Word: irian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...local- and cable-television audiences, says most TV ministries have suffered a significant fall in viewership. Concurs Fred Vierra, president of United Cable, the nation's eighth largest operator: "We do not see their audiences growing. They're staying relatively flat." One evangelist cracks, "I was in West Irian on the island of New Guinea, and even some of the Stone Age people are familiar with the PTL scandal. That's how far it has gone...
...Indonesia, Hong Kong Bureau Chief Sandra Burton watched a Mennonite missionary weigh bleating goats hung by their hoofs from a hook scale. And in the village of Mulia, in the untramped interior of Irian Jaya, the Indonesian half of New Guinea, she met Missionary Leon Dillinger, photographed for the cover by Roland Neveu...
...throughout the world. Nonetheless, despite their awareness of the religious arrogance of older missionaries, and their sensitivity to the customs and rituals of the peoples they serve, questions remain as to whether the spiritual good they do is not balanced, in part, by social and cultural harm. In the Irian Jaya village of Mulia, for example, schools set up by the missionaries threaten a complex family structure that developed over the course of centuries. The children no longer can help their mothers work in the gardens and the rise in monogamy adds to the wives' labor...
Leon Dillinger has had similar success in another obscure corner of Asia: the interior of Irian Jaya (formerly Dutch New Guinea and now part of Indonesia). Dillinger, 51, and wife Lorraine, 48, work among Dani tribesmen cut off from the outside world by crocodile-infested, malarial lowlands and mountain ranges that soar to 13,000 ft. It is against Indonesian law to convert any person who already has a religion, and 88% of the country is Muslim. But the government does allow Christian missionary work, Minister for Religious Affairs Haji Alamajah Ratuprawiranegara acknowledged to TIME, "as long...