against aid workers, United States-led troops and other foreigners in the war ravaged nation, a Baptist official said Wednesday October 8.
Mark Kelly of the America based Southern Baptist International Mission Board told Mission Network News (MNN) the projects were halted after the August 19 bomb attack on the United Nations’ offices in Baghdad killed 22 people, including U.N. Special Representative Sergio Vieira de Mello.
U.N. and church officials in Baghdad had warned that foreign aid workers and other non military targets were increasingly attacked by loyalists of the previous Saddam Hussein regime. In addition Iraqi Christians also suffer under Muslim violence directed against them, BosNewsLife learned from churches and individual believers.
Volunteers who had planned to begin distributing 46,000 food boxes packed by Southern Baptists in late August were reportedly rerouted to neighboring Jordan to deliver food and supplies to Iraqi and other refugees living there.
PARCELS
Despite the difficulties small teams of Southern Baptist workers and Arab Baptist partners in Iraq managed to distribute at least some of the food parcels, which arrived in the country since August 21, the Baptist Press (BP) news service said.
"God is using the effort in remarkable ways to help Iraqis understand how much He loves them," BP quoted an unidentified aid worker as saying.
One worker told BP that Iraqis who received food in two towns in central Iraq also asked for New Testaments, which Arabs know as the "Injil." People who were standing in line for food reportedly left the queue to get a Bible, referred to by some Evangelicals as the Bread of Life.
GRATEFUL
"We are grateful Southern Baptists were sensitive to God’s leading in packing the food boxes," the worker added. "This tangible expression of God’s love has broken through barriers of misunderstanding and created an opportunity for people to experience God’s love and forgiveness for themselves."
"We’re asking Christians everywhere to pray that God will reveal Himself to Iraqis and help them see that Jesus is, as the Quran says, the long-promised Messiah," the aid worker said.
Kelly stressed that the Baptists who now arrive in Iraq, including apparently Americans, are going to begin with additional "volunteer projects, on a small scale. The teams will be smaller and their projects will be de-centralized, not gathering in any one place," because of security concerns, he said.
PRECAUTIONS
However Kelly added that the Baptist workers believe that "if people observe the proper precautions…it was not as dangerous as they had feared it might be."
But the Baptist official admitted the situation remains volatile in Iraq, where three American soldiers and an Iraqi interpreter were killed Tuesday, October 7, in a pair of roadside bombings in the central part the country.
"Everyone who serves there would ask that people pray for their safety. But again, their primary concern is to have opportunities to distribute the food boxes that represent just a tangible expression of God’s love for the people of Iraq," he told MNN, an internet and radio news outlet covering missions.
