WASHINGTON (RNS)—An evangelical businessman from Oklahoma has planned a multimillion-dollar, high-tech, interactive museum of the Bible.

The plan was announced first amid 130 biblical artifacts exhibited at the Vatican Embassy and later at a conference at Baylor University in Waco honoring the 400th anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible.

The exhibit included samples of Jewish, Roman Catholic and Protestant treasures from the future museum’s 10,000 manuscripts and texts, one of the world’s largest biblical collections.

Some are as old as pages of the gospel in the Aramaic of Jesus’ time; as political as the only Bible edition ever authorized by the U.S. Congress; and as treasured as first editions of the majestic King James Version, displayed near the king’s own seal.

These will form the basis for “a public museum designed to engage people in the history and the impact of the Bible,” said museum sponsor Steve Green, owner of the Oklahoma City-based craft chain Hobby Lobby.

The Green family has amassed the world’s largest collection of ancient biblical manuscripts and texts including his favorite—the 1782 Aitken Bible authorized by Congress.

While the location, architecture and even the museum’s name stil arel in the works, 300 highlights of the Green Collection will go on tour beginning at the Oklahoma Museum of Art on May 16. The traveling exhibit, called Passages, will move to the Vatican in October and New York City by Christmas.

Meanwhile, scholars at 30 universities worldwide are burrowing into rare texts from the collection and pioneering technology that enables them to bring out the ancient words in the most faded and printed-over manuscripts, said Scott Carroll, director of the collection and research professor of manuscript studies at Baylor University.

Carroll’s primary focus has been finding and authenticating ancient manuscripts that can deepen—or alter—“our understanding of the word of God. The Bible didn’t come from the sky as tablets handed to Moses on Mount Sinai and then wind up in a hotel desk drawer,” Carroll said.

“The Bible is not in a lockbox. It changes across time,” he said, pointing to the earliest known manuscript fragment of Genesis, a section of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a Jewish Torah (the five books of Moses) from the time of the Spanish Inquisition, and more.

Passages also will address the dramatic struggles behind the texts, as translations are a matter of life, death and eternal fate to believers. The illustrated frontispiece of one King James Version shows the king flanked by people who would be burned at the stake within 10 years.

“Translating a Bible is a soap opera of moving political and spiritual parts,” Carroll said.

There already are American museums centered on the Bible. Conservative evangelicals established the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., to walk people through a literal reading of the Bible. And the Museum of Biblical Art in Manhattan was established by the American Bible Society, which has a Christian evangelizing mission.

Green and Carroll say their museum, opening by 2016, has no theological agenda.

“Think of the great new science museums that take you inside how things work, or the Folger Library’s public and scholarly center for Shakespeare,” Carroll said. “This will be our approach to the Bible. It’s a museum, not a ministry.”

Highlights of the Green Collection include:

• The Codex Climaci Rescriptus, one of the world’s earliest surviving Bibles. Using a new technology developed by the Green Collection in collaboration with Oxford University, scholars have uncovered the earliest surviving New Testament written in Palestinian Aramaic—the language used by Jesus—found on recycled parchment.

• One of the largest collections of cuneiform clay tablets in the Western Hemisphere.

• The second-largest private collection of Dead Sea Scrolls, all of which are unpublished and likely to contribute substantially to an understanding of the earliest surviving texts in the Bible.

• Previously unpublished biblical and classical papyri, including surviving texts dating to the time of the now-lost Library of Alexandria.

• The earliest-known, near-complete translation of the Psalms to (Middle) English.

• Some the earliest printed texts, including a large portion of the Gutenberg Bible and the world’s only complete Block Bible in private hands.

WACO—When many readers describe the 1611 King James Version of the Bible, the word “majesty” tends to enter the conversation.

It’s no wonder, according to Laura Knoppers, professor of English at Penn State University.

The translators King James enlisted to create a new version of the English Bible had an agenda—to provide scriptural support for the divine right of kings, she asserted.

