(ACNS) The Archbishop of Canterbury has given a message of support to the people of Haiti affected by the devastation caused by Tuesday’s earthquake.

“I am profoundly shocked and concerned to hear about the devastating earthquake in Haiti. As the news comes through, we are learning more about the tragic loss of life, injury suffered and terrible damage to the country. We stand alongside all the people in Haiti affected by this terrible disaster in prayer, thought and action as the situation unfolds. We pray for the rescue of those still trapped and look towards the rebuilding of lives and communities.

I commend the swift action of the Department for International Development and the relief agencies and churches in mobilising an emergency response. In this time of catastrophic loss and destruction, I urge the public to hold the people of Haiti in their prayers, and to give generously and urgently to funding appeals set up for relief work.”

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Dear Friends,

Please pray for our brothers and sisters in Haiti.

– Haiti is the largest and fastest-growing diocese in The Episcopal Church.

– There are over 83,000 Episcopalians in Haiti

– There are over 110 Episcopal Churches in Haiti, and over 200 Episcopal schools

The Episcopal Church in Haiti has lost a cathedral, convent, Holy Trinity Complex, College St. Pierre, and a Jubilee Center. The Bishop has no place to live. Thankfully, the four missionaries are all accounted for – Mallory Holding, Jude Harmon, Oge Beauvoir and his wife Serette.

How can you help?
Check the Haiti page on Episcopal Relief & Development website http://www.er-d.org/

Donate and encourage others to donate to Episcopal Relief & Development by calling 800-334-7626 ext 5129. https://www.er-d.org/donate-select.php

Episcopal Relief & Development has a four star rating on Charity Navigator and meets all 20 standards of the Better Business Bureau.

Episcopal Relief & Development has a long partnership with The Episcopal Church in Haiti. http://www.er-d.org/HaitiEarthquakeResponse

We have already been listed in a number of news outlets, including CNN, ABC, MSNBC. We can still use your support. Call your local media contacts and sources and request that Episcopal Relief & Development be included in their list of relief organizations for Haiti.

Place a link to Episcopal Relief & Development on your congregation or diocesan home page. http://www.er-d.org/

Share this information on Sunday and in your bulletin inserts. Bulletin inserts from Episcopal Relief & Development are available in both Spanish and English. http://www.er-d.org/BulletinInsertsCT/

Please do not encourage anyone to travel to Haiti.

Priority must be given to first responders and a few relief agencies so as not to over-burden the already compromised infrastructure.

Thank you for all that you do for our Church.

Peace,

Malaika Kamunanwire

Senior Director, Marketing and Communications

Episcopal Relief & Development

Archbishop Joseph Serge-Miot was reported dead after the Tuesday earthquake that measured 7.0 on the Richter scale.

Father Andre Siohan, a missionary of the French St. Jacques Society, e-mailed the Missionary International Service News Agency a few hours after the quake, which was centered less than 10 miles from Port-au-Prince, the country’s capital.

“Nou atè nèt,” the priest wrote, which means in Creole, “We are on our knees.”

“I went to the city center this morning to visit the other religious communities,” he said. “The area is completely devastated and there are thousands of victims.”

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Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere with 80% of the population living under the poverty line and 54% in abject poverty. Two-thirds of all Haitians depend on the agricultural sector, mainly small-scale subsistence farming, and remain vulnerable to damage from frequent natural disasters, exacerbated by the country’s widespread deforestation. While the economy has recovered in recent years, registering positive growth since 2005, four tropical storms in 2008 severely damaged the transportation infrastructure and agricultural sector.

Before you look, please guess the GDP per capita income of Haiti (the United States is tenth in the world at $47,500 for comparison purposes) Read it all.

Caught this on the morning run–brings it home. Watch it all.

Haiti Bishop Jean Zaché Duracin’s home was destroyed in the earthquake and his wife injured her foot, according to news received mid-morning on Jan. 13 by the Rev. Christopher A. Johnson, the U.S.-based Episcopal Church’s officer for social and economic justice. Duracin was not injured in the earthquake. The Roman Catholic Archbishop Joseph Serge Miot of Port-au-Prince died in the earthquake, according to the Associated Press. The Roman Catholic Cathedral was badly damaged.

