Summons to a Higher Court

Arrogance Paternalism and Racism Rife in the UK Foreign Office

State parties all around the world have taken a fancy to claiming authority over the Bible.  For decades this has been happening indirectly.  State schools, for example, teach evolutionism as fact.  Whilst this is not a direct attack upon the Holy Scriptures per se, it indirectly runs a flag up the flagpole: the state and government parties hold the Bible to be a bunch of baloney.  

We Christians have got used to this and end up returning the "compliment": we hold that state parties are riddled with cant, ignorance, and are grossly prejudiced.  We end up handing them over to their fate on Judgement Day.

But things are ratcheting up somewhat.  In the UK a functionary of the Foreign Office has decided that it is time to rein in Christians in the Southern Hemisphere (by which they almost  certainly mean Africa, since the Church has been going from strength to strength in that continent).  The Barnabas Fund has exposed the latest egregious action by an organ of the UK state.

Letter From the UK (About Africa)

Capitalism is Eradicating Disease and Poverty

As the remarkable retreat of malaria across Africa shows, free trade is a very efficient way of spreading medicine and wealth

Daily Telegraph
Fraser Nelson


A Maasai warrior talks on a mobile phone in Kajiado, Kenya Photo: Joseph Van Os / Getty

Did you know that someone dies of malaria every 60 seconds? You may do, if you’ve seen one of the latest Christian Aid posters picturing an African girl staring fearfully at the camera, or a young boy lying on what seems to be his deathbed. They send a powerful Christmas message: while we celebrate in comfort, children are dying for want of a £3 mosquito net. And we could change this, if only we chose to help.

What these adverts don’t tell you, though, is the remarkable extent to which we are helping – and, more importantly, the way in which Africans are helping themselves. Malaria, mankind’s biggest killer, is now retreating faster than at any time since records began.

Earlier this month, the United Nations announced that malaria’s global death toll has more than halved since the turn of the century, saving six million lives. It’s the greatest success story of modern times, yet no one seems interested in telling it.

Growth of the Kingdom of God in Africa

Christianity Explodes in Africa

Implodes in Europe

Dr Thomas D. Williams
Breitbart London

Christianity is experiencing an unprecedented boom on the African continent and now accounts for more than half of Africa’s total population, while Christian affiliation and practice continue to ebb in Europe, signaling a major demographic shift in global Christianity.

An article in the Christmas issue of the Economist lays out the sobering statistics of European Christianity, while holding up the remarkable growth of the Christian faith among Africans.

Christianity is experiencing more rapid growth in Africa than anywhere else on the planet, including Asia and Latin America. In 1910 less than 10% of Africans identified as Christians, whereas today 55% of the population is Christian.

Taking Advantage of the Vulnerable

Worse Than Fiction

John Le Carre's novel, The Constant Gardner is a story of pharmaceutical exploitation.  Big Western drug companies distribute drugs in African countries, but the drugs are untested, dangerous, and end up killing people.  They were not approved for use in the US and other Western countries.  Since the West was smart enough not to distribute them, African countries were easy pickings.  Sound far-fetched.  Not at all.  It is actually happening, as the following article from Turtle Bay and Beyond reveals:

The Ugly American Re-Emerges From the Closet

Boss Hogg's Soft-Imperialism

One of the reasons the climate change charade has been mocked in the "third world" is the persistent disquiet that it is a "first world" issue, with the unfortunate by-product of oppressing poorer nations by impeding their economic and social development.  In other words, the "third world" sees the climate change circus as Western soft-imperialism.

One response of the poorer nations has been to say, "If you want us to impede our own economic development, pay us big time in compensation."  Unfortunately, since the Global Financial Crisis the West has run out of money.  So, the traction of the climate change crusade has disappeared in the Southern Hemisphere quicker than a politician's integrity. 

But pompous, paternalistic and imperialistic Westerners just don't get it.  They have not washed their ears out in a long time.  And this is where the syndrome of the offensive, ugly American rears its head again.  Consider the supercilious, condescending, paternalistic US Secretary of State, John Kerry.

Not the Best Deal

Planned Parenthood Will Push Harmful Injectable on Zambian Girls and Women

Posted on | March 12, 2014 

by Lisa Correnti

Turtle Bay and Beyond

[The story is told in the days of the Soviet Union of a Soviet Commissar lining up to buy bread.  The line was long and the Commissar was in a hurry to get home, so he shouted out, "All Jews in this line, go home."  A significant number of people in the line fell out and went home.  About half an hour later the Commissar made it to the shop door, only to read a sign just put up, which read "Bread Sold Out."  Grumbling, the Commissar returned to his limousine.  His driver turned to him, and asked, "Why is it, Comrade Commissar, that the Jews always get the best deal?" 

Below is a story about how women in Israel appear to be getting a much better deal than women in Zambia, thanks to the "tender" embraces of Planned Parenthood.  Ed. ]

Despite scientific research finding women using the contraceptive Depo Provera are at higher risk to transmit HIV/AIDS and develop breast cancer, Planned Parenthood plans to widely distribute the injectable to women in Zambia.

Abortion advocates are lauding the Zambian governments decision to create, for the first time, a line item within the country’s budget for the procurement of contraceptive supplies – $9.3 million.  The successful advocacy which led to securing the funding from the Zambian government, is being attributed to the Planned Parenthood Association of Zambia (PPAZ) from a $50,000 advocacy grant awarded to them.

