wfn.org | Episcopalians: News Briefs

[dmack@episcopalchurch.org]

May 5, 2003

2003-096

Episcopalians: News Briefs

Episcopal Church missionary describes mood in China as it faces 
health threat of SARS

(ENS) The Rev. Elyn MacInnis, who serves an interdenominational 
English-speaking congregation in Beijing as an appointed 
missionary of the Episcopal Church, recently sent an e-mail 
describing the tension in China as it faces the threat of Severe 
Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

"The hospitals are bursting, and even a tour group of 20 Germans 
has been affected," she wrote. "They are all in Union Hospital 
where I used to teach English. One has died, and quite a few are 
now having fever, the first symptom. In one hospital the police 
surrounded the hospital and evacuated all the people inside 
because it was not an official SARS hospital, yet 60 of the 
doctors and nurses inside all had SARS. Our local hospital is 
now a SARS hospital."

She reported that "the supermarkets are almost empty, and the 
farmers don't want to come to the markets. We seem to have a few 
farmers with produce in our market, but my friend's vegetable 
market is basically shut. Try to find some disinfectant or 
bleach--there is none to be found. I bought the last 10 bottles 
of Chlorox from our local foreign market at the Lido Hotel for 
the members of the team with whom I film once a month, and they 
were so grateful. Their markets had nothing in them."

She said that "all schools are now shut, and the university 
campuses are also shut and quarantined for the next two weeks, 
including Beijing University and Qinghua University (China's 
MIT). The foreign schools have a pretty good system going, where 
anyone with a fever or cough (for any reason) is asked to stay 
home, and children are checked for fever before class. Everyone 
has to wash their hands many times in the day, and that seems to 
help a lot." 

MacInnis said that the foreign hospital near her apartment is 
not reporting any cases of SARS. "Of course, no one really wants 
to go to the hospital, since if they don't really have SARS, 
then going to the hospital should give them ample chance to 
catch it. My Chinese teacher's husband is a doctor, and he is 
now living at the hospital and doesn't come home. The son has 
been sent off to live with Grandpa, since his school is shut and 
the Mom is away all day still." 

According to MacInnis, "The foreign population is doing better 
than the local population, since many of them live in individual 
houses or places with better sanitation, although it is a bit 
rattling for those of us in apartment houses, since the drain 
pipes here are so terrible with no traps and the SARS virus 
comes up through the drain pipes. I disinfect our drainpipe 
openings twice a day. Most foreigners want to go home, no 
question about that, since if the local hospitals get 
overwhelmed by patients there will be no place to get proper 
medical treatment. I think that point may come soon." 

She reported that "the train station and the airport were packed 
with people--all bailing out of Beijing. I just talked to one of 
our pianists who is married to a Beijinger, and she said her 
part of town is completely empty. They ate dinner in a 
McDonald's that had 14 people in it. The usual number of people 
is five or six times that. She felt comfortable since there were 
so few people there. The servers all had masks, and they sprayed 
the tables with a disinfectant after each group left. On the 
streets it is so quiet that she thought it was almost like her 
home town in England. "

She concluded her report with a question: "How do I feel? I 
alternate between nervous, confident, and numb."

Church blows up for the convenience of worshipers  

((ENI) If you can't get people to come to church you can take 
the church to the people, believes Michael Gill, a British 
events organizer, who sees his inflatable church that can be put 
up anywhere as a fun way to draw worshipers.

The air-filled structure is made of fire- retardant PVC, and its 
steeple stretches to 47 feet. It has "stained glass" windows and 
even an inflatable altar.

"Traditional church buildings don't compel us to come in. They 
simply say, You know where the church is if you want to come," 
Gill told ENI. "The inflatable church is in-your-face. It says, 
Get involved!"

Gill sees the inflatable church as an answer to falling 
religious attendance in the United Kingdom and other countries. 
It could be carried around and used for impromptu services 
anywhere, from town squares to deprived municipal housing 
estates.

Gill, aged 34 and a father of two, is especially concerned that 
traditional churches are ceasing to be part of children's lives, 
and sees his design as a way to put this right.

"It will be a pied piper for children," he said. "They will 
think it's a bouncy castle, although in fact it's a rigid 
structure. It will be an opportunity, however, to combine 
religion with fun activities."

Gill said the church can be assembled in three hours and 
dismantled in fewer than two. With a popular Web site and media 
coverage around the world, Gill says he has received many 
inquiries from clergy, particularly in the United States and 
Britain. Now he aims to persuade church leaders to put their 
weight behind the project.

The Web site states: "No problem with high heels - our church 
has a hard floor. But please, No Smoking!"

