If preacher Harold Camping is right, that’s the exact date Jesus will return and the righteous will fly up to heaven, leaving behind only their clothes.

That will be followed by five months of fire, brimstone and plagues, with millions of people dying each day and corpses piling in the streets. Finally, on Oct. 21, the world ends exactly as the Book of Revelation says it will—with a bottomless pit, a lake of fire and, at last, a new heaven and new earth.

Doomsday preachers come and go, but at nearly 90 years old, the spry Camping has managed to ignite a nationwide movement that has garnered national attention.

Camping is not an ordained pastor with a church, and has no formal religious training. He can’t read or speak Greek, Hebrew or Jesus’ native Aramaic. His main predictive tool rests by his side in his wood-paneled office that looks like it was borrowed from the set of AMC’s “Mad Men.”

“I made a very deliberate decision to make the Bible my university,” Camping said, reaching for his battered, brown King James Bible and flipping nimbly through pages with marked-up margins and taped-up tears.

“I bought a Bible with a good leather cover. This is the sixth one. When you use them all the time they wear out.”

The same can’t be said for Camping. Since the 1950s, he has broadcast his views via Family Radio, a global network of Christian stations where he now serves as unpaid president and primary on-air talent. His teachings air worldwide five nights a week via `Open Forum,’ a call-in show that draws listeners as far away as China and Ghana.

“Thank you for calling `Open Forum,”’ Camping has said countless times in his trademark baritone, “and shall we take our next call, please?”

One of those callers is Chris McCann, an independent preacher who is part of a Philadelphia group of Camping followers that is spreading the word about May 21.

“God has put his stamp of approval that this is the day,” McCann said in a telephone interview. “I don’t doubt it, and I don’t look at the possibility of May 22 happening.”

Neither does Camping. Asked how he arrived at the date, he opened his Bible to Genesis and said Noah loaded animals into the ark in 4990 B.C., a number he said he arrived at years ago after looking at carbon dating, tree rings and other data. Paging forward to 2 Peter, he read aloud, “one day is with the Lord as a thousand years and a thousand years is one day.”

Leafing back to Genesis, he said that the seven days Noah spent loading the ark was really 7,000 years. He then added 7,000 to 4990 B.C to arrive at 2010. He added one more year, he said, because there is no year one in the Bible.

As for the exact date of May 21, he pointed again to Genesis, which says the flood began on the “17th day of the second month.” According to the Jewish calendar, which he believes God uses, that is May 21.

“Now I am telling you, that gets pretty heavy when you see this coming right out of the Bible,” he said, looking up from his Bible’s dog-eared pages.

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Camping finds further proof in the headlines: same-sex marriage, devastation in Japan, popular uprisings across the Arab world. They’re all divine warnings of the earthly obliteration to come.

“There are still people that God has to save, and he uses them to get them to cry out for his mercy,” Camping said.

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Camping is not the first to be enthralled with biblical numerology. In the 1500s, Scottish mathematician John Napier invented logarithms to better predict Jesus’ return. American farmer William Miller (the founder of Seventh-day Adventism) picked dates in 1843 and 1844. More recently, Chen Tao, a group based in Garland, Texas, predicted God’s return in the late 1990s.

A poll conducted last year by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that 41 percent of Americans expect Jesus’ return before 2040. But pinpointing an exact date is unusual, said John R. Hall, a sociology professor and author of “Apocalypse,” an examination of doomsday groups.

“What is interesting is that (Camping) is claiming he is studying the Bible and this is what the Bible says,” Hall said. “That is a very different thing than saying God has spoken to me and this is what has been revealed. It leaves him quite a bit of wiggle room.”

Camping has wiggled before. He first predicted Jesus’ return in 1994 in a book named for that year—but with a big question mark at the end. While writing the book, he said the year 2011 began to come up in his calculations, but 1994 was more prominent.

When the year came and went, Camping explained that he was wrong and needed more study. “It just was a cudgel to keep studying,” he said.

Camping was once well-regarded in the evangelical community, both for his encyclopedic knowledge of Scripture and his radio empire. But in the late 1980s, when he began teaching that churches have strayed from the Bible and embraced false doctrine, he lost much of that support.

He announced his current prediction in his 2005 book, “Time Has an End,” and spreads the word through tracts, postcards and his radio shows. The final countdown has brought an international billboard campaign and a fleet of 20 decorated recreational vehicles that tour the country like movable billboards.