The Dort Bible, a rare second-edition of the Authorized King James Bible, was published in 1613. (RNS PHOTO/Pablo Richard Fernandez)

But Protestant dissidents such as John Milton, in turn, used the same language the translators appropriated to emphasize democratic principles, she observed.

Knoppers examined different views on the term “majesty” in her presentation to a convocation sponsored by Baylor University and its Institute for Studies of Religion that marked the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible.

When nonconformists brought a list of grievances to King James at the Hampton Court Conference in 1604, James later boasted he “peppered the Puritans soundly” and turned aside nearly all their demands. However, for his own reasons, he embraced their desire for a new English-language translation of the Bible.

A uniform translation could unify the English-speaking people of Great Britain, James reasoned. Also, the king realized, he could use the translation to shore up the Anglican Church and “amend and polish what was amiss” in existing English translations.

For the most part, the translators employed a variety of English words to express a single Hebrew or Greek word.

“One important exception was the reiterated word ‘majesty,’” Knoppers observed. In that case, the translators reversed normal procedure and applied that single English word to multiple words in the original biblical languages. The word “majesty” is used 72 times in the text, headings and notes of the King James Bible and 18 times in the opening dedication and preface, Knoppers discovered.

“Use of the word ‘majesty’ linked the earthly monarch with God himself,” she concluded. The translation blurred distinctions between the attributes of God and attributes of the earthly king.

However, in both his polemical writing and his epic poetry, Milton took the opposite ap-proach—stripping majesty from the office of the king and portraying it as resting upon the people at large.

“For Milton, the emphasis was on the power and dignity of the people” rather than the monarch, Knoppers said.

In Paradise Lost, Satan seeks to claim as his own majesty that rightly be-longs to God and to the couple in the garden created in God’s image—a metaphor for “kingly usurpation of divine majesty,” Knoppers ex-plained.

“Milton dramatizes the danger of usurping the characteristics of God,” she said.

WACO—Translation of Scripture grows naturally out of a central Christian theme—God making himself known by identifying with the commonplace, said Lamin Sanneh, professor of mission and world Christianity at Yale University.

“Translation into the common idiom is emblematic of the incarnation in which the Word became flesh,” Sanneh told a conference sponsored by Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion marking the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible. “Christianity is embodied faith. It must have a face. … Christianity is a translated religion, and a translated religion is necessarily interpreted.”

Christianity’s view of its holy book, the Bible, stands in sharp contrast to the Islamic attitude toward the Quran, he explained.

Muslims believe the angel Gabriel directly gave Mohammad the pure word of God in Arabic, and it remains immutable. Muslims see value in the words of the Quran, even if they are not understood.

Christians, on the other hand, believe the Bible’s value rests in the message it communicates about God, and efforts to make it understandable to varied cultures and languages are encouraged.

“Once the Quran is translated, it is no longer the Quran,” said Sanneh, who grew up Muslim and attended Islamic schools in Gambia at an early age before becoming a Christian.

“For Christians, the word of God is not sealed in idiom.”

Pentecost signaled the expansion of Christianity beyond the boundaries of one language, race and culture, he noted.

“No language is forbidden, nor is any one language a prerequisite,” he said. Christian mission takes a utilitarian view of language—God provides multiple means of making the gospel known in ways comprehensible to different people in different places, he said.

Sanneh recalled be-ing “scandalized” the first time he heard a question asked by Christian missionaries: “What name do you call God?” For a Muslim, Allah is the one and only name of God, but Christians understand God makes himself known in the language of each of the world’s people, he learned.

“Christianity is both universal and particular,” he explained. “God speaks all the languages of the world.”

God’s revelation of himself in Jesus Christ transcends culture, but at the same time, it must be translated into the language and cultural expressions to each specific culture, Sanneh observed.

“Christianity has to be embraced by an indigenous source before it takes root,” he said. “Understanding is at the heart of the gospel.”

The King James Version of the Bible demonstrated “a power intrinsic to itself that transcended the circumstances of its translation,” he observed. As English-speaking Christian missionaries translated the Bible into other languages, they often used the King James Bible as their guide, and in spite of its flaws, that version proved itself remarkably well-suited to cross-cultural expression.

