World News August

Joseph Smith | 30 July 2007

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Hungry for Word

CMS missionary to Italy, Dean Ingham says Pope Benedict XVI’s reassertion last month of the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church and suggestion that Catholicism provides the only true path to salvation will not affect his ministry to university students.

Mr Ingham has worked with the national student movement (GBU) since 2001 to establish a strong evangelical student ministry in Milan among the city’s 163,000 university students.

“I don’t think the Pope’s comments give us less credibility, because most students have no idea what we are on about. But it does give us a point of conversation,” he says.
“We can question where the Pope took his statement from, then go back to the Bible as source of authority.”

CMS missionary Andrew Lubbock works with the GBU in the University of Florence, which contains 60,000 people. He says the majority of students he talks to, including the nominal Roman Catholics, lack a basic grasp of Christian fundamentals.

“There are central things they have not grasped like who Jesus is, the saving nature of his death and our ability to understand the Bible for ourselves,” he says.

Mr Lubbock says the Pope’s mention of Protestant Christianity raises the profile of what is a marginalised group.

Mr Ingham shares the startling statistic that only two per cent of the university age group are attending any church.

“The next generation of university students is going to be utterly unchurched, so it’s important that we proclaim Christ to these people.”

Sydney’s ‘grief’ at divorce

Sydney bishop Robert Forsyth says he feels “grief” to be reminded of teachings that caused the divorce between Christians during the Reformation, following last month’s Vatican statement.

But he adds that Anglicans shouldn’t be shocked the Pope has reaffirmed the longstanding Vatican view that Protestants do not belong to true churches.

“We have a deep love for our Catholic friends, but there is grief that the Vatican’s new document has reminded us of our deep and irreconcilable differences.”

“There are significant disagreements within the key doctrines of salvation,” he said, explaining these were not ‘technical’ differences.

Persecution Watch

The British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, has published a report in Britain’s Sunday Express revealing that some 200 million Christians in 60 countries around the world are at risk of suffering persecution, MI6 reports that in the Sudan “thousands of Christians have been massacred and the fundamentalist government has done little to protect them”.

In Iraq, “Christians do not have their own militia to defend them, and Sunni and Shiite factions accuse them of collaborating with the American ‘crusaders’ ”.

During the last year, at least 70 Christians were killed in Pakistan. North Korea has sent some 50,000 Christians to concentration camps, while in China some 40,000 have suffered the same fate.

Communist and Muslim countries are the worst offenders. In Muslim countries, persecution starts in mosques rather than the government.

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