three did. Armed men whom he believes were Muslim militants asked the guards at his home where he was, and announced that they were going to kill him. This time, on Friday, March 10, a guest of one of his guard was shot dead. The guard and another worker were seriously injured. The four attacks on his house in the last year never involved an attempted robbery. “It is difficult to believe that it was not religiously motivated because some bishops have been attacked and one priest was murdered in a similar way,” he said. “And the killers never stole any thing from their houses.” (Compass Direct)

ASSESSMENT TEAM VISITS INDONESIAN CITY 16 MONTHS AFTER TSUNAMI

One-third of the residents of the Indonesian city of Meulaboh were killed in the December 2004 tsunami and earthquake. In the 16 months since, Food for the Hungry has been in the region helping to rebuild Meulaboh together with the City of Phoenix in Arizona and others that formed the Phoenix Rising to Help partnership. This partnership has raised more than $350,000 to help rebuild Meulaboh. Phoenix Councilwoman Peggy Bilsten is part of a Food for the Hungry assessment team that is in Indonesia helping with the education system, creating and maintaining jobs in the area and meeting with leaders to assess how the redevelopment effort is going. Food for the Hungry is committed to meet not only people’s physical needs, but also their spiritual ones. (Mission Network News)

HIGH-TECH OUTREACH HELPS PEOPLE ‘STAY IN TOUCH WITH THEIR FAITH’

Rick Warren, senior pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., has announced that has partnered with Proteus, Inc., to bring faith-based content to wireless telephones through the company’s mobile storefront (pdlmobilestore.com). This month also marks the launch of a premium text-messaging service called “40 Days of Purpose Mobile.” The service presents two new ways for people to “stay in touch with their faith, no matter where they are.” The mobile storefront offers wireless users the ability to personalize their mobile phones with the “Verse to Remember” series of graphic wallpapers. Users can also sign up for the “Mobile Daily Devotional” service that sends inspirational text messages to users’ phones. “Today’s society is busier than ever, making it difficult for individuals to stay in touch with the things that matter to them,” said Guy Vidra, vice president of business development at Proteus. “We recognize how the mobile channel can help bridge this gap . . . giving people another way to connect to their faith.” (Evangelical News/Christian Communication Network)

* HCJB WORLD RADIO HONORS LATE MOODY BROADCASTING NETWORK HEAD

HCJB World Radio is celebrating the life of Robert “Bob” Neff who served with the Moody Broadcasting Network (MBN) in Chicago for 40 years, the last 31 of those as head of the network after he became Moody Bible Institute’s vice president of broadcasting in 1974.

Neff died in Chicago after a courageous battle with ALS (also called Lou Gehrig’s disease) on Friday, April 21, about a year after health concerns forced him to resign from Moody.

When he took the helm of MBN, it comprised just three owned-and-operated stations. Under Neff’s leadership this number expanded to 35. In 1982 he helped pioneer the groundbreaking satellite delivery of MBN programming, now serving more than 400 affiliate stations and outlets nationwide.

In the last 10 years of his leadership, Neff advanced the globalization of Christian radio through strategic partnerships with HCJB World Radio, the Buckner Foundation, Romania’s Radio Voice of the Gospel (RVG) network and others.

He served on HCJB World Radio’s board of trustees for 4˝ years before stepping down in January 2005 due to health concerns, but he maintained a close relationship with the organization until his death.

“What impressed me most about Bob is that he was someone who directed a major ministry in the U.S. with a long tenure, yet he had a freshness and interest in what God was doing around the world in a way that few people have,” said HCJB World Radio President Dave Johnson.

“Bob was not content with the status quo,” he says. “He wanted to be involved where God was moving today. He wanted to touch and feel whatever he was committing himself to. He’s one of our few board members who actually traveled to most of HCJB World Radio’s regions and talked with each regional director personally. He asked the hard questions, but always with a spirit of love and a ‘can-do’ attitude.”

