Relief

Christmas gifts are floating from military aircrafts to Micronesian communities in need this week as part of the longest U.S. humanitarian mission in the history of the Department of Defense.

Operation Christmas Drop began 60 years ago, when U.S. aircrew stationed in Guam flew over Micronesia on a training mission and noticed people waving from below. The crew quickly bundled up supplies, attached a parachute and dropped the package below.

The tradition has been carried out every year since. Packages filled with mostly relief items – clothes, food, medicine, toys – are dropped on dozens of Micronesian islands for one week every year before Christmas. more >>

Saddleback Church’s popular addiction program, Celebrate Recovery, will soon hit the silver screen.

Filming for "Home Run," a story about overcoming trials and tribulations, recently wrapped in Oklahoma and is slated for release next September. It tells the story of Cory Brand, a baseball star who battles and defeats alcoholism with Saddleback's Celebrate Recovery initiative. The megachurch launched the popular 12-step Christian program in 1991, and it now counts over a million graduates who have overcome past addictions in their lives.

In an interview with The Christian Post, executive producer Carol Mathews explains how "Home Run" shows the reality of rounding the bases in personal struggles with addiction. More importantly, she adds, it reveals that God is the only one capable of catching us when we fall towards rock bottom. more >>

The nation’s first faith-based academic disaster research center located at Wheaton College in Illinois, aims to equip Christian churches and organizations to respond to natural catastrophes in the best way possible.

Wheaton College launched the Humanitarian Disaster Institute (HDI) just before the start of the fall semester. It is also one of the few disaster or humanitarian centers in the Midwest, according to school officials.

The institute is using its experience in Haiti and a planned trip to tsunami-affected areas in Japan to equip relief organizations. more >>

West Africans could face another food crisis in 2012, but Oxfam International is insisting it is avoidable.

Calls to increase aid are underway, as experts warn millions of adults and children risk facing starvation.

"The situation is looking extremely worrying for millions of people in West Africa, but the worst is not yet inevitable," Mamadou Biteye of Oxfam Humanitarian Lead in West Africa said in a press release Monday. more >>

After nearly two years of serving in earthquake-ravaged Haiti, the Billy Graham Rapid Response Team is completing the mission and chaplains are set to come home, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association reported Wednesday.

More than 120 chaplains spent 22 months in the devastated country, after arriving in Haiti immediately following the Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake. Chaplains typically stayed for two-week periods and were rotated in and out regularly, said Keith Stiles, deployment manager of the Rapid Response Team.

“We were in clinics, orphanages and school. We worked with Samaritan’s Purse at the shelters … we ministered to Samaritan’s Purse volunteers in the camps at night,” said Stiles. more >>

WASHINGTON – The countdown towards AIDS' extinction began this morning in honor of the 24th annual World AIDS Day.

President Obama and a panel of experts, celebrities and social leaders promised that their combined efforts could start the ending of the disease's global epidemic as early as 2015. The group's bold statement is based on the idea that before the next decade, an entire generation of births could occur without new infections through prevention efforts.

"Today we come together across countries, cultures and faiths to combat the pandemic of AIDS," Obama told a packed Jack Morton Auditorium on George Washington University's campus. "Back in those early days, few could imagine we'd talk of the possibility of an AIDS-free world. Make no mistake – we're going to win this fight." more >>