Free Seminar on Financial Planning Is Offered Sunday

The Presbyterian Church of the Covenant in Costa Mesa at 2850 Fairview Road is holding a free seminar about financial planning Sunday at 11:30 a.m.

A church member, attorney and financial advisor will explain estate planning, wills and family trusts as well as ways to donate to churches and nonprofit organizations, seminar organizer Wayne Rexrode said.

“We want people to plan as intelligently as they can, and part of the plan is to benefit the church,” he said.

Nondenominational Services Target the ‘Young at Heart’

With contemporary music, a surfer priest and laid-back atmosphere, Rock Hills Church is hoping to reach out to young or “young at heart” Christians.

The nondenominational Christian church recently began holding services in the 350-seat auditorium of Mission Viejo High School at 25025 Chrisanta Drive.

“There are people that are looking to encounter God that may be looking for something a little more down-to-earth,” said pastor Lyle Castellaw, a 38-year-old Tustin native and surfer. “Our approach is a little more stripped down.”

The grand opening, on Sunday at 9:30 a.m., is free and open to the public.

Documentaries Focus on AIDS Ministry Members

For a year, members of a ministry for AIDS patients shared their lives with Hiro Inaba, a Japanese documentary filmmaker. They told him about their lives and their loves. They let him tape their marriages and funerals.

Each member of He Intends Victory, a Christian ministry in Irvine, either has AIDS or is HIV-positive. The stories they told are now part of television documentaries aired throughout Japan.

“Asia and Southeast Asia is considered the next Africa when it comes to this pandemic,” said Bruce Sonnenberg, president of the ministry, who is also featured in one of the documentaries.

“We thought the opportunity to be on air in Japan was one we really wanted to take to get the message out.”

The first program, “The Real Meaning of Grace,” airs this month in Japan. The second, “Unconditional Love Through Jesus and Our Trust in Him,” will air in February and features a hemophilic ministry member who contracted HIV and another who died of AIDS.

The programs are not airing in the U.S.

Sonnenberg said he and Inaba hoped the programs would sensitize Japanese Christians to the plight of AIDS patients.

“We’ve heard many times that AIDS is a punishment or judgment from God,” Sonnenberg said. “Is prostate cancer God’s punishment to man? Is breast cancer punishment to women? It’s not a personal punishment. . . . The Bible tells us to love our neighbor. It doesn’t just say love the healthy people.”

Group Raises Funds to Fight Persecution

Open Doors With Brother Andrew, a nonprofit Christian group in Santa Ana, received more than $84,000 in donations in 1998 to help persecuted Christians worldwide by sending Bibles to other countries.

The group used $20,000 of that money to secretly distribute Bibles in China and several countries in the Middle East.

In some countries, the Bible is considered “as dangerous as drugs or pornography or illegal piracy,” said Mike Yoder, director of communications. “In countries where the government works very hard to control its people, they don’t want their people to develop an allegiance with God.”

The group smuggled more than 1.5 million Bibles, hymnals and spiritual books to China and brought 250,000 Bibles and other reading material to Christians in predominantly Muslim countries in the Middle East, Yoder said.

The nonprofit, which normally uses money for Christian reading material and theological training, used $60,000 this past year for emergency famine relief in southern Sudan and will distribute part of the more than 400 tons of supplies--food, blankets, seeds, medicine and clothing--to Christians who have been affected by the country’s decades-old civil war, Yoder said.