Charisma Staff

Massive tent camps. Rampant cholera outbreaks. Civil unrest.

Despite the many obstacles to rebuilding Haiti after last year’s massive earthquake, seeds of hope in the form of permanent housing are starting to sprout up.

Fifteen families have been able to move out of the tent camps, away from disease and destruction, into simple decent solid homes through the work of the Fuller Center, a non-profit ecumenical Christian housing ministry working to eliminate poverty housing worldwide.

“It’s been devastating to see the suffering and destruction,” says Heather Nozea who’s been on the ground in Haiti with her husband, Gerson, helping build homes with The Fuller Center. “But I feel great joy that we’ve been able to help these families and plans are underway to help many more families in the future.”

Nine of the 15 Fuller Center homes were built in Leogane, four in Saint Ard, and another two in Bellanton. The homes were built using earthquake- and hurricane-resistant techniques.

As news reports reveal that 23 people were killed and more than 90 injured in the New Year’s Day attack on Egyptian Christians, some leaders are looking to the U.S. government to step in.

Indeed, Michael Youssef, founder and president of “Leading The Way,” a weekly television broadcast that airs in more than 200 countries in 20 languages, is asking U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to pressure the Egyptian Government to bring back law and order, and to grant Christians the same liberties as Muslims.

If the bird and fish deaths in Arkansas weren’t spooky enough, millions more dead fish have turned up in Maryland. And the United Kingdom and Italy are also reporting unusual animal deaths. What’s going on?

It all started on New Year’s Eve when reports came in that 5,000 blackbirds dropped out of the sky in Beebe, Ark. The next day, about 100,000 dead drum fish floated to the shore of the Arkansas River.

If that’s where it ended, it might not have gained national attention. But a few days later, about 2 million juvenile spot fish were dead in the Chesapeake Bay.

Christian recording artists Moses and Erica Lugemye are commemorating the one-year anniversary of the Haiti earthquake with the release of their new song “Alive.”

All proceeds from sales of the song will benefit the Youth With A Mission (YWAM) Haiti Homes of Hope program, which provides concrete houses for homeless people in Haiti.

Located 55 miles outside Port-au-Prince, the Love a Child Orphanage became a place of refuge for more than just children immediately after the earthquake. For several days, founders Bobby and Sherry Burnette transported the injured from the streets to a small hospital adjacent to their property, then opened their school classrooms for more additional patients when the hospital’s capacity overflowed.

Love a Child continues to grow as a refuge of hope. Plans now include creating a prototype sustainable community called Miracle Village with 500 new homes, a church, marketplace, chicken farm, clinic, some microbusinesses and more.

It’s a story that works to break down the walls between Muslims and Jews. It’s the story of Kevin, a 14-month-old Indonesian boy diagnosed with Congenital Heart Disease just eight days after his birth. His fate looked grim–the heart malformation is responsible for more deaths within the first year of life than any other birth defect.

Kevin’s misfortune was an opportunity for Save a Child’s Heart, an Israel-based international humanitarian project focused on improving the quality of pediatric care for children from developing nations, to treat its first Indonesian child.

Kevin’s surgery, which was made possible by donations from the American Jewish Committee (AJC), was a success and doctors are optimistic that Kevin will make a full recovery. Perhaps when he does, he’ll remember the kindness of the Israeli people.

Christian leaders in Punjab Province’s Nankana Sahib district said they were apprehensive after a police inspector’s warning on Friday (Jan. 7) that “they would be responsible for anything that went wrong in the villages” if they continued preaching over a public address system.

Eight pastors leading a delegation of more than 100 Christians from Martinpur and Youngsenabad villages had persuaded police to drop the charge of preaching over the church loudspeakers — a practice routinely allowed by Muslims in mosques. They complained of inspector Muhammad Rana Ishaq’s veiled threat to the police chief, but they fear Ishaq will file other false cases against them in retaliation for the withdrawal of the charge.  

Bible translators are working to make it possible to not only “go ye into all the world with the Gospel,” but to “go ye” with a Bible penned in the country’s native language.

Bible translators like The Seed Company report great strides with translation efforts in 2010. The Seed Company’s strategy is to come alongside a country’s natives to help them with the work of accurately translating the Word of God.

“The Seed Company was privileged to participate in an amazing acceleration of Bible translation work around the world this past year,†says Larry Jones, senior vice president for Field programs for the company, told Mission Network News (MNN). “Ninety-three new people groups were engaged, and we got them started on the process of having Scripture in their own language.”

Christian news around the world and right here in the U.S. is horrifying in some cases and ridiculous in others. Here are some of the stories I came across as I was scouting for the most important Charisma news headlines:

An attack on a Christian village in central Nigeria early Tuesday morning left 13 people dead. CNN offers more details on the report of yet more violence, which is mostly blamed on Islamist extremists. Not surprising.

Convoy of Hope is breaking ground on a 35,000-square-foot warehouse just outside of Port-au-Prince, Haiti early this year. Once completed, the warehouse will have the capacity to hold up to 6 million meals.

“The site is prepared and I expect construction of the prefabricated steel building will progress quickly once begun,” says Kevin Rose, International Programs Director for Convoy of Hope. “I am optimistic we will be utilizing the building by early summer.”

Government officials in West Java Province blocked one church from worshiping, and Islamic groups pressured authorities to seize the property of another during the Christmas season.

The Bogor Regency Administrative Leadership Council tried unsuccessfully to forbid the Gereja Kristen Indonesia (Indonesian Christian Church, or GKI) in Bogor’s Taman Yasmin area from holding a Dec. 25 Christmas service, but authorities did block it from its regular Sunday service on Dec. 26. In Rancaekek, Bandung, Islamic demonstrators on Dec. 19 got police to remove items from a Huria Kristan Batak Protestan (HKBP) church building that had already been sealed.