The Episcopal Church has four U.S.-based missionaries working in Haiti, three of whom were in-country when the earthquake hit: the Rev. Oge Beauvoir, 53, dean of the theological seminary in Port-au-Prince, and Young Adult Service Corps volunteers Mallory Holding, 23, of Chicago and Jude Harmon, 28, of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Charleston disaster relief worker Jerry Miner knows the earthquake in Haiti could be the start of a human nightmare that has every chance of escalating.

“The information is the destruction is on the scale of the (Pacific) tsunami,” said Miner, who works with West Ashley-based Water Missions International. “This is big and horrible.

Note especially the how to help section at the bottom. I esepcially want to highlight Water Missions International as a worthy idea for donations. In any event, read it all.

A lot of very helpful links to look at.

President Obama set the U.S. government Wednesday on a massive rescue and relief operation in the devastated capital of Haiti, ordering the rapid mobilization of military and diplomatic assistance, and pledging an aggressive effort to save the lives of those caught in Tuesday’s earthquake.

Naval ships steamed south and flights began shuttling search-and-rescue teams to dig through rubble in Port-au-Prince. Military aircraft flew over the island, mapping the destruction, while U.S. officials coordinated the efforts of non-governmental aid agencies. Coast Guard helicopters began flying seriously wounded Americans from the island nation’s U.S. Embassy to the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba., about 200 miles away.

“With just a few hundred miles of ocean between us and a long history that binds us together, Haitians are neighbors of the Americas and here at home,” Obama said, calling the earthquake an “especially cruel and incomprehensible tragedy.”

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Look through the whole gallery.

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We the Bishops of Province Two of The Episcopal Church were gathered for our annual retreat when we learned of the great earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Having spent our 2008 retreat in that country, we were already very conscious of the desperate situation of the Haitian people and of our Diocese of Haiti. This new disaster which has injured and killed so great a number touches us very deeply. Haiti is the poorest nation of the hemisphere and therefore the less able to cope with such a catastrophe.

Our brother Bishop Zaché Duracin had not been able to attend our retreat this year, and we learned with relief that he is unscathed. However, we have reports that his wife Marie-Édithe has been injured and their family home destroyed. It appears also that one of the Roman Catholic bishops of Port-au-Prince was killed when his office collapsed during the earthquake. Along with the great number of Haitian expatriates and all those who have loved ones and friends there, we await news of them with impatience and worry, including the Episcopal missionaries who do extraordinary work in that country.

We ask therefore that the faithful of our dioceses, as well as all people of good will, pray for this people devastated by yet another cataclysm, that they will know the mercy and comfort of the Holy Trinity. To support immediately our brother Bishop Duracin in the work of reconstruction, we pledge at least $10,000 from our own resources. We ask our members to join in these efforts by giving to Episcopal Relief and Development.

The efficiency of Episcopal Relief and Development in helping people in these crises is well known. They will update their website, www.er-d.org as they receive fresh information. They are currently accepting donations to the Haiti Fund (https://www.er-d.org/donate-select.php) to support this assistance.

The Diocese of Haiti is the largest in The Episcopal Church. The efforts of their clergy and laity to proclaim and live out the Good News of Jesus Christ have in the past earned our profound admiration. Now that they have suffered yet another calamity, may the Holy Spirit give us the strength and resources to meet their new needs.

Signed,

Bishop Gladstone Adams

Bishop Mark Bethwick

Bishop George Councell

Bishop Michael Garrison

Bishop William Love

Bishop Larry Provenzano

Bishop Prince Singh

Bishop Mark Sisk

Bishop Pierre Whalon

A Message from the Rev. Kesner Ajax, Partnership Program Coordinator for the Episcopal Diocese of Haiti, received January 13, 2010

Dear Friends in Christ:

We have devastating news to share with you from Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake yesterday. According to reports I have received here in Les Cayes, the damage in Port au Prince and areas around it is terrible. There is no Cathedral. The entire Holy Trinity complex is gone. The convent for the Sisters of St. Margaret is gone. The Bishop’s house is gone. College St. Pierre is gone. The apartment for College St. Pierre is still standing. Bishop no longer has a house in which to live. In Trouin, four people were killed during a service.In Grand Colline, the church is gone. In St. Etienne Buteau the church, the rectory and the school are gone.

In Les Cayes, BTI is OK, but some people were injured trying to get out of the buildings during the quake. The rectory in Les Cayes is in very bad condition.

The Rev. Kesner Ajax
Executive Director, Bishop Tharp Institute (BTI)

Please read it all.

