Congratulations on a great issue of NWO! It really breaks new ground. It moves beyond rhetoric and more towards personal responsibility in everyday choices we make, and towards personal spiritual quests. The former is very important, too--but speaks more to the 60s generation and earlier. The latter is the kind of thing my generation seeks. Great job!
Eddy Bikales, Associate Director, Audiovisual Department, GBGM
Every issue of New World Outlook is great but the November-December 1997 issue is exceptional. Read it from cover to cover yesterday and found a use for every article in some presentation I'm doing over the coming months. Thanks to everyone for a stellar effort! The pictures are sensational.
Barbara Bibbee, Current and Deferred Giving Director, GBGM
Interested in finding out more? Here's what's up in the November-December 1997 issue.
Simple Living: Pathway Toward Sustaining Life
Canadian author Mark A. Burch writes about "a way of life so graceful, so light, so joyous and peaceful, so creative and alive that it holds great promise for our future." Voluntary Simplicity makes room for God and claims time and space for people, memories, feelings, prayer, silence, and open emptiness. This renowned author of Simplicity: Notes, Stories, and Exercises for Developing Unimaginable Wealth gives New World Outlook readers an alternative to life that is driven, tenuous, stressful, distracting, oppressive, and decidedly empty. Click here to see two photos and captions.
Funding a Socially Responsible Credit Source
The Ecumenical Development Cooperative Society has a 20-year history of channeling social investments for affluent Christians from the United States and Europe as a major source of development credit for grassroots organizations around the world. Louis L. Knowles, EDCS's North American regional manager, writes about the Rota transit workers in Harare, Zimbabwe; organic composters in the Philippines; the women of Coopesantelena in Costa Rica (who have designed a distinctive line of embroidered clothing and accessories); and other groups in developing countries who have been able to start businesses and raise their communities' standards of living with help from an EDCS loan.
Credit Card Use, Misuse, and Abuse: A Christian Perspective
Doris Gidney, a recently retired but still working director of Current and Deferred Giving for the General Board of Global Ministries, tells how the excessive use of plastic credit cards and the resulting debt can derail and disable church members' ability to support mission in a hurting world. She provides signs of danger--indicators that tell you you've gone over the edge--and the three basic rules of financial management that will keep you out of debt.
Thirty Years of Support for Justice
Within its 30-year history, the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO) has worked to advance the struggles of oppressed people for justice and self-determination, assisting hundreds of community organizations, local churches, and public-policy groups with technical expertise, grant making, organizer training, and creative use of its global grassroots connections. Gail Walker tells the story of IFCO's testament to service, the first and only national ecumenical foundation of its time controlled by people of color and exclusively committed to the support of community organizing. Click here for a photo with caption.
52 Seconds of Terror: A Major Earthquake Hits Jabalpur, India
Jabalpur resident, Dr. J. S. Murthy, of the Methodist Church of India, took camera in hand the night an earthquake measuring 6.0 on the Richter Scale shook apart much of the city of Jabalpur and surrounding areas. The damage that a 52-second earthquake can cause is brought home in this moving photo essay.
( Click here to see two photos with captions.)Still looking for the right gifts for those special people on your Christmas list? New World Outlook gives you:
A Gallery of Alternative Gifts for Christmas
We have gifts that keep on giving--to the receiver, to the giver, and to the provider of the gift! Our exclusive gallery combines ways to support the church's mission with ways to support one another through Christmas giving. Gift catalogs from Red Bird Missionary Conference, UNICEF, SERRV International, Pueblo to People, and Equal Exchange Coffee are featured for practical gift ideas. If you prefer a gift to mission, Heifer International, Habitat for Humanity, and the Advance provide good ideas for gifts that will honor their receivers--and honor your loved ones.
How about a gift of New World Outlook to someone interested in The United Methodist Church in mission? You can get a subscription for a few people on your list--and we'll keep sending them your gift all year long.
Letting Nature Heal
As modern pharmaceuticals become more costly and out of reach for many poor communities in the developing world, community health practitioners look to traditional medicines used for centuries within indigenous communities. Paul Jeffrey covers a conference supported by the General Board of Global Ministries in which 65 church-sponsored health practitioners from 15 countries came together to share their wisdom about traditional ways of healing.
The Story of Santa Maria
Missionary George Holcombe tells the story of Santa Maria, a village in Dasmarinas Bagong Bayan in the Philippines. Over the course of 10 years, many changes took place as the community organized, developed goals and plans for action, and transformed J2 (the government's designation for the area) into the community of Santa Maria. Quina Nacpil-Pajaro, Reynita Balboa, Phoebe Yabut, and Erlinda Torrente contribute to Holcolmbe's article.
Ecology and the Amazon: A Challenge for the Methodist Church
Elizabeth Antônia Leonel de Moraes Martines from Central Methodist Church in Porto Velho, Brazil, expresses her concern for the great Amazon Region, her home, as she sees the rain forest steadily shrinking each year. She calls upon the Methodist Church in Brazil and on the world-wide community to save the Amazon ecosystem, a calling she defines as both Wesleyan and biblical in nature.
Steps Away From a Mine-Free World
William Sage of Church World Service tells the story of Jean Paul Bigirindavyi of Burundi, a young medical student crippled by a landmine while trying to escape the civil unrest in Rwanda. (Complete Text, click here).