“The King James Bible brought out the strength and beauty of the simple and ordinary,” he said. Its earthy idioms translated well into societies that lived close to the land, and its lyrical quality appealed to nonliterate people with oral traditions.

“Oral culture is a formidable challenge to a religion of the book,” he noted. However, the beauty of the King James narratives—even when translated into other languages—demonstrated “the triumph of the warm voice over the cold pen.”

WASHINGTON (RNS)—For evangelical author John MacArthur, the best way to explain a Christian’s relationship to Jesus is what appears to be a simple metaphor—one often used by the Apostle Paul himself.

“To be a Christian is to be a slave of Christ,” writes MacArthur, pastor of a nondenominational church in Sun Valley, Calif.

His new book, Slave: The Hidden Truth About Your Identity in Christ, explores varied practices of Bible translators regarding the controversial term. It’s also drawing mixed reactions among African-American Christians whose ancestors were slaves in 19th-century America.

While biblical texts use the word “slave” to describe actual slave-master relationships in biblical times, English translators often opt for the word “servant” when describing a believer’s relationship to God, MacArthur explained.

“The stigma was just too great with that word to use it to refer to believers, even though they knew that was what ‘doulos’ meant,” MacArthur said, referring to the Greek word for “slave.”

In most translations, the Apostle Paul describes himself as “a servant of Jesus Christ” in Romans 1:1, but the Southern Baptists’ Holman Christian Standard Bible has him using the term “slave of Jesus Christ.”

It’s the same in Luke’s famous Nativity account, where the Virgin Mary calls herself “the Lord’s servant” or “the handmaid of the Lord” in most versions, while the Holman Bible calls her “the Lord’s slave.”

The New International Version, a top-selling Bible whose latest edition was released March 1, continues its translations of Paul as “a servant of Christ Jesus,” and Mary as “the Lord’s servant.”

Some African-American leaders have long stayed away from the slave language, and they differ with MacArthur’s view that it’s the best way to relate to God.

“Your will is broken in slavery, and I don’t think God wants to break our will,” said Joseph Lowery, a retired United Methodist pastor and icon of the civil rights movement. “I’m a little slow to accept the word ‘slave’ because it has such a nasty history in my tradition.”

MacArthur argues that using the word “slave” is just one of many concepts in the Bible that might be unappealing—hell’s generally not a crowd-pleaser, either—but are nevertheless key to reading and understanding the sacred text.

“You can’t let the Bible usage of the concept of slavery be informed by the abuses of the African slave trade,” said MacArthur, who devotes pages in his book to describing first-century Roman slavery. “That’s not the context in which it was written.”

But MacArthur said there’s an important theological meaning to the term “slave,” however politically incorrect the word may be.

“You give obedience to the one who has saved you from everlasting judgment,” he said.

When the more inclusive New Revised Standard Version of the Bible was being developed in the 1980s, its translation committee sought advice from African-American scholars about whether to use “slave” or “servant.”

Cain Hope Felder, a New Testament professor at Howard University School of Divinity, recommended “slave” when describing the institution of slavery, which was a part of the Greco-Roman world known by biblical writers. But he said descriptions of church leaders are “a totally different matter” and “servant” is more fitting.

Mitzi Smith, an associate professor of New Testament at Detroit’s Ashland Theological Seminary, said it is inappropriate to “sanitize” the word by changing it to “servant,” but she disagrees with the idea that the master-slave relationship is the ideal image for God and Christian believers.

“We have so many more examples to show how to be in relationship with God,” she said. “A slave-master relationship is not one of willing obedience and what God seeks is willing obedience and a relationship of love with us.”

Other African-American leaders, however, embrace both the use of “slave” throughout the Bible and MacArthur’s interpretation of it.

Dallas H. Wilson Jr., vicar of St. John’s (Episcopal) Chapel in Charleston, S.C., hosted a three-day work-shop in early February to promote MacArthur’s book.