The building, which measures 175 square feet, will be made in 
Belgium and offered for sale or hire. The purchase price is 
$35,000. Gill is also dreaming of other inflatable buildings. He 
is planning  an inflatable pub which can give a touch of England 
anywhere, from the North Pole to the Sahara Desert.

(The inflatable church can be found at 
www.inflatablechurch.com.)

Zurich Protestants beg forgiveness for persecuting Mennonites 
and Amish

(ENI) Protestants in the Swiss canton of Zurich have made a 
public apology for the persecution during the 16th century 
Reformation era of a radical Christian movement called 
Anabaptists, whose present-day successors include many 
Mennonites and the Amish community in North America.

At a service in Zurich cathedral, Reformed Christians from 
Switzerland, and Mennonites and Amish from the United States, 
held out the hand of friendship to each other.

"The Reformed churches of Switzerland persecuted the 
Anabaptists. The resulting injustice, centuries ago, was a 
betrayal of the Gospel, something we now recognize with horror," 
said Ruedi Reich, president of the Cantonal Reformed Church of 
Zurich, at the service.

A contingent of about 40 Amish from the United States, wearing 
their distinctive plain dress, sat in the front rows of the 
cathedral's nave as Reich made his statement.

The Amish and many Mennonites trace their roots to the Swiss 
Brethren, a 16th-century radical Christian movement near Zurich, 
vigorously denounced and combated by Ulrich Zwingli, Zurich's 
leading Protestant Reformer, and his followers.

"In the name of my people we forgive you in the name of Jesus. 
In him, we find the power to forgive you, bless you and love 
you," Bishop Ben Girod, an Amish leader from Montana, told the 
spiritual heirs of Zwingli gathered in the cathedral, reported 
the Swiss Protestant news agency Protestinfo.

The Swiss Brethren were called Anabaptists, or re-baptizers, 
because of their rejection of the baptism of infants and their 
insistence on believers' baptism. They were persecuted as 
heretics both by Protestants and by Catholics, and many fled to 
America to seek refuge.

Protestinfo described Reich's speech as historic, and reported 
that it was that the first time Reformed Christians had received 
the Amish with such ceremony in the Zurich cathedral to exchange 
words of reconciliation.

The idea for the event, part of a four-day conference, came from 
Geri Keller, a retired Swiss Reformed pastor who last year 
travelled to the United States and visited a number of Amish and 
Mennonite communities. During the conference Reformed pastors 
wearing clerical attire washed the feet of the Amish and 
Mennonites present. Foot-washing, demonstrating humility, is an 
important part of Anabaptist tradition.

Church taken during apartheid handed back 22 years later by NGK  

(ENI) The former members of St. Stephen's Church, in the main 
street of Paarl in the Cape's wine-growing area, have returned 
22 years after they were forced to leave because they were the 
wrong color during the era of South Africa's racial ideology of 
apartheid.

Descendants of the congregation forced to move from a white zone 
to a church in a coloured or mixed-race area attended services 
at St. Stephen's, the first since the church's hand-over the 
previous week during celebrations for South Africa's national 
day.

"For many of us here the last 20 years were years of exile, but 
today we came home," said the Rev. Roderick Cox, St. Stephens' 
new priest. "The church in which our fathers and their fathers 
were baptised, married and buried, is back in our hands."

The church had been taken over by the Dutch Reformed Church 
(NGK), but on 27 April the original worshipers got their church 
back at a ceremony attended by both the NGK and the Anglican 
congregations.	The handing over during the week of celebrations 
for South Africa's 28 April Freedom Day was seen as a symbolic 
act of rapprochement between the NGK and the Anglican church, 
which had fought against the racist policies of the government 
at the time.

Present at the ceremony were Anglican Archbishop Njongonkulu 
Ndungane and Connie Burger, the moderator of the NGK, which had 
found justification for apartheid in the past, but has since 
renounced it. Ndungane, who succeeded Desmond Tutu as leader of 
South Africa's Anglicans, noted that St. Stephen's as well as 
the adjacent Dutch Reformed Church were packed for the ceremony, 
and that the youth of both congregations took part in it.

"This is an indication that we have to deepen the relationship 
between the Anglican and the Dutch Reformed Church. Our 
challenge is to find specific projects in which to cooperate," 
said Ndungane. Burger agreed: "May these two congregations give 
the witness that South Africa will need very much during the 
next few years."

