EDITOR’S NOTE: BP Ledger carries items for reader information each week from various Southern Baptist-related entities, and news releases of interest from other sources. The items are published as received.
Today’s BP Ledger contains items from:
Campbellsville University
World News Service (2 items)
Campbell University
Campbellsville student recounts life-changing experience with Christ
By Linda Waggener
CAMPBELLSVILLE, Ky. (Campbellsville University) — Campbellsville University senior Jordan Alves from Lawrenceburg, Ky., reflected on his personal experiences after a life-changing sophomore year. He felt his life was falling apart until a Christian professor/coach/mentor saw the trouble he was in and began to help him turn things around.
Alves said, “I was an incoming freshman with a lot of talent. I wasn’t here for anything else besides playing baseball and becoming the best infielder I could be.”
He played hard in 30 games as a freshman with very results. But he said his sophomore year began with a broken hand on the first ground ball he took in the fall. He was out for three months and never fully recovered. He thought baseball was gone.
In that same year, his mother told him she and Alves’ father were getting a divorce and on that same night his grandmother died from a sudden heart attack. Alves remembers being devastated.
“I didn’t know what to do, think or say,” he said. “I didn’t want to be around baseball. The things that I turned to in order to feel better led me into a world of parties, trying to fit in with upperclassmen. My grades went down the drain, and I ended up getting an F and a few Ds on my final grade report. I felt like my family was being ripped apart.”
Alves’ instructor, G. Ted Taylor, professor of Christian studies and director of CU’s Leadership/Character Development Institute and lead professor of the sports ministry program, saw beyond just the falling grades, and saw his student getting into deeper and deeper trouble. In a Christian coaching program, Taylor related to Alves using examples of others in the field who have walked a similar path to help him understand and grow past the events that had Alves in free fall.
“Dr. Taylor saw something in me when I took his class,” Alves said, “and now I’m an assistant baseball coach here at CU graduated May 4 with a bachelor’s degree in sport management.”
Alves was a student assistant during his junior and senior years, coaching first base. He also coached the junior varsity team this year. He helped with the baseball team’s Operation Christmas Child work in the fall.
Alves remembers meeting new people who were on fire for Christ and for being servant leaders while a student at CU. Seeing those people so happy and living life to the fullest was exactly what he said he needed as a sophomore.
Taylor rewarded Alves’ turnaround with the assignment to become a FIRST CLASS mentor with incoming freshmen. He said that was a major moment in his spiritual walk.
His goal after graduation is to enroll in the master’s of organizational leadership (MAOL) program to start in fall 2013 with aspirations of working inside a baseball organization or coaching college baseball.
Alves said he found that coaching, while different from being a player, still allows him to be a part of the sport he loves, just in a different role. He has his self-esteem back and believes he was born to be a leader in the classroom and on the field.
He said, “And I found out that I was missing one huge person in my life, and that was Jesus Christ. And that is by far the best thing that has ever happened to me.”
For more information about the sports ministry programs at CU visit www.campbellsville.edu/sports-ministry.
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Linda Waggener is marketing and media relations coordinator for Campbellsville University
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Conservative groups at odds over immigration policy
By J.C. Derrick
ASHEVILLE, N.C. (WORLD News Service) — Illegal immigration has long been a contentious issue in the Republican Party, and the current debate is no different. Partisan rifts are the nasty side effect of bipartisan coalitions aimed at reforming the nation’s immigration system.
Now, three weeks after the Senate’s so-called Gang of Eight released its immigration bill, the battle has spilled into activist circles as conservative groups wage an ideological war to influence Republican lawmakers. The Heritage Foundation released a report last week on the economic effects of legalizing the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants currently residing in the United States, which it says will trigger a lifetime “fiscal deficit” of $6.3 trillion.
“We should not be spending $6 trillion on people whose claim to that money is that they broke our laws,” lead author Robert Rector said. “We don’t have $6 trillion to throw away, and this is the last place we should be spending it if we had it.”
Rector’s report came under immediate and widespread criticism from other conservative organizations, including experts with groups that are usually aligned with The Heritage Foundation: the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Cato Institute, Americans for Tax Reform, the Kemp Foundation and the American Action Network.
