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Interim pastor: "We are surgeons." By K. Connie Kang / The Los AngelesTimes
	The Rev. Charles Svendsen is a church doctor. He — and a growing number of pastors like him — fixes churches in trouble. In the last 26 years, the Hollywood-born Presbyterian pastor has cared for 17 needy congregations from California to Maine, Scotland to New Zealand. Svendsen has assisted churches where pastors were fired for misconduct, treasurers stole funds or incompetent staffers remained on the payroll too long. And he has helped thousands of parishioners make a new start after their ministers took another job, retired or died. "We're surgeons," said Svendsen, 55, whose assignment since June has been Brentwood Presbyterian Church, which has been trying for seven years to hire a permanent pastor.

Scripture lessons for today – from the Lectionary
	"...Be merciful to me, O God, be merciful to me, for in you my soul takes refuge; in the shadow of your wings I will take refuge, until the destroying storms pass by..." "...For my name's sake I defer my anger, for the sake of my praise I restrain it for you, so that I may not cut you off... My glory I will not give to another." "...if we or an angel from heaven should proclaim to you a gospel contrary to what we proclaimed to you, let that one be accursed!... the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin..."

Today in the Yearbook for Prayer and Study The Presbytery of West Virginia
	"...In the heart of the southern coalfields, Whittico Memorial Church – the only African American Presbyterian church in West Virginia – continues to minister to the needs of the Keystone community of about two hundred residents in an area often devastated by floods..."
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Equal-opportunity offender
Uzbek government crackdown on Muslims worries evangelicals.
By Susan Wunderink / CT

Crackdowns on alleged Muslim extremists recently landed Uzbekistan on the U.S. State Department's list of Countries of Particular Concern (CPC). The situation for all religious groups has deteriorated since 2005, when troops in Andijan fired on civilians gathered in a public square, killing hundreds.
About 88 percent of Uzbekistanis are Muslim. But the government has closed thousands of mosques and arrested, imprisoned, and tortured Muslims in the name of combating Islamic extremism.

North Koreans cut off and freezing to death
By Sergey Soukhorukov / The London Telegraph

The men who finally made it into the remote highland village of Koogang were greeted by an eerie silence and a gruesome sight.
Lying among the simple wooden huts and burnt remnants of wooden furniture, they found the bodies of 46 North Korean villagers, including women and children, all of whom had frozen to death. Cut off from the outside world by one of the harshest winters in many years, the villagers had suffered a macabre fate that has exposed both the desperate poverty and callous misrule blighting the Stalinist state.
More than 300 people are thought to have perished from cold so far this winter in North Korea's mountainous north, victims of temperatures as low as -30C and of an arrogant ruling clique.

CAIR protests depiction of Muslim terrorists in Fox hit series '24'
By Wayne Parry / AP

Two years ago, Muslim groups protested when the plot of the hit Fox drama '24' cast Islamic terrorists as the villains who launched a stolen nuclear missile in an attack on America.
     Now, after a one-year respite during which Russian separatists played the bad guys on the critically acclaimed series, Muslims are back in the evil spotlight. Unlike last time, when agent Jack Bauer saved the day, the terrorists this time have already succeeded in detonating a nuclear bomb in a Los Angeles suburb.
    "The overwhelming impression you get is fear and hatred for Muslims," said Rabiah Ahmed, a spokeswoman for the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations. (CAIR).
     "Over the past several seasons, the villains have included shadowy Anglo businessmen, Baltic Europeans, Germans, Russians, Islamic fundamentalists, and even the (Anglo-American) president of the United States," FOX said. "The show has made a concerted effort to show ethnic, religious and political groups as multidimensional, and political issues are debated from multiple viewpoints."

Tutu: Leave clergy alone – by Wangui Kanina / IOL

Nairobi – Archbishop Desmond Tutu on Friday urged the African Anglican church to concentrate on the the continent's grim problems rather than on the row over gay clergy, and said persecuting gays was akin to racism.
African Anglican bishops have threatened to refuse to sit at the same table as Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, who heads the US Episcopal Church and supports gay clergy, at a global meeting in Tanzania in February.

Jimmy Carter's Jewish problem
By Deborah Lipstadt / The Washington Post

"...Carter's book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," while exceptionally sensitive to Palestinian suffering, ignores a legacy of mistreatment, expulsion and murder committed against Jews. It trivializes the murder of Israelis. Now, facing a storm of criticism, he has relied on anti-Semitic stereotypes in defense...
"When an Ahmadinejad or Hamas threatens to destroy Israel, Jews have historical precedent to believe them. Jimmy Carter either does not understand this or considers it irrelevant...
"...by almost ignoring the Holocaust, Carter gives inadvertent comfort to those who deny its importance or even its historical reality, in part because it helps them deny Israel's right to exist. This from the president who signed the legislation creating the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum..."
Click here to order: Jimmy Carter, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid

George Barna research
Survey explores who qualifies as an Evangelical

Asking people if they consider themselves to be evangelicals produces a comparatively large number: 38% of the population accepts that label.
The Barna Group has traditionally used nine questions to categorize people as evangelicals, whether they consider themselves accurately described by that label or not. Using the nine questions about their beliefs produces a much smaller figure: just 8% of the adult population in 2006 fit the criteria.
When extrapolating these percentages across the entire adult population, the difference is staggering: 84 million adults based on self-report versus 18 million using the nine-point theological filter.