The advocacy grants flow from the Advance Family Planning initiative established through the UK Family Planning Summit in July 2012, which partnered with Melinda Gates and the United Nations Population Fund. The goal of the summit was to secure commitments from pharmaceutical companies, Foundations, and governments to scale-up the delivery of modern methods of contraceptive to 120 million women and girls in low-income countries by 2020 – $4.6 billion was committed.

The Fund is part of a 5-year AFP project providing grants to reproductive rights groups – like Planned Parenthood, to target high birth rate countries to secure these governments financial investment and political commitment to assure access to contraceptives, especially long-acting methods like injectables.

The Wisdom of Ages

Bono, Africa, and Aid

Age and experience is reputed to bring wisdom.  Sometimes sadly this is not the case.  Growing years can cement the foolishness prejudices and simplicities of youth, which makes aged folly all the more ridiculous.  But often as people grow in experience, they become more subtle, discerning, and wise.  They learn that things are not always what they seem.  They realise that truth often lies beneath, not on the surface.  

David J. Theroux, writing in The Beacon, gives us an example of the latter.

Bono (nee Paul David Hewson) is the lead singer in the rock group U2, one of the most successful rock groups in history. Bono also became a major proponent of greatly expanded U.S. foreign aid and other government programs (including debt cancellation) to alleviate the dire plight in the world of HIV/AIDS, malaria, abject poverty, and other issues.

Bono's name and fame is synonymous, not just with U2, but with charitable activities in Africa.  He has publicly and passionately taken up the cause of that needy continent for most of his public life.  Bono is a professing Christian.

A City Set Upon a Hill

The Gospel in Africa

Matthew Parris, is a seasoned journalist and politician. He is also a professing atheist. He recently wrote a piece in The Times entitled, As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God. The by-line read: Missionaries, not aid money, are the solution to Africa's biggest problem - the crushing passivity of the people's mindset

This is a remarkable article.

We reproduce it in full below:

Before Christmas I returned, after 45 years, to the country that as a boy I knew as Nyasaland. Today it's Malawi, and The Times Christmas Appeal includes a small British charity working there. Pump Aid helps rural communities to install a simple pump, letting people keep their village wells sealed and clean. I went to see this work.

It inspired me, renewing my flagging faith in development charities. But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I've been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I've been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.

Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.

I used to avoid this truth by applauding - as you can - the practical work of mission churches in Africa. It's a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith.

But this doesn't fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.

First, then, the observation. We had friends who were missionaries, and as a child I stayed often with them; I also stayed, alone with my little brother, in a traditional rural African village. In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world - a directness in their dealings with others - that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall.

At 24, travelling by land across the continent reinforced this impression. From Algiers to Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon and the Central African Republic, then right through the Congo to Rwanda, Tanzania and Kenya, four student friends and I drove our old Land Rover to Nairobi.

We slept under the stars, so it was important as we reached the more populated and lawless parts of the sub-Sahara that every day we find somewhere safe by nightfall. Often near a mission.

Whenever we entered a territory worked by missionaries, we had to acknowledge that something changed in the faces of the people we passed and spoke to: something in their eyes, the way they approached you direct, man-to-man, without looking down or away. They had not become more deferential towards strangers - in some ways less so - but more open.

This time in Malawi it was the same. I met no missionaries. You do not encounter missionaries in the lobbies of expensive hotels discussing development strategy documents, as you do with the big NGOs. But instead I noticed that a handful of the most impressive African members of the Pump Aid team (largely from Zimbabwe) were, privately, strong Christians. “Privately” because the charity is entirely secular and I never heard any of its team so much as mention religion while working in the villages. But I picked up the Christian references in our conversations. One, I saw, was studying a devotional textbook in the car. One, on Sunday, went off to church at dawn for a two-hour service.

It would suit me to believe that their honesty, diligence and optimism in their work was unconnected with personal faith. Their work was secular, but surely affected by what they were. What they were was, in turn, influenced by a conception of man's place in the Universe that Christianity had taught.

There's long been a fashion among Western academic sociologists for placing tribal value systems within a ring fence, beyond critiques founded in our own culture: “theirs” and therefore best for “them”; authentic and of intrinsically equal worth to ours.

I don't follow this. I observe that tribal belief is no more peaceable than ours; and that it suppresses individuality. People think collectively; first in terms of the community, extended family and tribe. This rural-traditional mindset feeds into the “big man” and gangster politics of the African city: the exaggerated respect for a swaggering leader, and the (literal) inability to understand the whole idea of loyal opposition.

Anxiety - fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things - strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and, call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won't take the initiative, won't take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders.

How can I, as someone with a foot in both camps, explain? When the philosophical tourist moves from one world view to another he finds - at the very moment of passing into the new - that he loses the language to describe the landscape to the old. But let me try an example: the answer given by Sir Edmund Hillary to the question: Why climb the mountain? “Because it's there,” he said.

To the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one would not climb the mountain. It's... well, there. Just there. Why interfere? Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary's further explanation - that nobody else had climbed it - would stand as a second reason for passivity.

Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.

Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.

And I'm afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.

Matthew Parris joined The Times as parliamentary sketchwriter in 1988, a role he held until 2001. He had formerly worked for the Foreign Office and been a Conservative MP from 1979-86. He has published many books on travel and politics and an autobiography, Chance Witness, for which he won the 2004 Orwell Prize. His diary appears in The Times on Thursdays, and his Opinion column on Saturdays

This is a remarkable article because of Parris picks up what so many superficial commentators fail to see. The Gospel transforms hearts, minds, and lives before it transforms communities. But the overall impact is like no other. We loved the observation that people under the influence of the Missions and the Gospel stood straight, and walked tall.

Hat Tip: The Briefing Room