“I think what we have done is we have translated slavery ‘servant’ and watered it down,” said Wilson, who leads a predominantly black congregation of about 70 people.

“Instead of condemning the system, we should condemn the abuses.”

WACO—Regions Martin Luther never knew have embraced biblical books the Protestant reformer never liked, author and educator Philip Jenkins said.

“If Luther hated it, it goes down great in Africa,” said Jenkins, professor of humanities at Penn State University and co-director of the program on historical studies of religion at Baylor University. He spoke at a conference at Baylor marking the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible.

The earliest copies of the King James Bible included the Old Testament Apocrypha—books the church considered valuable but did not accept as inspired Scripture.

Luther’s earlier German translation of the Bible also had included the Apocrypha, segmented from the Old and New Testament to indicate its content did not carry the same weight.

But Luther took an additional step. He placed books he considered of little value—notably Esther, Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation—at the back of the Bible to indicate they occupied “an inferior category,” Jenkins said.

Eventually, Protestant Bibles dropped the Old Testament Apocrypha, particularly after the English Bible societies began printing copies of the Scripture without those disputed books.

“The Bible the British spread around the world lacked the Apocrypha,” Jenkins said.

If the printers and distributors of Bibles had dropped the books Luther segregated in his translation, 21st century Christianity in the global south might look different, he asserted.

When, in their introduction to the King James Bible, translators wrote about the Bible “manifesting itself abroad in the farthest parts of Christendom,” they never envisioned how far some of those parts might be, Jenkins said. Today, the largest markets for Bibles are Brazil, India, China, Indonesia and Nigeria, he noted.

Luther considered the New Testament book of James an “epistle of straw” that emphasized good works and contradicted the Apostle Paul’s teachings on justification by grace through faith.

African, Asian and Latin American Christians, on the other hand, view James as “a practical manual for living as a global south Christian in a society marked by the sharp stratification of wealth and by scarcity of resources,” said Jenkins, author of The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South.

The pithy proverbs of James communicate well in preliterate oral cultures, and its teachings translate well into cultures where Christianity is a minority religion, he observed.

Asian Christians can witness to their Buddhist neighbors on common ground when they share James’ description of life as “a vapor that appears for a little while and vanishes way.” And Christians in Islamic countries can earn the respect of their Muslim neighbors when they heed James’ admonition not to presume upon the future but to say, “If God wills, we shall live and do this or that,” Jenkins added.

Christians in North America and Europe have difficulty relating to the sacrificial systems central to the New Testament book of Hebrews, but African Christians relate readily to it, he noted.

“Hebrews might be considered the national epistle of Africa,” Jenkins said. “Sacrifice is everywhere.”

In cultures where people understand firsthand the prevalence of animal sacrifice and the reality of genocide, Christians are drawn to Hebrews and Revelation—“the bloodiest books in the New Testament,” he said.

African and Chinese Christians understand Revelation as a message of hope to persecuted people today, not just a description of events at the end of time, Jenkins noted.

“Different books speak differently to different people,” he said. “What people hear depends on who is doing the hearing.”

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (RNS)—Even long before the times of Jesus and the Apostle Paul, Malta was the rocky knob at the western edge of the Roman Empire, the place where the leftovers of the Mediterranean Sea washed up and dug in.

And Malta is the site of what Huntsville, Ala., software salesman John Harkins believes will be the last and best quest of his life.

Harkins, a mild-mannered, Bible-reading, Church of Christ deacon and marine biologist, is determined to be the first person since the New Testament writer Luke to see evidence of the ship that carried Paul nearly to Rome.

“I’m quite in the minority in thinking there might be some remnant,” Harkins said, unrolling charts of the island on his desk at work. “But I know we’re going to find something, though it may not be from Paul’s wreck.”

According to Acts 27, a chapter in Luke’s history of the early Christian movement, a huge ship loaded with grain, sailors, soldiers, prisoners and other passengers crashed into the coast at the end of a 14-day storm. The ship broke in half, spilling everyone into the sea.

Miraculously, the entire crew was able to struggle to shore, where they were met by the inhabitants of the 200-mile-long island, who built them a fire.