One set of RVs came to the University of Oregon, where Daniel Wojcik is a professor of folklore and author of “The End of the World As We Know It,” a study of end-times groups. Wojcik said prophets and their followers generally regroup after their prophesy fails, often recommitting themselves to the prophet.

“People try to rationalize it,” he said. “Often they say the end didn’t come, but a spiritual transformation took place, so the prediction was right on. Then there is the test-of-faith response, where they say, `Well, we weren’t ready for it.’ Or he (Camping) might just admit to being wrong.”

Asked about that, Camping does not hesitate.

“I do not even think about that possibility because I am trusting the Bible implicitly.”

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His followers, in turn, are trusting Camping. Allison Warden, a 29-year-old office manager in Raleigh, N.C., runs a website, WeCanKnow.com, dedicated to spreading news of Camping’s predictions. But what if he is wrong?

“It is a fair enough question,” she said. “But the fact that it is in Scripture is why you can say it with such a degree of certainty. It’s one of those things where you have to trust God.”

Reff:http://www.religionnews.com/index.php?/rnstext/self_proclaimed_prophet_spawns_apocalypse_movement/

NEW YORK (RNS) In their day, “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “Godspell” attracted controversy for putting the tenets of Christian faith on the musical stage, but leave it to the creators of “South Park” to raise the bar (or lower it, depending upon your point of view) with a high-spirited look at religion in “The Book of Mormon.”

Opening Thursday (March 24) at the Eugene O’Neill Theater, the show is Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s often-obscene appreciation of earnestness in the service of God—and its limits.

Given their history of persecution, many Mormons can be, well, a little defensive about their church. Throw in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ distinct theology and practices and you’ve got ready-made material that is ripe for parody.

Parker and Stone take the parody and run with it—often to places they shouldn’t.

To be sure, the duo have been open about their own backgrounds: growing up in Colorado, they’ve said they knew Mormons but wondered how such nice people could believe in a faith that says its scriptures were revealed on golden plates by an angel named Moroni to church founder Joseph Smith in upstate New York in the 1830s.

Many people’s initial encounter with Mormons is a pair of clean-cut missionaries who go door to door to spread the church’s doctrine. Parker and Stone’s play opens the same way, with 10 handsome men in characteristic white shirts and ties and black name badges enthusiastically ringing imaginary doorbells and declaring, “I would like to share with you my book of Jesus Christ.”

As the eager missionaries pair off for their two-year assignments in Norway, France or elsewhere, one decidedly odd couple is sent to Uganda. Elder Price (played by Andrew Rannells) is handsome and self-centered. Elder Cunningham (Josh Gad) is short, pudgy and desperately wants to be liked.

Although the boys are sure that “the Book of Mormon will do those Africans a lot of good,” the village they visit is terrorized by a paramilitary militia that is practicing female circumcision, and a local man sings “80 percent of us have AIDS.” The villagers greet the missionaries with a rousing African-style chant and dance, but the boys are shocked to realize that the locals’ rather reasonable response to their hard lives is “F*** you, God.”

Parker and Stone’s Uganda, while a lively comic construction, bears only a passing resemblance to the real thing, where progress has been made against AIDS and people don’t walk around with manual typewriters thinking they are “texting machines.”

Price deserts his companion, who learns to rely on himself and “Man Up,” like Jesus did when “he crawled up on that cross and stuck it out.” Cunningham’s version of Mormon preaching innocently and amusingly incorporates alternative forms of modern religion: “Star Wars,” “Star Trek” and “Lord of the Rings.”

Cunningham’s desire to help the villagers find hope in their lives and stand against oppression is so engaging that a local girl, Nabulungi (the delightful Nikki M. James) expresses a desire to be baptized and packs for a trip to “Salt Lake-y City.” When no such trip materializes, she accuses the missionaries of traveling “from your sparkling paradise in Utah to tell us ridiculous stories.”

The show cleverly satirizes the LDS church’s prohibition against homosexuality by having half a dozen male missionaries sing (and tap dance!) about how they “turn off” uncomfortable feelings. A plaintive song sung by Cunningham ("I Believe") captures the endearing emotions of a believer, and Price’s guilt-ridden dream of hell features dancing Starbucks coffee cups (the church shuns caffeine). The missionaries’ good intentions are sent up in a number called “I Am Africa,” in which the whiter-than-white team sing that they are “the tears of Nelson Mandela.”

