What in the Name of the Crusades are Tennessee Evangelicals Doing in Kurdish Iraq?

[Are_grits_groceries]

<snip>
According to Reynolds, America 21 "was run by an old anti-abortion ambulance-chasing lawyer and lobbyist named J Thomas Smith... was working on behalf of some Christian evangelicals that were looking to set up shop in Kurdistan." Those discoveries led him to Douglas and Marilyn Layton and Servant Group International, a project run out of the Belmont Church in Nashville.

While Franklin Graham was preparing to provide relief to beleaguered Iraqis (and to find Christian converts), Servant Group International had already been in Iraq for more than ten years. Again, Reynolds:
<snip>
How did Christian evangelicals get so deeply involved with the Kurds?

You might say that it started after Saddam Hussein's 1988 assault on the Kurds, which culminated in the chemical weapon attack that killed thousands in the village of Halabja. Some 14,000 refugees from Kurdistan made their way to Nashville, Tennessee, now home to the largest Kurdish population in the nation. Four years later, a group of Nashville evangelical Dominionists known as Servant Group International, departed from the Belmont Church--a megachurch occupying several blocks on Music Square--making their way to the mountains of northern Iraq where they set up shop.

Why is Kurdistan important to Christian evangelicals?

For evangelicals, Northern Iraq is prime real estate in what they call the "10/40 Window," which is a geographical delineation at 10 and 40 degrees North latitude that opens across North Africa, through the Middle East, India and closes in Indonesia. The concept originated in 1991 with Argentine evangelist Luis Bush, and was expanded upon by his fellow New Apostolics C. Peter Wagner and George Otis Jr. These zealous dominionists called it the "primary spiritual battleground in the world today...the Church's final evangelistic frontier."
<snip>
Can you describe how Servant Group International operates?

What is especially distinctive about SGI--and its partners--is its development of a military model of evangelism ('spiritual warfare'), which includes covert action tactics ('tentmaking'), intelligence gathering ('spiritual mapping'). They have an ingrained animosity to Islam, and their Dominionist 'Kingdom Now' worldview, is a fusion of neo-Calvinist authoritarianism and 'New Apostolic' Pentecostalism, a cult-like millenarian sect of the Assemblies of God led by self-anointed 'apostles' and 'prophets.' Interestingly enough, its best-known adherent is Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

http://servantgroup.org/index.htm

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/20401

I didn't know anything about this. Just what is needed in the Middle East - a wingnut group setting up shop to do who knows what.
The unholy alliances that can be spawned from this make my head hurt. Apparently they have been there since 1988. Sweet Jesu....

MEH!

[get the red out]

1. When are we going to expose Missionaries

for what they are really all about? Right now there is a default position of "respect missionaries" in this country. We need for them to be looked at critically. They do so much more harm than good. I am all for people achieving religious freedom, but to be converted from one sect to another by hook or crook isn't it.

[VAliberal]

2. An article or two written by reps. of the Servant Group

have washed up in the last five years or so in the Chalcedon Foundation's monthly periodical. Chalcedon Foundation was established by R.J. Rushdoony, the father of Christian Reconstructionism/Theonomy.

The Servant Group International has been vigorously promoting, from what I understand, Reconstructionism and Theonomy among the Kurds.