Business as Missions

Rob Moll writes at the Wall Street Journal about the Business as Mission movement, which is likely the more Biblical model for the Great Commission than what we see today in most Christian missions practices. The Apostle Paul himself disdained accepting money from those he brought the Gospel to. This modern movement instead demonstrates that it is likely better that missionaries bring material value to the cultures they are reaching, and develop every-day relationships within the communities they touch:

The Business as Mission movement began in the 1990s, when globalization allowed Christian business people to build companies overseas. Often they did so without the help of churches. This missions model required some initial capital but no long-term subsidies. Business missionaries could become integral parts of a community, build trust with locals through business relationships, and minister every day of the week—not just Sunday—to employees, vendors, suppliers and customers.

It also debunks the myth that a Christian missionary must be educated, learn a new language, raise money, and get ordained — wasting valuable time that could be spent instead on immersing oneself into the culture and accomplishing the goal:

Steve Rundle, an economics professor at Biola University in California, has been studying business as mission for 15 years. Prof. Rundle says that much of the movement is still informal, led by individual entrepreneurs. Because many business owners work outside of traditional mission agencies, it can be hard to quantify their numbers. But surveys of U.S.-based agencies found that about 5% of their missionaries are working in business, up from almost nothing 20 years ago.

If you are called to the mission field you don’t need permission from an agency or a church. You don’t need to wait around until you raise support. Just be willing to go, work, and tell.

One-Child Policy=Forced Abortions

The Washington Post‘s Kathleen Parker explains the barbaric practice in China:

Coerced abortions, as well as involuntary sterilizations, are commonplace in China, Beijing’s protestations notwithstanding. While the Chinese Communist Party insists that abortions are voluntary under the nation’s one-child policy, electronic documentation recently smuggled out of the country tells a different story.

Congressional members of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission heard some of that story Tuesday, two days before President Obama was slated to leave for Asia, including China, to discuss economic issues. Among evidence provided by two human rights organizations, ChinaAid and Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, were tales of pregnant women essentially being hunted down and forced to submit to surgery or induced labor.

Reggie Littlejohn, founder and president of the Frontiers group, told the commission that China’s one-child policy “causes more violence against women and girls than any other official policy on Earth.”

How much evidence do we need of the darkness of the human soul and need for our Redeemer? The only hope in China is that Christ’s church is growing, but needs an accelerator.

Rep. Mike Pence last year on the policy:

Slavery in America Today

Oh, and we thought it was eradicated so long ago. The New York Times, which I usually don’t have much good to say about, exposes how pimps in U.S. cities prey upon runaway teens and keep them under their control. They underwent a two-year research project investigating and interviewing incarcerated pimps to learn how they operate.

“With the young girls, you promise them heaven, they’ll follow you to hell,” said Harvey Washington, a pimp who began serving a four-year sentence in Arizona in 2005 for pandering a 17-year-old and three adult prostitutes. “It all depends on her being so love-drunk off of me that she will do anything for me.”

While most of the pimps said they prefer adult women because teenage runaways involve more legal risks, they added that juveniles fetch higher prices from clients and are far easier to manipulate.

Virtually all the juveniles who become involved in prostitution are runaways and become pimp-controlled, according to law enforcement officials and social workers. Built of desperation and fear, the bonds they form with their pimps are difficult to break. Some girls continue working for pimps even after the pimps are incarcerated.

If there is any flaw in the Times article, is that they look to government for the solutions to the problem, as they usually do.

Hello, church?

SE Asian Faux Human Rights Effort

The Wall Street Journal editorializes today about the new human rights council created by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), about which it is very skeptical:

Like its United Nations equivalent, it’s a toothless body, but it can still do damage to the cause it’s supposed to serve.

Asean members aspire for the council to be “a vehicle for progressive social development and justice, the full realization of human dignity and the attainment of a higher quality life for Asean peoples,” according to their inaugural declaration. These are worthy goals.

But Asean is a broad church that includes countries like Burma and Laos that want to rubber-stamp their authoritarian regimes, not submit to real scrutiny….Commissioners include Kyaw Tint Swe, the Burmese ambassador to the U.N. who has long defended the junta’s rights record there, and Brunei’s Abdul Hamid Bakal, a Shariah court judge. The commission operates by consensus and its mandate focuses on promoting human rights, not protecting them.

Meanwhile in Cambodia, UN human rights watchdogs were removed from the National Assembly before voting for a new criminal libel law that is designed to restrict press freedom and silence opposition to the ruling Cambodian People’s Party.

Cambodia Regression?