Some song-and-dance numbers go on a bit too long, the constant stream of four-letter words and frat-boy humor can get tiresome—one African character declares several times that he has maggots in his scrotum—and the villagers perform a sensationally pornographic version of the founding of Mormonism. One wonders if the subject of female genital mutilation—much less numerous mentions of the female sex organ—really should be Broadway show material.

“The Book of Mormon” often treats its Mormon characters with surprising kindness, its Africans less so, and will appeal to those who share Parker and Stone’s “South Park"-style appetite for satire wrapped in endless vulgarity.

“The Book of Mormon” is co-directed by Parker and choreographer Casey Nicholaw. Robert Lopez co-wrote the book, music and lyrics with Parker and Stone.

(Solange De Santis is a New York-based correspondent for Religion News Service and covers the arts, with a special interest in theater, for a variety of publications.)

Reff:http://www.religionnews.com/index.php?/rnstext/give_my_regrets_to_broadway/

(RNS) Wolfgang Langhans, a Tokyo-based field director for missionaries, calls the week since the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan “the busiest and most stressful week of my life.”

But when those twin crises created a third—the threat of dangerous radiation leaks from a damaged nuclear plant—the balancing act between living out a missionary calling and keeping safe became particularly difficult.

“That was and still is a great concern,” said Langhans, a German Baptist who works for the group OMF International, which has some 100 missionaries in Japan.

“We constantly inquire about the latest news and advice and have prepared evacuation places in the west of Tokyo should radiation danger reach Tokyo,” he said in an e-mail Friday (March 18) between rolling power blackouts.

His organization has left evacuation decisions up to individual staffers. So far, seven have decided to leave Japan.

Across the devastated country and back home in the United States, missions leaders are grappling with whether staffers should stay put or move away, either to other parts of Japan or out of the country entirely.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has evacuated 187 missionaries out of the Sendai and Tokyo regions to other parts of Japan. They also are sending home an additional 45 missionaries who have almost completed their assignments.

Radiation from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex, which is about 150 miles north of Tokyo, was not the sole factor in the decisions, spokeswoman Kim Farah said.

“The infrastructure in those areas is dangerous,” she said. “We didn’t want people having to use their resources to support the missionaries when they needed to concentrate on their own families.”

The Southern Baptists’ International Mission Board also has moved its staffers in eastern Japan to a region southwest of Tokyo.

“The safety and security of our personnel is very important,” said board spokeswoman Wendy Norvelle on Friday. “We are also mindful of the Japanese people and want to minister to them in any way we can.”

The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod has relocated three missionaries from Tokyo to Kobe, in southern Japan. Two others in the western city of Niigata are not being moved.

“The move is more of a precautionary measure as the situation has worsened given the nuclear crisis,” said spokeswoman Vicki Biggs.

Other groups had determined they were far enough from the nuclear complex to continue their work. Several Catholic orders, for example, are staying put.

Sister Nancy Conboy, minister general of the Franciscan Sisters of the Atonement based in Garrison, N.Y., said the six nuns in her order in Japan are about 500 miles away from the affected region so “we really feel it is safe for the sisters to be there.”

The Divine Word Missionaries, with 135 in Japan, and the Daughters of Charity, also are far from the quake area.

The three-pronged crisis in Japan is prompting unusual challenges for missionaries, said Todd Johnson, director of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.

“Missionaries in general, who are tied very closely to local situations, are often the last people to leave or to evacuate,” he said. “Tsunamis and earthquakes and even war or pestilence—they historically have been the very last people to go because this is their home, so to speak, where they work. But radiation is just a completely different thing.”

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Johnson’s center estimates that there are about 8,000 missionaries, or 63 for every 1 million people, in Japan. That compares to Singapore, with about 218 per million, and India with about seven per million.

Marvin Newell, executive director of CrossGlobal Link, a Wheaton, Ill.-based network of mission agencies, said staffers who choose to stay in a potentially dangerous situation are often required to sign a release form.

“The litigation that could follow in something like this is a very big concern and that’s why missions are trying to be as prudent as possible,” said Newell, who could not recall in 32 years of mission work a previous need for contingency plans in Japan.

As of Thursday, Wheaton, Ill.-based TEAM (The Evangelical Alliance Mission) had told its 77 missionaries, mostly located outside the affected area, that the decision is up to them, said David Haas, director of support services for TEAM.

“It’s a combination of faith, including our trust in God, and using the wisdom and resources that he has provided,” he said.

Reff:http://www.religionnews.com/index.php?/rnstext/missionaries_grapple_with_leaving_japan/