Ray Nagin: God wants New Orleans to be a Black City

You really have gotta love our enlightened Louisiana politicians. After the fashion of Pat Robertson, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has publicly announced in his Martin Luther King Day speech the mind of God to the American public: God sent the hurricanes to destroy New Orleans because He is mad about the Iraq war.

God also wants New Orleans to be a black city, according to Prophet Nagin who said: "This city will be a majority African American city. It's the way God wants it to be. You can't have New Orleans no other way. It wouldn't be New Orleans."

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2006/103/21.0.html

Now I will not unload on such, well, stupid (and racist?) comments to point out all the problems with them. I can only think that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King must be rolling in his grave, since Nagin invoked his name, along with God's (in vain I suspect).

I wonder what (if anything) this says about Louisiana in general and "Black" New Orleans in particular?

Southern Baptist Mission Agency Bans Tongues

The International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist convention has voted to bar new missionaries who speak in tongues as a "private prayer language."

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2006/002/1.21.html

I think this decision is interesting for various reasons:

The article seems to imply that public tongues (with an interpretation) would still be acceptable; but in my (limited) experience of charismatic and neo-pentecostal worship, most people speak in tongues to themselves while they pray or sing and public interpretation is relatively rare.

I wonder what it means that a mission agency is banning something that many Christians experience as or believe to be a move of the Spirit? Church history shows that this is often how new denominations form; the Methodists were run out of the Anglican Church and the Holiness/Pentecostals were run out of the Methodists over disagreements about which unusual behavior was and was not a move of the Spirit.

Maybe more tangibly: since neo-pentecostalism is the fastest growing form of Christianity, especially in Africa, South America and Asia, I wonder how this policy will affect Southern Baptist missions and evangelism (if it does).