Harkins said Malta’s government places a high value on caring for and understanding relics washed on its shores. Museums catalogue ancient weapons, structures, tools and, of course, fragments of the shipping trade that made Malta a crucial outpost of vessels attempting to round the Italian boot to get to Rome.

“God put that ship there, and I figure he put it where he wants it,” Harkins said. “He gave it to the Maltese people, and frankly, he couldn’t have given it to people who do more to preserve their heritage—and it’s their heritage, along with the rest of us.”

Harkins can’t remember a time when the story of Paul’s shipwreck didn’t fascinate him. It was one of the stories that leapt out of the dim and musty antiquity of ancient stories to snap into Technicolor.

He hopes to help other people overcome doubt if he finds evidence confirming Luke’s account.

“It could be one more thing where somebody said something didn’t exist, and we can say, ‘Yeah, it did,’” Harkins said. “Maybe it will help someone who has lost their faith and wants to come back.”

When Harkins and his partners return to Malta in May for what will be his third visit to the island, he hopes to map the sub-bottom profile of areas he’s decided are likely shipwreck locations, given prevailing winds and the land forms.

Among the experts he has consulted are second-century essayist Lucian and a 19th-century book by the preacher son of an East India Company merchant. His bookshelves also bulge with various doctoral dissertations on relics found underwater and other books on archaeology, sailing and diving.

Gordon Franz, an archaeologist at the Akron, Pa.-based Associates for Biblical Research, remembers responding cautiously to Harkins’ first letters some years ago.

“We get all kinds of crackpots who contact our office about their crazy ideas or discoveries,” Franz said. “After a few exchanges, I realized this fellow knows what he is talking about, so I called him. We talked for about an hour, and he shared some nautical insights into Acts 27 which I had never considered before.”

Shipwrecks older than the one Harkins seeks have been found, Franz said. But if Harkins can find the remains of an Alexandrian grain ship, like the one that carried Paul, it would be a first.

“It would add to our knowledge of the grain ships and the grain trade in the Roman world,” Franz said. “Finding the wreck would put the Acts account on solid historical grounds.

And what if Harkins finds nothing at all, despite self-funding his search and taking time away from family and work?

“I believe we all have to search for something,” Harkins said. “And one of the reasons I’m doing this is because who else would do it? It’s not important to other people who would rather search for sunken treasure.

“The most important thing is the searching, and you have to find something you think worthwhile to search for.”

FLOWER MOUND—Fraud prevention beats fraud detection—especially for churches, Verne Hargrave, a certified public accountant and fraud examiner, told a group at RockPointe Church in Flower Mound.

“The reason why we try to do fraud prevention rather than fraud detection is because it is very hard on your stomach to get into fraud detection,” Hargrave said at the seminar, sponsored by Denton Baptist Association. “No. 1, you worry you didn’t catch it all, and then you’re overwhelmed with the sadness of it when it happens in the church.

Verne Hargrave (left), a certified public accountant and fraud examiner, discusses fraud prevention in churches with Denton Baptist Association Director of Missions Gary Loudermilk. (PHOTO/George Henson)

“A business, they dust themselves off, and then they move on. With churches, unfortunately, the money loss often isn’t the worst part of the loss. It’s the aftermath—the tsunami of bad feelings and the loss of trust.”

After experiencing that turmoil in a church whose pastor was found to be inappropriately using funds—“half the church wanted to forgive him, and the other half wanted to execute him on the spot”—Hargrave decided he would rather stop it before it happened.

The recent economic downturn has led many churches to cut expenses by trimming staff and benefits, and some have stopped administrative procedures like outside audits. All of those things heighten the risk of fraud at the worst of times.

“History shows that’s not really the time to be cutting back (on auditing expenses), because there is a spike of fraudulent activity during downturns,” Hargrave said.

Fraud is built on three elements—economic pressure, rationalization and opportunity, he said.

“It’s not usually crooks who seek out churches to steal from. It’s usually good people who find themselves in bad situations which causes them to even contemplate doing something they know is wrong,” he said.