"The Weather Channel" mess
By James Spann / ABC 33/40 Weather Blog

"Well, well. Some “climate expert” on “The Weather Channel” wants to take away AMS certification from those of us who believe the recent “global warming” is a natural process. So much for “tolerance”, huh?
     "I have been in operational meteorology since 1978, and I know dozens and dozens of broadcast meteorologists all over the country... I do not know of a single TV meteorologist who buys into the man-made global warming hype. I know there must be a few out there, but I can’t find them...
     "Billions of dollars of grant money is flowing into the pockets of those on the man-made global warming bandwagon. No man-made global warming, the money dries up...
     "...the warming in the last 10 years is not much [different] than the warming we saw in the 1930s and other decades. And, lets not forget we are at the end of the ice age in which ice covered most of North America and Northern Europe..."

Speaker Pelosi's daughter documents Christian right
By Bob Tourtellotte / Reuters

Alexandra Pelosi, a documentary filmmaker and daughter of U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and a former TV news producer who documented Bush's 2000 presidential campaign in her award-winning "Journeys with George," said she traveled through 16 states and conducted some 800 interviews to profile evangelicals who believe the Holy Bible is the word of God and should be strictly followed.
"If you live in Los Angeles or New York, you don't realize there's this whole group out there rejecting your culture," she said. "All I was trying to do was introduce blue staters to all the people who live in between New York and L.A.," she said.
Pelosi's "Friends of God" debuts on HBO on January 25.

Is the Vatican a rogue state? / Der Spiegel

The top crime neighborhood in the world isn't in Sao Paulo or Lagos. It's not the Bronx in New York, or even Wedding in Berlin. It's the small city ruled by Pope Benedict XVI, which apparently sees more criminal cases per capita than any other part of the world.

How does God guide us? – series by Mark D. Roberts

"...Ever since I first put my faith in Jesus Christ over 40 years ago, I've been more or less eager to do what God wants me to do... if I only knew what He wants! As hard as obedience can be at times, I've found that discerning God's will can be even harder..."

'Embryo bank': New hope or too far?
By Amanda Paulson / The Christian Science Monitor

In an era when infertile couples often look to test tubes or surrogate mothers to create children, the notion of egg or sperm donors is hardly novel.
Yet a San Antonio woman's idea to bring the two together – creating complete embryos ready to be implanted into the womb – has drawn a raft of criticism, with bioethicists debating whether this is the commodification of children or just another – perhaps more effective – way to help people become parents.
The "embryo bank" at the Abraham Center of Life isn't a storage bank so much as an intermediary that creates embryos from anonymous donors of both sperm and egg, for a waiting list of interested parents.

Opportunity Lost – by Chuck Colson

"Twelve years ago, I spoke on this program about a novel by P. D. James titled The Children of Men. I said then, “P. D. James... seems to be warning us that we might just destroy ourselves from within – if we continue to embrace a culture of death.” It was a great book.
"I wish I could say as much for the new movie version of Children of Men. Its story and themes are so completely different, it’s just like somebody set out to make a movie of Adam Smith’s famous The Wealth of Nations, the conservative book, and wound up making instead Karl Marx’s Das Kapital..."


Letters from readers – email us
•	Claude U. Voils, Jr. "I read Presbyweb every day almost in its entirety. It makes every possible emotion well up inside of me. I laugh and I cry... "Thank you Presbyweb for printing fairly the many sides on issues. I think you are as unbiased as possible..."
•	Leslie Fox "As a Jewish Presbyterian I very much appreciated Viola Larson and Jim Berkley's excellent analysis and assessment of Presbyterian Women's "Guidelines for Avoiding Anti-Semitism." "When I first read the "Guidelines" I couldn't help but wonder how PW came to choose the resources they used..."
•	Daniel M. Berry "The article from the Kansas City Star by Andrew Comiskey ["Christian community can transform homsexuals"] is very revealing and worth pondering. The power of God – Father, Son, and Holy Ghost – can indeed transform people's lives and reshape them into the kind of people God intends them to be..."
•	James H. Logan writes regarding "Presbyterians and separatist Evangelicals": "...it does not matter what man thinks, it is what God has revealed to those special people as recorded in Scripture that counts..."
•	Paul Leggett "...I cannot recognize myself or my evangelical friends in Dr. Winter's article. It is so distorted that it fails the basic standard of competent scholarship... "If the Office of the General Assembly is to have any credibility they need to publish other more accurate views on Presbyterian evangelicals."
•	Doug Hucke "It is astonishing to me that so many in our denomination treat evangelicals as a sub-species. Dr. Milton's article "Presbyterians and Separatist Evangelicals: A Continuing Dilemma" does this very thing. And it is published by the Office of the General Assembly!..."
•	Karl Landstrom "Supplementing The Reverend Adam Scott's letter of January 20: adding another item to the "funniest things ever read in an official denominational publication." This is the assertion by The Reverend R. Milton Winter that what committed, same-sex couples are pleading for is "the church's tolerance."..."