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They face off, jaws squared, eyes trained on their opponents. It's a battle between good and evil, and who wins depends on the power of the cards and the skill of the players.
"It's a good game. Everybody loves to play the game," says Zachary Palmer, 13.
Laughter mingled with a lot of trash-talking fills Wesley Memorial United Methodist Church on Monday and Thursday nights. Move over, Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh. In this Lakeland neighborhood, AngelFire is trump.
"The kids have the idea that these angels we created might be real," says David Collinsworth, the church's youth pastor.
Collinsworth designed the card game that pits the armies of good angels Gabriel and Michael against the army of the evil Lucifer. With the roll of the dice, the game begins. Every character on a card has special powers and fights in one army or the other. The players use strategy to win their opponents' cards.
"Sometimes the good angels win. Sometimes the bad angels win," says 11-year-old Shantirria Thomas.
AngelFire tournaments draw an average of 35 children on weeknights. Most come from the economically depressed communities surrounding the church.
"I mostly stay at the church," Zachary says. Some of his friends used to get into trouble, but now most of them come to the church, he says.
Many of the children who play AngelFire went to the church initially because of the game. Now, almost all of them are members of the church and attend worship services regularly.
"The game has become the way to catch a kid that might not have been caught any other way," Collinsworth says.
The youth pastor is working with a Michigan marketing company to try to distribute AngelFire nationwide.
A book that accompanies the game explains the theology of angels and their role in the Bible, but Collinsworth chose purposely not to make the game overly theological or preachy. He wanted it to be as mainstream as possible and fun for kids to play.
The angels don't live in heaven. Instead, they reside in the fictitious "Angel City." While the game is Christian-based, God is not a character in the game. The premise is based on the popular theme of "good guys" versus "bad guys."
Many of the children at Wesley Memorial leave the game table with life lessons and stronger faith.
"You've got to watch out for the bad stuff happening in your life," says Montrez Greer, 13.
Palmer agrees. "It helps you know what's bad and what's good. It helps you know you want to go to heaven."
Nancy E. Johnson is a Florida-based freelance correspondent for United Methodist Communications.
While the United Nations and some officials within his administration have carefully avoided referring to the violence and death in Sudan's Darfur region as genocide, President George W. Bush told reporters on June 1 that he concurs with former secretary of state Colin L. Powell who had previously declared "the situation a genocide." The President restated his commitment to provide financial and logistical assistance, but not U.S. troops, to stop the killing.
United Methodists have been active in encouraging President Bush to do what he can to stop the bloodshed in Darfur.
Bishop Hope Morgan Ward of Mississippi called on the U.S. government to take a stronger stand against genocide in Sudan. "By contacting the president, the United Nations ambassador and members of Congress, we can make an impact on the tragic situation," Ward said. "This is an opportunity for the U.S. to use its power for good for vulnerable people."
According to an open letter from religious leaders released May 24, "Up to 400,000 people have lost their lives in Darfur since the government-sponsored genocide began in 2003. More than 2.5 million people have been displaced, their livelihoods and villages destroyed by government forces and their proxy militias, and many thousands of women and girls have been raped by these forces.
"Recent reports confirm that the government-sponsored violence continues in Darfur, and that the security situation is deteriorating. The humanitarian crisis that forms part of the genocide is escalating, as the government of Sudan continues to obstruct humanitarian operations, creating famine conditions for millions of vulnerable people."
The letter, signed by United Methodist officials such as Bishop Beverly Shamana and James Winkler of the UM Board of Church and Society, calls on the Bush administration to work through the United Nations to achieve a stronger civilian protection mandate for the African Union mission and to assemble a broader international force.
The failure of the Security Council of the United Nations to take serious action on July 30, 2004, led leaders of the National Association of Evangelicals, World Evangelical Alliance, and the Institute on Religion and Democracy to write the President last August. "It's our judgment that deteriorating circumstances and obstruction, indeed complicity, by the Khartoum regime now necessitates additional actions by the United States government," their letter stated.
That letter, signed by James V. Heidinger II and Steve Beard of Good News, urged swift government action authorizing (1) massive humanitarian aid to protect the highly endangered civilian populations displaced in Darfur; (2) active exploration of all plausible intervention options in order to stop the killing; and (3) a serious multinational effort to remove Sudan from membership on the U.N. Human Rights Commission.
The leaders also urged their churches and related ministries to "give generously to the relief agencies active in the Darfur region of Sudan" and indicated that their agencies would be willing to work with any and all international bodies, including the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, to alleviate the suffering.
Adapted from United Methodist News Service.
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