Medical bills, personal debt or unforeseen expenses can put pressure on people to find cash from sources they normally wouldn’t consider.

Rationalization is what these good people tell themselves to convince them it is all right to take the money. The chief rationalization of those who defraud churches is: “I wasn’t stealing it; I was going to pay it back,” Hargrave said.

“But in addition to economic pressure and rationalization, there has to be a way for the fraudster to get into your system and take the money and not get caught,” he continued.

“You have very little control over the pressure and the rationalization. That’s almost totally out of your control, but you have total control over the opportunity. If the opportunity is shut down, then the pressure will be there. But the rationalization, it will be very difficult for them to cross that hurdle, because they know they’re probably going to get caught,” Hargrave said.

While most churches think it’s not a problem they need to worry about, that’s not true, he said. Four to 5 percent of all reported fraud is in churches.

“I would submit to you that it’s probably a larger percentage than that, because we as religious organizations have a tendency to sweep that under the rug, because we don’t want it to get out,” he speculated.

The median loss for churches in fraud cases is about $105,000.

“So, every time one of these losses takes place, it’s probably going to be in that six-figure ballpark, which in most churches, that’s going to hurt something. Something is going to have to be cut, so it can be significant,” Hargrave pointed out.

Some churches may believe they don’t have enough money to worry about it.

“You are a lucrative target, whether you believe it or not. You have the one thing thieves want, and that’s money. They don’t have to take something out and sell it or anything like that,” he said.

Having a lot of designated accounts where money can sit for years before it is spent can make churches prime targets because it may take awhile for anyone to notice the money is missing, Hargrave added.

“Most people still operate under the illusion that it can’t happen here. That’s the hardest hurdle we have to get over,” he said. “You have an environment conducive to that kind of activity—we trust and forgive rather than trust and verify.”

Churches can guard against fraud through policies and procedures followed strictly, he said.

“You need to have policies and procedures that are well-documented, that are adhered to and reviewed periodically. In 25 pages or less, you can have a very concise policy, but you need to do that,” Hargrave said.

A chief part of those policies and procedures should be a segregation of the financial duties. For example, the person who inputs deposits should not be the same person who writes all the checks and then later balances the bank statement. The greater number of eyes on the numbers, the less anyone will take a chance of being discovered doing something they shouldn’t.

“These procedures are not primarily to protect money, but to protect staff from false accusations and the reputation of the church. Money can sometimes be replaced somewhat quickly, but reputations are hard to recover,” he said.

WASHINGTON (RNS)—Almost all churches in the United States witnessed a change in the financial giving they received in 2010 compared to 2009, with smaller churches feeling the squeeze but larger churches faring relatively better, according to a new report.

Only 12 percent of churches reported unchanged giving from 2009, according to the State of the Plate survey, while 43 percent of churches experienced a giving increase and 39 percent reported a decrease.

Smaller congregations were more likely to see a decrease in giving, said Matt Branaugh, an editor at Christianity Today International, which helped gather the data for the State of the Plate the past two years.

“We do see smaller churches continuing to struggle, it seems more so than larger-sized churches,” Branaugh said.

The report found about 40 percent of churches with fewer than 249 attendees experienced a drop in giving. Only 29 percent of megachurches, with an average weekend attendance of more than 2,000, reported a decrease in giving, according to the report.

The percentage of churches that reported a drop in giving in 2010 rose slightly from 2009, from 38 percent to 39 percent. Churches that reported an increase in giving rose from 35 percent in 2009 to 43 percent in 2010.

The State of the Plate survey was launched in 2008 when Brian Kluth, founder of Colorado Springs, Colo.-based Maximum Generosity, realized there was minimal solid data on church finances.

The following year, Kluth’s financial consulting firm recruited Christianity Today International in compiling the report. The Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability joined both organizations this year to analyze self-reported 2010 data from churches.

The survey is a constituency survey, based on e-mail responses submitted by 1,507 congregations and is not a traditional random phone sample with a margin of error.