Dissenters’ primary objection is that the Heritage report uses static, rather than dynamic, scoring. In other words, it estimates illegal immigrants will take in more than $9.4 trillion in government benefits and only contribute $3.1 trillion in taxes during their lifetimes, but it doesn’t assume any positive economic impact in gross domestic product (GDP).
“He didn’t assume that the economy would increase in size, which is just absurd,” said Alex Nowrasteh, the Cato Institute’s lead immigration analyst. Nowrasteh cited academic studies from several sources and said even the most pessimistic studies agree that legalizing illegal immigrants would boost “the size of GDP and increase wages for most Americans.”
Rector responded to his critics in a May 7 briefing at The Heritage Foundation, arguing that his methodology is “far more nuanced” than dynamic scoring. He said immigrants, who on average have about a 10th-grade education, haven’t provided a net increase to the economy since the end of World War II.
Rector said he believes more than 11 million illegal immigrants currently live in the United States, so the $6.3 trillion net deficit is a “minimal estimate,” but critics accused him of coming up with a large number to scare away fiscal conservatives in Congress who might otherwise be inclined to vote for reform.
They also complained the Heritage report doesn’t address the comprehensive immigration bill filed last month in the Senate. Rector said he hasn’t read the whole bill, but he’s confident it’s “like all the others in the last 10 years.”
Nowrasteh, who said he’s read the entire bill, expressed “disappointment” in Heritage: “I grew up reading their stuff and they always emphasized the importance of dynamic scoring. To see them retreat on that is unfortunate.”
The Heritage study projects that doing nothing about the illegal immigrants already in the country would cost taxpayers about $1 trillion. Its solution for the problem is increased enforcement for employers who hire illegal immigrants, leading to what former presidential candidate Mitt Romney last year dubbed “self-deportation.”
The report doesn’t estimate how much self-deportation would cost taxpayers, but UCLA professor Raúl Hinojosa-Ojeda projects it would cost $2.6 trillion in lost GDP over 10 years. If the Senate bill makes it through committee, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) will score its net effect on the economy.
Six years ago, during the last immigration debate, the CBO estimated that legislation would provide a net improvement on the government’s budget deficit, but a similar Heritage report said it would cost about $2.6 trillion. The report was credited with playing a key role in defeating the 2007 legislation.
AEI’s Medline Zavodny said more than a document about immigration reform, Heritage’s research is an indictment on the growth of government. “What the report reveals is not the broken nature of our current immigrant system,” she wrote, “but rather the broken nature of our welfare state.”
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Wycliffe pledges to comply with an audit panel’s recommendations on controversial Bible translation practices
ASHEVILLE, N.C. (WORLD News Service) — After a year’s work, a World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) panel has released its report on the Muslim-context translation practices of Wycliffe Bible Translators and its partner SIL International. Wycliffe requested the audit of its policies after controversy erupted last year over the world’s premier translator supporting translations that altered the phrases “Son of God” and “God the Father” in Muslim contexts.
Western mission agencies have been concerned about literal translations of “God the Father” and “Son of God” in Muslim contexts because the terms imply God had sexual relations with Mary. One SIL-supported translation of Matthew in Turkey rendered “God the Father” something along the lines of “the great protector,” according to locals.
Both the Assemblies of God and the Presbyterian Church in America threatened to withdraw support from Wycliffe over the issue. Western mission agencies have also felt backlash from local believers in Muslim contexts who felt the agencies were changing the terms out of impatience over church growth. Frontiers, a missions agency that funds translation work, has also supported translations that alter the divine familial terms, but unlike Wycliffe it has not publicly submitted to an audit of its practices or policies. The WEA report may set the standard for Frontiers whether it officially adopts the recommendations or not.
The report never overtly rebukes Wycliffe/SIL, but it does draw clearer lines for the organizations’ translation practices. (Download a PDF of the report at http://www.worldea.org/images/wimg/files/2013_0429-Final%20Report%20of%20the%20WEA%20Independent%20Bible%20Translation%20Review%20Panel.pdf.)
Wycliffe’s earlier standards said translators should use a literal translation of the divine familial terms in a “majority” of cases, but left open the possibility of using an “alternative term with equivalent meaning” when the literal translation might “communicate wrong meaning.”