After signs of hope in moving towards liberty, especially in promoting religious diversity, the Cambodian government appears to be taking measures to limit free speech. As reported by the Financial Times, the parliament has passed a law restricting public demonstrations:

The Cambodian parliament, which is dominated by the Cambodian People’s party of Hun Sen, the prime minister, passed the law limiting public demonstrations to a maximum of 200 people with the aim of ensuring “public order and national security”.

Public demonstrations are a popular form of protest in Cambodia. The opposition, comprehensively outnumbered in parliament, uses them to make political points but they are also a last resort for groups of impoverished farmers and slum-dwellers who say they are the victims in land -disputes with developers and powerful allies of the government. Mu Sochua, an opposition mem-ber of parliament, said: “It is limiting freedom of assembly and that will severely limit freedom of expression.”

Other recent signs of rights setbacks in Cambodia include property evictions and press restrictions via libel laws. As in most Southeast Asian countries, the government is rife with corruption. Pray that God will move the hearts of leadership towards freedom.

HRW’s Misguided Attacks and Defenses

Jillian Bandes at Townhall.com today addresses a recent New York Times op-ed by the founder of Human Rights Watch, Robert Bernstein, who could no longer remain silent about the group’s support for a U.N. resolution that accused Israel of war crimes. He wrote for yesterday’s paper:

As the founder of Human Rights Watch, its active chairman for 20 years and now founding chairman emeritus, I must do something that I never anticipated: I must publicly join the group’s critics. Human Rights Watch had as its original mission to pry open closed societies, advocate basic freedoms and support dissenters. But recently it has been issuing reports on the Israeli-Arab conflict that are helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.

Bandes reports:

Anne Bayefsky, a senior fellow with Hudson Institute, said that Bernstein’s move push HRW to reconsider its decisions with many other international affairs.

“HRW has decided for many years to refuse to do the hard work of confronting human rights abusers who have powerful friends, particularly within the United Nations,” said Bayefsky. “With an annual budget of $40 million a year, the only way to change what has become of this human rights fraud is to withdraw financial support. Let’s hope Bernstein’s call wakes up HRW’s funders first and foremost.”

Even human rights defenders are not immune from politicization.

Orphan Sunday, November 8

The ministry Cry of the Orphan has declared the second Lord’s Day of next month “Orphan Sunday,” in which many churches will focus on “the least of these” who need to be cared for. You can find a local event or message at COTO’s Web site.

Former Nuremberg Interrogator Passes Away

What a life Richard W. Sonnenfeldt lived. He was a Jew who escaped the worst of Nazi Germany, traveled five continents until he arrived in the U.S. where he became a citizen, joined the Army and fought the Battle of the Bulge and helped liberate Dachau. Then he helped translate, then interrogate, war criminals including Hermann Goering. And afterward he became an electrical engineer, went to work for RCA, and helped develop color television. For pleasure, he crossed the Atlantic Ocean three times in his 45-foot sailboat. He passed away Friday.

Elites and Dictators

Walter Williams today discusses how many American elites are tyrant worshippers who don’t recognize their slippery slope from socialism:

Today’s leftists, socialists and progressives would bristle at the suggestion that their agenda differs little from Nazism. However, there’s little or no distinction between Nazism and socialism. Even the word Nazi is short for National Socialist German Workers Party. The origins of the unspeakable horrors of Nazism, Stalinism and Maoism did not begin in the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s. Those horrors were simply the end result of long evolution of ideas leading to consolidation of power in central government in the quest for “social justice.” It was decent but misguided earlier generations of Germans, like many of today’s Americans, who would have cringed at the thought of genocide, who built the Trojan horse for Hitler to take over.

Human Rights Developments

Four items today:

1. The Washington Times reports that President Obama isn’t earning stellar grades from human rights organizations:

“There has not been sufficient attention paid within this administration on how to counter the major challenges to human rights that we face today,” said Jennifer Windsor, executive director of Freedom House. “We see authoritarian regimes like China, Iran and Egypt and others getting granted opportunities for dialogue and engagement, but it’s not clear from the outside how human rights concerns will be addressed in that engagement.”

2. AP reports that Interpol has arrested one of their most-wanted suspects in the 1994 Rwanda genocide, “a former top intelligence official accused of sending soldiers to execute the Rwandan queen.”

3. The military regime in control of Burma has a second meeting with house-arrested dissident Aung San Suu Kyi, at her request. The talks are explained as “a confidence-building gesture to the junta.”

4. Iraqi Christians are still exiting the country due to sectarian violence and crime sprees against them, especially in Kirkuk.