Almost all responding churches (91 percent) expressed concern over the potential of a government revision of the rules for charitable deductions. Kluth said the Obama administration’s proposal to reduce tax deductions for high-end charitable donors will affect gifts given to churches.

“If the government’s plan to change the rules on charitable tax deductions goes through, giving to charities and churches and the help they give to others will likely be negatively impacted at a time it is needed the most,” Kluth said.

Court fails to deliver for Adventists. Neither snow nor rain nor Saturday Sabbaths should keep a Missouri mailman from his appointed rounds, a federal appeals court has ruled. Seventh-day Adventist Hosea Harrell argued he was the victim of religious discrimination when the U.S. Postal Service refused to give him Saturdays off. Harrell took the days off anyway and was fired in 2008. Like Jews, Seventh-day Adventists observe the Sabbath from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, and they believe the day should be kept holy by refraining from secular work. But the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, upholding a lower court decision, ruled that giving Harrell Saturdays off would create an “undue hardship” for his fellow mail carriers and the post office where he worked. Also, the Warrensburg post office schedule is determined by seniority and could not have been changed without violating a collective bargaining agreement with a mail carriers’ union, according to the circuit judge. Harrell was the most junior letter carrier. The six other mail carriers were asked to give up their Saturdays but declined. Harrell was offered a different position with the USPS and leave to attend church services on Saturday, but rejected both offers, according to the judge. The routes could not have been covered using fewer carriers, the USPS argued.

American Catholics support gay rights. Although the Vatican and U.S. Catholic bishops maintain a hard-line stand against most gay rights causes, American Catholics are more supportive of gay rights than other Christians in the United States, according to new research. A report by Washington-based Public Religion Research Institute found 74 percent of Catholics favor legal recognition for same-sex relationships—either civil unions (31 percent) or civil marriage (43 percent). That figure is higher than the 64 percent of all Americans, 67 percent of mainline Protestants, 48 percent of black Protestants and 40 percent of evangelicals. Less than one-quarter (22 percent) of Catholics want no legal recognition of same-sex partnerships, while a majority (56 percent) believes same-sex adult relationships are not sinful. The analysis was based on polling conducted by PRRI and the Pew Research Center last fall. In almost every category, Catholics scored 5 to 6 percentage points higher on supporting gay rights than other American churches.

Anglicans want to convert to Catholicism. More than 900 Anglicans formally expressed a desire to convert to Catholicism at special services held at Westminster Cathedral—including the first Anglicans to join a new branch of the Catholic Church. The annual ceremonies included 62 adults who will become Catholics as part of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham. Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Westminster, head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, presided. Pope Benedict XVI set up the Personal Ordinariate as an extra-geographical body for Anglican converts who left their former church over theological differences, including the consecration of women bishops.

The Woman’s Missionary Union of Texas is making sure the Singing Men of North Central Texas will stand on solid ground when they return to the Ukraine and Crimea for a series of concerts next spring.

“I grew up in a church that had a strong WMU and strong mission organizations. I was a Sunbeam, Mission Friend and Royal Ambassador,” said Larry Collins, president of the Singing Men of North Central Texas.

“So when our organization needed some additional funding for our mission work in Ukraine, I immediately turned to the Texas WMU.”

Collins was a part of the 70-voice Singing Men of North Central Texas choir that sang 11 evangelistic concerts in eight Ukrainian cities last October.

Southern Baptist Evangelist Michael Gott preached at each concert, and their meetings resulted in more than 4,600 recorded decisions for Christ.

“In several cities, the churches were too small to host our concerts, so we sang in the local performance hall. The problem was they had no suitable risers for our men to stand on. In one hall, I had to tell the men if they weighed more than 175 pounds they couldn’t stand on the rickety risers,” Collins explained.

So in preparation for their return to Ukraine & Crimea April 23-May 4, 2012, the choir purchased a set of used choral risers. But when they checked into shipping costs, they quickly realized getting them there was going to cost a lot more than they had expected.