Read it all.

The death toll from Haiti’s 7.0 magnitude earthquake is at least 100,000 and could be several times that number, Haitian officials said Wednesday.

Haitian Consul General Felix Augustin said the capital Port-au-Prince “is flattened, CNN reported.

“More than 100,000 are dead,” Felix Augustin told reporters.

Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive said it could be much worse, saying several hundred thousand people may have been killed.

Makes the heart very sad–the Lord be with them. Read it all.

An earthquake with a magnitude of 7.0 has struck the impoverished Caribbean nation of Haiti.

The U.S. Geological Survey says the earthquake struck Tuesday afternoon. There are unconfirmed reports that a hospital has collapsed. A tsunami watch has been issued for the neighboring Dominican Republic, along with Cuba and the Bahamas.

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Bougainvillea shade the pathways at the Cementerio General del Sur, where the mausoleums of statesmen and movie stars stand next to the graves of aristocrats and thousands of commoners. Sculpted lions gaze down from sepulchers. Elegance, not anarchy, once defined this resting place.

No longer.

Now, crypts for once-feared military rulers have been ransacked. Coffins, twisted open with crowbars, lie strewn under samán trees. Cages with padlocked gates surround the burial sites of some families, as if that might protect them from a disturbing reality: not even Caracas’s city of the dead is safe.

Accompanying Venezuela’s soaring levels of murders and kidnappings, its cemeteries are the setting for a new kind of crime wave. Grave robbers are looting them for human bones, answering demand from some practitioners of a fast-growing transplanted Cuban religion called Palo that uses the bones in its ceremonies.

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Iran is helping to detect uranium deposits in Venezuela and initial evaluations suggest reserves are significant, President Hugo Chavez’s government said Friday.

Mining Minister Rodolfo Sanz said Iran has been assisting Venezuela with geophysical survey flights and geochemical analysis of the deposits, and that evaluations “indicate the existence of uranium in western parts of the country and in Santa Elena de Uairen,” in southeastern Bolivar state.

“We could have important reserves of uranium,” Sanz told reporters upon arrival on Venezuela’s Margarita Island for a weekend Africa-South America summit. He added that efforts to certify the reserves could begin within the next three years.

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Because of political turmoil in Honduras following the arrest of President Manuel Zelaya, members of St. Christopher’s Episcopal Church in Killeen have canceled their annual medical mission trip to the Central American country.

Officials at the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, issued a statement last week requesting that people avoid all nonessential travel to the region.

On June 28, soldiers ousted the democratically elected Zelaya before an unpopular constitution referendum went to a vote. The referendum could have allowed the president to run for a second term, which is forbidden by the Honduran constitution. Zelaya, forced into exile in Costa Rica, vowed to stay in power.

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The Bishop of Honduras has written to the House of Bishops, asking their prayers for his country after Sunday’s ouster of President Mel Zelaya.

“So far, the entire clergy, lay leadership and our families are all well,” the Rt. Rev. Lloyd Allen wrote on June 29 in an e-mail to the House of Bishops.

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President Barack Obama says the weekend ouster of Honduran leader Manuel Zelaya was a “not legal” coup and that he remains the country’s president.

Obama spoke to reporters in the Oval Office on Monday after meetings with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe. Obama said he wanted to be very clear that President Zelaya is the democratically elected president.

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(Taiwan Church News)

Evangelism should definitely be one of the missions of the church and many churches today are trying their best to excel in this area. Some churches try to research the local sub-culture before promoting a strategy. Others participate in mission conferences in search for the best method available to spread the gospel. Still others try to mimic successful models they have seen other organizations apply in order to invigorate local evangelism. However, regardless of how much effort churches put into the ministry of evangelism, who is the key person affecting the development of this ministry? The answer is the pastor.

Though churches may have successful evangelism strategies, as soon as the pastor moves away, everything comes to a halt. Furthermore, all the resources and experiences that the previous pastor built during his time ministering in the area are seldom passed on, so the new pastor must often start from scratch. Though this phenomenon is a major loss and a waste of resources for many local churches, it has always been prevalent among churches from past to present. Therefore, the pastor becomes an important topic of discussion when discussing evangelism ministries.

