Its their Business to convert YOU!
Posted December 7, 2005
Compiled by Chandra Saini
Sources:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/14/giving/14newman.html
Bill Britt:
http://www.sbcbaptistpress.org/bpnews.asp?ID=22062
Promod Haque/Opportunity International:
http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cache:dNIlaSroWyUJ:
https://secure.xo.com/opportunity.org/whoweare.html
http://www.opportunityinternational.ca/
http://www.opportunityinternational.ca/learn/about.html
Promod Haque/Maclaurin Institute
http://www.maclaurin.org/pdf/2002.annual.report.pdf
http://www.maclaurin.org/mp3s.php
Tom Monaghan
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=19522
The New York Times edition of November 14, 2005
highlighted the global nature of the "Missionary
Business" or in other words, evangelical missionaries who
run businesses to fund conversion activities around the
world.
Andy Newman, in this NYT article called "Their Mission:
Spreading the Word Through Business", has painted a
glowing picture of these "preying vultures". Yet we quote
"faithfully" from the article:
'Tom Sudyk is not most people's idea of a missionary. On
paper, he looks like a modern global capitalist, which he
is. Mr. Sudyk, an entrepreneur from Michigan, runs, among
other things, an outsourcing company in Chennai, India,
providing medical transcribers and software engineers to
American businesses. In six years, the Indian company --
a subsidiary of EC Group International, a larger
outsourcing company that Mr. Sudyk founded in Grand
Rapids -- has grown to 75 employees and is moving into a
building triple its present size.
But the Gospel, Mr. Sudyk says, illuminates every aspect
of his business, from its ethics to its help to local
ministries to the technical support it lends a Christian-
run vocational school for polio victims in Chennai. Each
afternoon at the Chennai office, there is a 10-minute
prayer, and while the prayer is interdenominational,
employees who ask to learn more about Jesus Christ -- as
many have -- are gladly accommodated.'
While portraying their tactics in a positive light, the
NYT article continues:
'Christian-run companies are multiplying in just about
every corner of the globe, reshaping overseas mission
work. These businesses form a movement known variously as
business as mission, kingdom business and great
commission companies, after the biblical charge to "make
disciples of all the nations."
In Romania, for example, a Californian who runs a Tex-Mex
restaurant and catering hall said that he expected to
clear $250,000 in profit this year, most of which will be
donated to local ministries. And in a Muslim country with
a history of hostility to Christianity, a medical-supply
importer from the Midwest leverages the trust she earns
through her business dealings to quietly spread the word.
Some supporters of business as mission set up
microlending banks or fair-trade coffee companies. In
countries where there is more hunger for economic
development than for missionaries, some of these
supporters think that a profit-oriented company centered
around Christian values can be a powerful tool for
building a Christian society. A job-creating, taxpaying
enterprise, they say, will be more legitimate in the eyes
of locals, harder for a government to expel and better
for the resident economy than one propped up by handouts
from back home.
"The real power of the movement is that it's not donor-
funded, it's basically globally funded," Mr. Sudyk said.
"There's no restraint in the capacity of this system,
because you avert the donor and plug into globalization."
Business as mission grew from a 1980's mission movement
to reach people in the "resistant belt" across North
Africa, the Middle East and Asia where Muslim, Buddhist
or antitheistic governments made it hard or impossible
for religious workers to get visas. Missionaries with no
business experience opened travel agencies, Internet
cafes and other small companies, sometimes accused of
being little more than fronts for proselytizing.
"That model was about getting missionaries into these
countries by whatever means you could, whether it's
teaching or business or whatever," said Steven L. Rundle,
an associate professor of economics at Biola University
in La Mirada, Calif., and an author of a 2003 book,
"Great Commission Companies: The Emerging Role of
Business in Missions."
Now, Professor Rundle said, evangelical groups are
recognizing that mission-minded businesspeople can do
things that traditional missionaries cannot. "The future
generation of missionary will be the rank-and-file
businessman," he said. The wheel, he added, has come full
circle: many of the first emissaries of the Gospel were
tradesmen, not priests."'
The NYT article quotes the example of one businessman
from California, Jeri Little, a financial planner who saw
immense evangelical prospects in a post-Communist
Romania. This missionary businessman, who now lives in
Romania, is quoted as saying:
'I realized that we needed to not just send them money
and create another banana republic dependent on our aid,"
he said. "We needed people to create business." The
question was what kind.
Mr. Little decided to open what he said was the first
secondhand clothing store in Iasi (pronounced yahsh),
Romania's second-largest city. "Good used clothing from
America at good prices," he recalled. "And we introduced
a number of new measures, like smiling." Soon there were
three stores, and Mr. Little and his wife plowed the
profits into local mission projects.
