NAMB provides funds to storm-damaged states. The Southern Baptist Convention's North American Mission Board is sending $950,000 to Baptist conventions in seven states hard-hit by tornadoes and storms. Funds are being sent to Alabama, $494,000 (52 percent of the total); Missouri and Tennessee, $114,000 each (12 percent each); Mississippi, $66,500 (7 percent); Arkansas and Oklahoma, $57,000 each (6 percent each); and Georgia, $47,500 (5 percent).
Nigerian Baptist leader critiques government. The head of the Nigerian Baptist Convention said his country's government is losing credibility over its inability to control a militant Islamic group responsible for bombings of public buildings, including police stations and Christian churches. Olasupo Ayokunle, general secretary of the 2.5-million-member Baptist body, said the federal government has shown so far it is not on top of the menace posed by a violent sect called Boko Haram that is seeking to impose Sharia law in Nigeria's northern states. Boko Haram claimed responsibility for last year's Christmas Eve attack on Victory Baptist Church in Maiduguri, in which the pastor was shot to death and two members were hacked to death inside the church. Despite assurances by security chiefs that they are being held in check, suspected members of Boko Haram bombed four areas of Maiduguri July 12, killing at least 50 people.
Host families wanted for exchange students. AFS Intercultural Programs is seeking Texas host families for high school exchange students arriving stateside in August. Each year, AFS Intercultural Programs welcomes more than 2,500 international high school students to the United States. These young people are selected in their home countries to study in American high schools and are eager to experience American life. To find out more, contact Anne Houlihan at (800) 876-2377 ext. 2263 or e-mail [email protected].
Professor seeks moderate stories. A Western Kentucky University professor is seeking contributors for an upcoming book detailing moderate responses to the takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention in the 1980s. Carl Kell's 2006 Exiled: Voices of the Southern Baptist Convention Holy War contained first-person essays by individuals estranged by the ideological shift from the mainstream of American Protestantism to the embrace of biblical inerrancy and the Religious Right in the nation's second-largest faith group. Kell said the next book—tentatively titled Exiled II: The Lost Generation—will tap two groups. One is sons, daughters and close friends of first-generation exiles now in their adult years with a second-generation story to tell. The other is young adults who grew up in Cooperative Baptist Fellowship churches and embrace the movement's values but have no frame of reference for the SBC controversy that brought it about. Exiled II would be the fourth book in a series that began when Kell and the late Raymond Camp co-authored In the Name of the Father: The Rhetoric of the New Southern Baptist Convention, in 1999.
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