When studying this issue, one important item that cannot be ignored is the negative effect a pastor’s relocation will have on local evangelism ministries. Furthermore, the higher the rate of relocation, the more harm is inflicted. So, how do we prevent this situation and stop the harm that is being inflicted? Below are my humble suggestions.

First, we must revise the current system. We are confident that pastors are very clear about their calling and will always be faithful to their churches. They normally will not relocate based on impulse alone. However, the realities of life often tempt them to relocate and the decision to move or stay is not determined by one individual alone. Therefore, churches and pastors must first agree that pastors will not look at the relocation issue lightly. In addition, churches must endeavor to remove factors that would tempt a pastor to relocate. For example, within the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan (PCT), pastoral salary and related benefits are major temptations luring pastors away from churches they are currently serving. The reason is because a pastor’s salary and benefits are often determined by the financial situation of the church where the pastor is serving. Since salaries vary a lot depending on where one is serving, many pastors must use their skills to fight for “top jobs”. Such a system in the PCT creates an inevitable collision between a pastor’s calling and the realities of life, which is a problem we must address. The high turnover among pastors in rural churches is a well-documented fact. How can Christians have confidence their church’s evangelism ministries when top leadership at the church is constantly changing? Though overhauling the current system will be a long process, it is also a problem the PCT must address because the effects of high turnover rates are harming church evangelism as a whole. The General Assembly and local presbyteries can assist and encourage pastors by offering subsidies to financially poor churches so that they can pay for their pastors’ vocational training or increase their pastors’ income. That way, pastors won’t be distracted by looking for more salary to support his family.

Second, we must allow local churches to partner with seminaries so that seminaries can nurture the kind of pastors churches need. That way, once seminarians graduate, they can return and serve the churches that sponsored them. This would greatly improve the development and continuation of local evangelism because these graduates will already know a great deal about the local church’s history, background, and outreach ministries. They will also already possess a lot of knowledge about the needs of the locals. Though this suggestion may affect the PCT’s system determining how and where seminarians are sent upon graduation, the change would also facilitate the way church evangelism is passed down and carried on, thus worthy of some reflection.

There are many success stories today when it comes to church evangelism, and in all of them, the pastor plays a key role. Furthermore, the length of a pastor’s tenure also affects the local church’s attempts at evangelism. The more frequently a church’s pastor relocates, the harder it is for that church’s ministry to bear fruit. One reason is that church members can sense whether a pastor exhibits confidence in his daily work, which will have spillover effects in church evangelism. Therefore, the challenges facing evangelism ministries mentioned above should not be glossed over. I hope that my humble suggestions above will stir discussion on the topic as we seek to find solutions to problems and improve the way churches do missions.

The Yanomami leaders are wading into a politicized debate about how officials react to health care challenges faced by the Yanomami and other Amazonian tribes. In recent interviews here, government officials contended that the Yanomami could be exaggerating their claims to win more resources from the government and undercut its authority in the Amazon.

Meanwhile, the Yanomami claims come amid growing concern in Venezuela over indigenous health care after a scandal erupted in August over a tepid official response to a mystery disease that killed 38 Warao Indians in the country’s northeast.
“This government makes a big show of helping the Yanomami, but rhetoric is one thing and reality another,” said Ramón González, 49, a Yanomami leader from the village of Yajanamateli who traveled recently to Puerto Ayacucho, the capital of Amazonas State, to ask military officials and civilian doctors for improved health care.

“The truth is that Yanomami lives are still considered worthless,” said González, who was converted to Christianity by New Tribes Mission, a Florida group expelled in 2005. “The boats, the planes, the money, it’s all for the criollos, not for us,” he said, using a term for nonindigenous Venezuelans.

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(ENS) The Episcopal Diocese of Haiti is trying to evaluate the needs of Haitians in the wake of four storms that have battered Hispaniola in less than a month.

“What has happened is very hard to us,” Bishop Jean Zache Duracin wrote September 10 in response to an email inquiry from ENS. “As you may know, many people died, disappeared [or are] hurt. The whole [of] Haiti has been affected, a country where the socio-economic situation was already bad. Many people have been left homeless, with no food and clothes, etc.”

“Many of our church buildings have been affected. We are now doing an evaluation of what we have lost, but because of problems of communication, that will take some time.”

Duracin, noting that usually in such situations many people wait for the church to respond, wrote that “the church here is making efforts to help. We are preparing to send food and other primary necessity materials to victims, but because of lack of ways of communication our work is very difficult.”

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