St. Stephen's was built in 1879 to serve the mixed-race 
population at Noorde-Paarl. The congregation was forced to leave 
in 1981 after the area was declared a white group area. The 
Anglican church sold the building to the government, which in 
turn sold it to the Dutch Reformed Church.  In 1998 members of 
the St. Stephen's former congregation applied to authorities for 
the return of their land. The NGK did not oppose it, and the 
building was sold to the Anglican Church for 780,000 South 
African rands (US$105,000). On 27 April the old congregation's 
first service in the church was one held jointly with the mainly 
white NGK Noorde-Paarl congregation. 

Romania's churches to honor Christians who died under Communism 

(ENI) Romania's church leaders are drawing up a list of martyrs 
who died for the Christian faith under Communist rule, and aim 
to publish it next year.

"All the mainstream churches suffered during the communist 
period here, so this is a significant ecumenical development," 
said Costel Stoica, spokesman for the Romanian Orthodox church's 
Bucharest patriarchate.  "It's supremely important that the 
history of our churches is properly known, and that today's 
young generation is made aware of the strong moral stand which 
many people adopted," Stoica noted in an interview with ENI.

"We began collecting data in 1990, and have already published 
material on Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant Christians who 
suffered for their faith. We've now established precise criteria 
for acknowledging acts of martyrdom," Stoica said.

The criteria include meeting a violent death, death from lack of 
food and water or prison torture because of ''hatred of faith 
and church," representatives of Orthodox, Catholic and 
Protestant churches said after a meeting about the project 
earlier this year. They said the list would include 120 
Orthodox, 50 Latin (Roman) Catholics and 20 Protestants, as well 
as 150 martyrs from Romania's Greek Catholic church, which 
combines the eastern rite with loyalty to Rome, and was outlawed 
in 1948.

A Communist government took control of Romania in the years 
following the Second World War. In 1989, the country's then 
Communist ruler, Nicolae Ceausescu, was overthrown and killed.	
Archbishop Ioan Robu, president of Romania's Roman Catholic 
Bishops' Conference, said he believed a joint list of martyrs 
was an "important area for inter-church cooperation," but 
regretted the initiative was only now being taken, 14 years 
after the collapse of Communist rule.  ''It's promising that we 
now can do this in an ecumenical way," the archbishop said.

In a March 2002 census, almost 87 per cent of Romania's 
population of 21.7 million said they belonged to the Romanian 
Orthodox church, compared to about 6 per cent describing 
themselves as Latin or Greek Catholics, and 1 per cent citing 
membership of Protestant denominations.

Dorothee Soelle, the 'political conscience' of Protestantism, 
dies at 73 

(ENI) Dorothee Soelle, a German Protestant theologian who died 
recently at the age of 73, was a controversial figure in her own 
church but attracted a large following by combining Christian 
mysticism and radical political commitment.

"She was and remains the political conscience of Protestantism," 
said Maria Jepsen, the Lutheran bishop of Hamburg, where Soelle 
lived, the German Protestant news agency epd reported.

The author of more than 30 books, Soelle attracted hundreds, and 
sometimes thousands, to public gatherings in Germany and beyond. 
Her radicalism and many themes in her early works prefigured the 
later development of feminist theology.

Soelle never held a full professorship at a German university. 
Some said it was because of her support for left-wing political 
causes, such as opposition to the Vietnam war and support for 
the peace movement. From 1975 to 1987 she spent six months each 
year in New York as professor of systematic theology at Union 
Theological Seminary.

"She was genuinely and deeply rooted in the spiritual tradition 
of the Christian church and intensely engaged in the struggle 
for justice," said the Rev. Konrad Raiser, general secretary of 
the World Council of Churches (WCC).

Born in Cologne in 1929, Soelle developed a massive following at 
the time of the student revolt in West Germany. With Fulbert 
Steffensky, a Benedictine monk she later married, she founded in 
1968 the Politisches Nachtgebet in Cologne, late-evening prayers 
linking spirituality and politics in churches that became full 
to overflowing.

"It was the first time, in this form, that conflictual political 
issues were used as the focus of attention in a context of 
liturgical celebration and prayer," noted Raiser, who was then a 
university assistant in Germany and remembers Soelle from that 
time.

In 1983 an invitation to be one of the main speakers at the WCC 
assembly in Vancouver offered Soelle a wider international 
stage. She opened her speech by saying, "I speak to you as a 
woman from one of the wealthiest countries in the world; a 
country whose history is tainted with bloodshed and the stench 
of gas." The offer of a platform to such a controversial figure 
also irritated leaders of her country's main Protestant body, 
the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD).

Still, in a tribute after her death, Manfred Kock, the EKD's 
current head, praised Soelle. Her teaching was no longer a 
"marginal stance", said Kock. "It is a significant part of our 
church, preserving it from pious exclusiveness."

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