Then, Mr. Little said, God gave him a new assignment:
open a restaurant. Why not, Mr. Little, thought, although
he knew nothing about it. "The most popular TV show after
the revolution was 'Dallas,' " Mr. Little said. "So we
said, 'Let's do a Texas theme, make it a Tex-Mex
restaurant.' "
The Littles gave the clothing stores to local ministries,
and in 1997 opened Little Texas, by all reliable accounts
the most popular and authentic, not to mention only, Tex-
Mex restaurant in northeastern Romania. As diners in the
John Wayne dining room eat their enchiladas and homemade
tortillas, they can study a passage on the wall from the
20th Psalm: "Some trust in chariots and some in horses,
but we trust in the name of the Lord our God."
The couple built a hotel above the restaurant, for
Romanian business travelers, with 32 rooms.
Some of the restaurant's profit this year will be put
back into expanding the business, but the rest will go to
local aid and ministry projects, Mr. Little said. These
have included opening a kindergarten and day-care center
in one of Iasi's poorest neighborhoods. Soon, Mr. Little
and his associates plan to open the first dental clinic
in a town in Moldova, several hours from Iasi.
Mr. Little also helped some Romanian friends start a
housing company that gives 25 percent of its profit to
evangelical ministries. "If I'm going to be involved," he
said, "there's going to have to be a significant win for
the ministry right off the top."
It is one thing to establish an evangelical presence in a
Christian country, another to do it where opening a new
Christian church is illegal and evangelizing is frowned
upon. Mary, a 52-year-old from the Midwest who imports
medical products into a country she identified only as "
98.9 percent Muslim" because she feared hurting her
credibility, said that in her four years there she
learned to let people come to her.'
The NYT article ends, not surprisingly, describing Mary's
efforts to convert a Muslim, who was her business
associate.
What the article surprisingly did not mention were other
hotshots who are prominent "missionary businessmen" in
America. These include:
- Bill Britt - He presides over the famous Amway products
conglomerate (Quixtar), that claims to have had $3
billion in sales between 1999 and 2004. Britt is also a
21-year veteran of fulltime evangelism and the President
of the Conference of Southern Baptist Evangelists.
According to their website BPNews.com, he heavily
encourages Baptist missionaries to go to India and Africa
for conversion activities.
- Promod Haque - He is a billionaire venture capitalist
of Indian origin in Silicon Valley, California. Haque
remains on the Board of Governors for "Opportunity
International", the largest Christian microfinance
organization in the world whose aim is to "reach" the
world's poorest people through its microenterprise
development programs. The organization's website claims
that Opportunity International uses a business-based
approach to empowering the poor with Christian
principals. It also claims: "We assist churches in their
responsibility follow the Biblical commandment to
practically demonstrate God's love". Haque also remains a
donor to "The MacLaurin Institute". This institute is a
Minneapolis-based Christian institution that counts
amongst its Fellows one Vishal Mangalwadi, a Christian
missionary of Indian origin notorious for his anti-Hindu
activities; and has invited fanatic Christian speakers
like Ravi Zacharias. Zacharias, who has been recently
quoted in "India Abroad" newspaper of hate-speak against
Hinduism and of blaming Thailand's prostitution industry
to Buddhism, has also been accused of fraudulent
conversion practices in many countries around the world
through his Ravi Zacharias International Ministries
(RZIM)'s annual budget of over $6 million.
- Tom Monaghan - He is the co-founder of Dominos Pizza
who sold his company in 1998 for a billion dollars.
According to observers, Monaghan is building Ave Maria
University a Catholic University with a Catholic-centered
town whose pharmacies are not going to be able to sell
condoms or dispense contraceptives (No surprises here! ).
After an earthquake devastated Nicaragua, he is reported
to have decided -- against the wishes of aid workers on
the ground --that spending $3 million dollars to rebuild
a church in Managua was more important than aiding the
victims of the quake. Now that's surprising (or is it?)
We hope this article gives you a fair idea of the men
behind the Christian behemoth that threatens to dominate
the world. Its their Business to convert YOU ! Are you
willing to stand up for yourself and for others who
refuse to submit to them?
More at:
http://christianaggression.com/item_display.php?type=ARTICLES&id=1133940251
Jai Maharaj
http://www.mantra.com/jai
Om Shanti
Hindu Holocaust Museum
http://www.mantra.com/holocaust
Hindu life, principles, spirituality and philosophy
http://www.hindu.org
http://www.hindunet.org
The truth about Islam and Muslims
http://www.flex.com/~jai/satyamevajayate
The terrorist mission of Jesus stated in the Christian bible:
"Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not so send
peace, but a sword.
"For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the
daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in
law.
"And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.
- Matthew 10:34-36.
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