So, the Texas WMU stepped up and agreed to pay to ship the risers, which will be used by three Texas Baptist groups in Ukraine over the next two years. Then the risers will be given to the Ukrainian Baptist Convention, which has started the Singing Men of Ukraine.

WMU Executive Director Sandy Wisdom-Martin presented the $3,775 check to Collins and the Singing Men at their concert rehearsal April 14.

“The spirit of cooperation and support indicated by the generous gift of the Texas WMU is as heart-warming as the gift is helpful,” Collins said.

“We will think of our sisters of the WMU every time we stand up to sing—literally.”

For more information about the Singing Men’s planned trip to Ukraine and Crimea, visit their website at www.smonct.org.

The Singing Men of North Central Texas are ministry partners of Texas Baptists. Don Blackley is director of the Singing Men of North Central Texas, and Tim Studstill is director of music and worship for the Baptist General Convention of Texas.

DALLAS—Texas Baptist Men is collecting bottled water that will be distributed to firefighters and victims of the wildfires raging throughout the state.

Bottled water can be dropped off April 21-23 from 8 a.m.-6 p.m. at the Texas Baptist Men's Equipping Center at 5351 Catron in east Dallas, near the intersection of Buckner and Samuell.

To contribute financially to relief and recovery efforts, give online to Texas Baptist Men disaster relief at www.texasbaptistmen.org or to the Baptist General Convention of Texas disaster reponse at www.texasbaptists.org/give .

Several fire departments also have indicated they need supplies. Specific items requested are bottled water; Gatorade/Powerade; baby powder; shaving supplies; batteries (C and D sizes); leather work gloves; travel-size shower gel, toothpaste and lotion; sunscreen, cough drops; antacid tablets; allergy medicines; tissues; adhesive bandages; Neosporin; Tylenol or ibuprofen; paper products including cups, plates, toilet paper and plates; power bars and granola bars (not chocolate or sticky); new T-shirts, underwear and socks; sandwich bags; hot dog buns, wieners, sandwiches (dry, no mustard or mayonnaise), chips, protein bars, beef jerky, peanut butter crackers and baby wipes.

Fire departments collecting supplies are:

• Palo Pinto Fire Department at 5th Ave., off Highway 180 in Palo Pinto.  Contact Amanda or Katy Faubion at (940) 659-3900.

• Stawn Fire Department, located off Interstate 20. Take exit 361. Call (254) 672-5333.

• Mineral Wells Junior High is serving as a shelter for firefighters and evacuees. It is located at 1301 S E 14th Ave. Call (940) 325-0711.

Current churches serving as Red Cross evacuee shelters and contact people are:

• First Baptist Church in Gordon – Michael Jones (254) 693-5586 office

• First Baptist Church in Palo Pinto – Donald Mc Craig (325) 998-0919

• Northside Baptist in Mineral Wells – Paul Harris (940) 585-8770

• Fairview Baptist in Mineral Wells – Tonya Dowdy (940) 329-1534

• First Baptist Church in Strawn -William Jamison (405) 469-0848

• Leaning Tree Church in Mineral Wells – Melissa Gage (940) 329-8910

Contact Marla Bearden for more information at (888) 244-9400.

Louis Cobbs (center in the photo below), a director of the T.B. Maston Foundation Board, congratulates recipients of the endowed scholarship administered through Hardin-Simmons University’s Logsdon School of Theology and its T.B. Maston Chair of Christian Ethics in honor of him and in memory of his late wife, Mary Vic.

The scholarship winners are (left) Kyle Tubbs, a Logsdon alumnus and youth minister at Trinity Baptist Church in Sweetwater who will begin work on his doctorate at Dallas Baptist University in the fall, and Joseph Barrett (right), a master of divinity student at Logsdon Seminary and pastor of First Baptist Church in Rochester.

The 1965 class of the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board’s Journeyman program—a two-year missions experience for recent college graduates—and others established the scholarship to benefit Christian ethics students and to honor Cobbs, a former campus minister and student worker with the Baptist General Convention of Texas and executive at the mission board who helped launch and develop the Journeyman program.