Missionaries

The war in the Persian Gulf threatens the future of Christian missionary work in the region for years to come, according to U.S. religious leaders who work in their denomination's foreign mission units. "Things are not going to be the same," said Erich Bridges, news editor for the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention. Missionary work will be harmed "for a half a century anyway," said William H.

With family and friends gathered around him, his hands slightly shaking, Steven Davis tore open the envelope last spring and read his future: Buenos Aires. In those two words, Davis, 19, learned where he would spend the next two years of his life as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He is among some 45 Mormons from the San Fernando Valley who went to Provo, Utah, this summer for language training and religious study.

Rebels in Chad freed a U.S. missionary after holding him hostage for more than nine months in the central African country's remote north, his organization said. Steven Godbold, who was captured by rebels while helping a local organization transport equipment to drill water wells, was freed late Thursday, the Wheaton, Ill.-based Evangelical Alliance Mission said in a statement. Godbold, 49, was held by Chad's rebel Movement for Democracy and Justice in Chad, which suspected him of being a spy for the government.

The government Wednesday ordered nine more missionaries--eight Americans and one Canadian--out of Kenya, the U.S. Embassy said. The missionaries have been accused of plotting to topple President Daniel Arap Moi's government. Kenya deported seven U.S. missionaries on similar charges on Friday. In Washington, State Department spokesman Charles Redman dismissed the coup charge as "patently absurd."

The letter that all of Kenya has been talking about this week reveals an unbelievably sinister plot: a Ku Klux Klan plan to topple several African presidents, funded by an $80-million war chest and using American missionaries in Kenya as undercover operatives. President Daniel Arap Moi's government, which for months has accused unnamed missionaries here of "subversive activities" but produced no evidence, saw the letter as a smoking gun.

Their trademark bicycles parked outside, Elders Bundy and Winterton paid a call on one Curtis Hawkins recently and, taking turns with their host, alternately read about baptism from the Book of Mormon and the Bible. Hawkins, a 45-year-old ex-convict, had been immersed in Scripture study for the last year at two evangelical churches, but he had yet to take the plunge into either church's baptismal pool.

An Indian court sentenced one man to death and 12 others to life in prison this week for the 1999 murders of an Australian Christian missionary and his two sons. Judge Mahendra Nath Patnaik ordered capital punishment for Dara Singh, the chief defendant, in a packed courtroom in the northern Indian state of Orissa.

The first Christian missionaries came here nearly two centuries ago on sailing ships; now they come by jet. They once preached under palm trees, on beaches and in villages; now they use television. Tongans killed three of the first six missionaries who landed here in 1796 and it took the missionaries 40 more years to make inroads. Today more than 95% of Tonga's 96,000 Polynesian people are Christians and the nation is considered a model of missionary success.

It was only 9:30 a.m. on this high-desert plain but Hans Benning and his crew of believers had been pouring sweat for five hours, laboring on a shelter for a small congregation of Navajo Christians. It was their fourth day of work when Benning lost his footing and landed hard on his backside while clambering across the shelter's partly built roof. But the 49-year-old Studio City man, who already was concealing a broken hand, barely paused.

The Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board has asked a newly appointed missionary to resign because of what the board called a lack of clarity in his views on the deity, miracles and resurrection of Christ. The Rev. Michael E. Willett was asked to resign in June, two months after he was appointed by the board to serve as a seminary teacher in Venezuela. He submitted his resignation June 18 but rescinded it in a July 7 telephone call to the mission board in Richmond, Va.