Johnson added that Neff was a “real family man and mentor at heart. His involvement at Moody in the training of Christian broadcasters from around the world was an outcome of a desire to see people equipped to do the job well.”

He caught the vision of assisting international broadcasters in the mid-1990s when Moody began receiving many requests for help in setting up Christian radio stations in their countries.

“We didn’t know how to respond to all the requests,” Neff said in an interview last year. “The need was there, but rather than reinvent the wheel, I went to HCJB World Radio, knowing the mission was already working around the world in ‘radio planting’ and had a good perspective of the situation.”

HCJB World Radio Chairman Ron Cline got to know Neff in the mid-1990s, not long after HCJB World Radio worked with local partners and the Romanian Missionary Society to launch the RVG network, now broadcasting on eight stations in that country.

Neff then began facilitating the training of Romanian broadcasters at Moody “This started us on a long journey of helping radio stations together around the world,” Cline says. “Bob’s agenda to help was simple, pure and terrific . . . to help!” In recent years students have come to Moody from places such as Hungary, Poland, Croatia, Turkey, Spain, Australia and South America.

Neff was instrumental in setting up a program to encourage small upstart Christian radio stations worldwide. “We decided that we would design criteria and then see what stations were growing and doing the job,” Cline explains. “Then we would reward the top 25 stations with the Moody Broadcasting Certificate of Excellence which carried a $1,000 gift to use for further development of the station. All this was Bob’s idea.”

He also encouraged HCJB World Radio to create a fund to help finance the training of young national leaders. This led to scholarship program called the Bob Neff National Leadership Development Fund, launched at the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) convention in February 2005.

Most recently, two young church leaders from closed countries received scholarships to attend the Radio School of Mission operated by HCJB World Radio in Singapore March 29-April 5. Fourteen students from 10 countries in the Asia Pacific region took part in this course.

Dick Jacquin, HCJB World Radio’s vice president of support ministries, saw Neff’s passion for missions during their many travels together. “I’ll never forget our time in Romania with the RVG station general managers who came from all across the country to spend some time with us, talking about leadership development, team building, fund-raising and staying close to God in difficult times,” he recalls.

“Once, because our flight from Burkina Faso back to Côte d’Ivoire was canceled, we had to return to Abidjan via an old bus,” Jacquin says. “That 30-hour ride was unbelievably wild, and we actually wondered if we would arrive alive! There were some pretty tense moments at numerous security checks at gunpoint and at a border crossing in the middle of the night when the two countries were on the brink of war. Then in the middle of nowhere a blown-out tire lifted the bus floor wide open just a few seats away from us!”

Jacquin described Neff as the “consummate ambassador of Christ, sharing His love and encouraging everyone he met. His love for ministry and Christ’s servants was exhibited over and over both to me and our mission staff as well as our partners in ministry.”

In 2005 Neff was a co-recipient of the NRB’s William Ward Ayer Distinguished Service Award for “outstanding and significant contributions to the field of Christian communications.” In addition, NRB recognized Moody’s “Open Line” call-in program as “Best Radio Talk Show.” This was one of the first programs created for Moody’s groundbreaking satellite service that Neff helped launch.

WRNF, “Radio for the Heart of Reconciliation” in Selma, Ala., recently named the station in honor of Neff for his dedication to bridging barriers such as nationality, race and geography.

Neff is survived by his wife, Miriam (Hinds); four children, Valerie Hogan, John Neff, Charles Neff and Rob Neff; a son-in-law, Mark Hogan; daughters-in-law Lori Neff and Mia Neff; three grandsons, Albert, Edward and Edmond Hogan; his mother, Dorothy Neff; and sisters Rebecca Shelton and Barbara Caban.

A memorial service will be held at 5 p.m. Sunday, April 30, at Harvest Bible Chapel in Rolling Meadows, Ill. Memorial gifts may be sent to the WRNF Selma Project at P.O. Box 10, Selma, AL 36702. (HCJB World Radio/Moody Broadcasting Network)

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