The ETHIOPIAN CHURCH Journal

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God's one and only Son. This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God. Gospel of John3:16-21

"Religious organizations are the only national entities to garner trust from a majority of respondents (68%) ...The national government garners trust from just 28% of Ethiopians, and the judiciary fares as poorly, eliciting confidence from about one-quarter of respondents. But participatory politics prompt the lowest levels of trust, as only 13% of Ethiopians have confidence in the honesty of elections." Thus goes another depressing poll conducted by Gallup in 2007. What is interesting is that the church is/ought to be the glue in a society fragmented along ethnic, class, gender, and generation lines. Here then is a great opportunity for the church to build and provide institutional leadership. To provide leadership based on a decidedly Christian ethics, however, requires that churches work hard to gain the trust of society at large. To gain trust one needs to identify with mores the public relates to; to not get caught up in worldly and alienating cultures, and to live a cl...

The importance of religion in international development is gaining wider recognition by governments and multilateral agencies alike in recent years. The World Bank routinely talks about Faith and Development and has not shied away from funding religious groups. The fact that the religious and the secular are not compartmentalized as in Western societies could mean the West has finally grasped the realities of the majority world. The challenge will now be how not to impose a studied (and not lived) understanding of religiosity coming out of theological and academic centers. If not handled with care and in consultation with native traditions we may end up worse than our experiences of the past. Here is an excerpt: “The secular world is very unique to the U.S.”Development work doesn’t have to fly in the face of religious traditions, he added. Natsios recounted a project in Ethiopia for HIV prevention that used church and mosque leaders to promote marital faithfulness, which fell in place ...

"Ethiopia's Kale Heywet Church – which fields 6,000 congregations and more than 5 million individual members - is the largest local provider of antiretroviral drugs for the prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV ... "

Jesus told his disciples: "There was a rich man whose manager was accused of wasting his possessions. So he called him in and asked him, 'What is this I hear about you? Give an account of your management, because you cannot be manager any longer.' "The manager said to himself, 'What shall I do now? My master is taking away my job. I'm not strong enough to dig, and I'm ashamed to beg— I know what I'll do so that, when I lose my job here, people will welcome me into their houses.' "So he called in each one of his master's debtors. He asked the first, 'How much do you owe my master?' " 'Eight hundred gallons of olive oil,' he replied. "The manager told him, 'Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it four hundred.' "Then he asked the second, 'And how much do you owe?' " 'A thousand bushels of wheat,' he replied. "He told him, 'Take your bill and make it eight hundred....