Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 17, 1990 TAG: 9003162540
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
An Austrian United Methodist leader will speak March 25 on the challenges to religion that recent political changes have brought to Eastern Europe.
The Rev. Dr. Helmut Nausner will be at Windsor Hills United Methodist Church, 3591 Windsor Road S.W., for 9:30 and 11 a.m. presentations.
Nausner is superintendent of the Provisional Annual Conference of Austria. He also is familiar with church life in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Yugoslavia.
He was born in Russia to Methodist missionary parents who returned to their family homeland in World War II. Nausner has been ordained for the past 35 years.
The church executive will discuss such issues as the financial survival of churches - which are emerging after Communist oppression of more than 40 years - and the competition that may threaten cooperation in building new church life.
Also a guest will be Edith Varner. With her late husband, Varner founded an English-speaking United Methodist church in Vienna about 15 years ago.
For more information, call 774-4730.
\ Moderates vie for office
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - Three people are seeking top offices in the Southern Baptist Convention to try to steer the 14.8 million-member denomination away from its fundamentalist path of the past 11 years.
Steve Tondera, a layman and senior engineer at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., last week announced his candidacy for a vice presidency on a moderate slate at the denomination's convention in June.
Also running as moderates are the Rev. Daniel Vestal of Dunwoody, Ga., seeking the presidency, and Carolyn Weatherford Crumpler, former head of the Women's Missionary Union, running for another vice presidency.
Together, they seek to unseat a fundamentalist administration that came into power in 1979 and began appointing others with similar views to key posts on the boards of Baptist colleges and agencies.
The fundamentalist wing, which this time is backing the Rev. Norris Chapman of Wichita Falls, Texas, for the presidency, gained control under the banner of biblical literalism. - Associated Press
\ Televangelists studied
DES MOINES, Iowa - A study monitoring television preachers finds that on the average they devote about a fourth of their time to fund-raising and promotion.
But major shifts in that area have occurred in some TV ministries.
The study made by Stephen Winzenburg, communications professor at Grand View College, found that both Pat Robertson and Oral Roberts had sharply increased time used seeking support.
Roberts now uses 53 percent of his air time in fund-raising and promotion, compared to 22 percent in 1987, while Robertson spends 44 percent of his programs asking financial help, up from 22 percent three years ago, the report said.
However, the Rev. Jerry Falwell has reduced fund-raising appeals in that period from 52 percent to 37 percent, it said.
Winzenburg said the decline in viewership that saw audiences for syndicated religious programs fall 30 percent in the 1987-89 period after the Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart sex scandals appeared to have leveled off. - Associated Press
by CNB