The new report is clearer. “The WEA Panel (hereafter referred to as ‘Panel’) recommends that when the words for ‘father’ and ‘son’ refer to God the Father and to the Son of God, these words always be translated with the most directly equivalent familial words within the given linguistic and cultural context of the recipients,” the report says.
The panel says where the familial words had a sexual implication, the translators should add qualifying adjectives to the familial word rather than change the word itself, using terms like “anointed Son of God” or “heavenly Father.” They also recommend that translators use “paratext” (footnotes or commentary) to explain the terms rather than alter the text itself.
The report notes “the centrality of the word for ‘son’ in the biblical presentation of salvation,” and says the centrality “demands that translators render the word with the most direct equivalent possible.”
The report also recommends standards for local involvement in translations and urged Wycliffe to set up a process for handling controversies over the familial terms. The panel says Wycliffe should be transparent about the translation decisions it makes.
Wycliffe embraced the report, and its president, Bob Creson, said in a statement that the organization would move “to implement these recommendations as soon as possible.”
“Wycliffe USA is committed to maintaining the integrity of God’s Word through accurate, clear, and natural translation,” Creson said.
Wycliffe had suspended the controversial translations while the review moved forward. A Wycliffe spokesman said that all the suspended translations (and all future translations) would meet these new standards prior to publication.
Critics of Wycliffe’s translation practices were cautious about embracing the report until they had studied it more fully.
The 12-member audit panel was made up of theologians and translators from around the world, including two Arab Christians. Robert Cooley, the president emeritus of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, headed up the panel. The panelists met twice last year, once in Toronto, Canada, and once in Istanbul, Turkey, to put the report together. Though the WEA “facilitated” the panel, it said the report was not necessarily its official view.
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Campbell to launch nursing degree program in 2014
BUIES CREEK, N.C. (Campbell University) — Campbell University’s trustees have voted to establish a Bachelor of Science in Nursing Degree and launch a nursing program in August 2014.
It will be the fifth major health sciences program launched by Campbell in the last three years. The Physician Assistant program welcomed its first class in 2011, the Master of Public Health program was launched in the fall of 2012, the School of Osteopathic Medicine will open and house its first class of 150 students this fall, and the anticipated Doctor of Physical Therapy program is projected to begin in January 2014.
As with its predecessors, the nursing program will help fill a growing need in North Carolina. The current statewide and nationwide shortage of nurses — coupled with recommendations from the National Institute of Medicine that more nurses be trained at the baccalaureate level — means the overall projected need for degreed nurses will increase by 28 percent over the next decade.
The Initiative on the Future of Nursing — a project of the Institute of Medicine and the Robert Wood Foundation — issued a report recently calling for schools of nursing across the nation to increase the proportion of nurses with a baccalaureate degree from 50 percent to 80 percent by 2020.
Campbell’s program, which is expected to house 120 students after four years, will help those numbers.
“Our program will not only educate nurses, it will expand their opportunities to lead and manage in their careers,” said Dr. Ronald Maddox, dean of the College of Pharmacy & Health Sciences. “They will not only meet a growing need for well-educated nurses, they will be prepared to meet the growing demands in the field.”
The program will be considered part of the Campbell University’s College of Pharmacy & Health Sciences, which also houses and will house the new physician assistant, public health and the anticipated physical therapy programs. Space for the incoming faculty and students will be developed through expansion of current facilities, according to the resolution passed by the Board of Trustees on April 24.
The undergraduate degree will require a minimum of 128 credit hours awarded in four years. Students will take basic sciences and general core requirements in the first two years (the pre-nursing sequence) and professional nursing courses with clinical and laboratory components in the third and fourth years.
“Nursing is a popular request of prospective students,” said Jason Hall, assistant vice president for admissions. “This endeavor will allow the admissions office to work with new students who are considering nursing and looking for a University such as Campbell to satisfy their educational aspirations.”
The establishment of the nursing program and degree will require the additional approval of the North Carolina Board of Nursing, the Commission on Collegiate Nursing and the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges.
“Campbell is educating highly trained and skilled health care professionals, and this nursing program fits well with our mission,” said Benjamin Thompson, chairman of the Board of Trustees. “Nursing complements our new and existing programs well, and we couldn’t be more excited about Campbell University’s future.”
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