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Many evangelical churches are relatively small and face great problems. At EN we dreamed up the kind of difficult local church situation into which young ministers/pastors and their families are often sent.

We asked four men to comment on how they might, under God, seek to turn things round if they were confronted with such a church.

It seems that very few churches or Christian mission organisations make any effort to consider how the context of their mission is likely to change before they plan. There is a tendency to plan as though the future is simply an extension of the present.

Futurists seek to identify driving forces for change. There is a widespread consensus that one of the major driving forces for change as we race into the 21st century is globalisation. It is our belief that globalisation is already changing the world in which we live, seek to serve Christ and think about mission. We join others and use 'McWorld' as a metaphor to characterise the globalisation of our planetary society.

In 1981 20th-Century Fox released a David Puttnam film about two British athletes who won gold medals in the Olympic Games in Paris almost 60 years before (in 1924). The film won critical acclaim and has been shown many times on television since then.

It brought to the public eye Eric Liddell, a Christian man who turned down the opportunity to compete in the 100 metres, the blue riband event at the Games, because its heats were to be held on a Sunday.

Jay Smith is an American missionary who holds weekly discussions at the historical Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park, London, which provides an open forum for the confrontation between the gospel and Islam.

He serves in Britain under the auspices of Brethren in Christ World Missions, and in October had a weekend conference in Dublin where he debated with Sunni and Shiite Muslims, 'encouraged by the realisation that, as Christians, we have little to fear when faced by the edifice of Islam in its many guises'. Smith and Dr. Elsie Maxwell were flown over by 'Dialogue Ireland', an ecumenical (Catholic/Protestant) group interested in 'dialoguing' with peoples of other faiths.

Literally millions of students in this country are being neglected in gospel work. Further Education (FE) Colleges have for too long been the forgotten frontier of student ministry. Many Christians hardly know these students exist, or are oblivious to the spiritual needs of the colleges on their doorsteps.

The facts speak for themselves: in the last academic year 2.35 million students were enrolled at FE colleges in England alone. Yet there are only 139 Christian Unions that UCCF know of, most of which have 2-5 members. Admittedly, many areas of Christian ministry are desperately lacking in resources, but at present there are only a handful of workers dedicated to FE colleges. As Steph Bushell, a student at Merton College, south London said recently: 'FE colleges are full of lost people as well'.

William Taylor is the Minister of St. Helen's Bishopsgate in the City of London, where Dick Lucas preached before his retirement. William has been outspoken in his opposition to the appointment of Rowan Williams as Archbishop of Canterbury. In this frank interview with EN, he explains why...

EN: What are the problems with Rowan Williams becoming the next Archbishop of Canterbury?

Getting on for two and a half years ago, Michael Lockwood moved from Thornhill Baptist Church with his wife and two daughters to join with four believers in fellowship at Hall Green in Haworth, West Yorkshire. He tells us what happened...

We went with an awareness of some of the inherent difficulties of life in a small church and prepared as well as we could for the hardships ahead. What we were not prepared for, however, was the enormous blessings we would experience, not despite the church being small but because it was small.

The American poet/songwriter Paul Simon wrote about the way human life goes. He described it like this:

Slip sliding away...

Something like a fifth of the world's people are Chinese. Woven into the fabric of the largest population on earth is the rich thread of China's ethnic minorities, numbering more than 100 million people. They are vastly outnumbered by the majority 1.2 billion Han Chinese.

'Operation World' has proved a great help in stimulating prayer for world-wide mission. But there is another book, 'Operation China', by New Zealander Paul Hattaway, published by Piquant, which introduces the reader to these hidden minority peoples within China. They account for only 6.7% of China's population, but they inhabit 62.5% of the territory.

2002 is the 50th anniversary of the death, in April 1952, of Samuel Marinus Zwemer. Though unknown outside specialist missionary circles, he was widely acknowledged in his lifetime as the world's foremost authority on all matters relating to Christian witness to Islam.

This reputation emerged from a 50-year career involving pioneer missionary work, literature propagation and advocacy work on behalf of mission to Muslims and finally a career in teaching and writing on missionary theology and practice.

Over the summer months many missions and gospel events are going on all over the country. One such outreach by students from Cardiff University went on into July and took place in the Rhondda Valley.

Wales has seen great days for the gospel in years gone by, but now things are different. For some time students from Cardiff Christian Union have had a burden to evangelise the valleys of South Wales and have set up a group called Revive to reach out. During term time a number of them go up to the valleys each week to work in youth clubs based in local churches in the area.

Francis Schaeffer brought a prophetic message to the church over 30 years ago about the sanctity of human life. Dr. Robert W. Evans's forthcoming book 'The Descent of Dignity' revisits the message that Schaeffer implored us to hear.

JC: You describe Francis Schaeffer in your book as your unseen friend. Tell us about his influence on you.

One year ago Claire Osborne walked into the Quinta Centre a confident graduate. She was looking forward to a year on the UCCF Relay programme 'meeting students for coffee and loving people'. All her illusions were soon to be shattered. The reality was that she was to be stretched and challenged more than she could ever have imagined.

'Relay' began as a response to UCCF's desire to put more people on the ground to work among students and to invest in and develop student leaders. It is now an established one-year training and discipleship training programme that has placed almost 400 recent graduates with Christian Unions across the country.

When Dayna Curry and Heather Mercer arrived in Afghanistan, they had come to help bring a better life and a little hope to some of the poorest and most oppressed people in the world.

Within a few months, their lives were thrown into chaos as they became pawns in historic international events. They were arrested by the ruling Taliban government for teaching about Christianity to the people with whom they worked. In the middle of their trial, the events of September 11 2001 led to the international war on terrorism, with the Taliban a primary target.

Surely we must stand amazed at the comparative lack of prayer in the British churches.

Think about our nation at present. Family breakdown is rife. Street crime is at record levels. Our media is awash with pornography. There is abortion on demand. Drugs are easily available. The churches are dwindling. Islamic extremism is on the rise. I can imagine the Lord Jesus standing at the door of many a church prayer meeting and thinking to himself: 'What has to happen to this country before my people will come and take prayer seriously?'

The value of churches having regular visiting teams going out with the gospel cannot be over-emphasised.

It is effective and not as difficult as many believe. Through visiting we meet people of all age-groups, and, given time and patience, we can gain their confidence and forge friendships with those who are interested to look into the Christian faith. Contact will be made with hundreds who do not attend church services.

During one of his lectures on apocalyptic literature this year at Word Alive, Don Carson explained how we can be diverted from the gospel by what may have been good experiences in our lives.

Culloden Battlefield is where the last battle was fought on British soil, between the armies of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Hanoverian Duke of Cumberland in 1746.

In 2002 the modern housing estates of Smithton and Culloden in Inverness are the scene of another struggle which has nothing to do with flesh and blood!

For a year of my degree I exchanged Irn Bru, ceilidhs, and a campus of 6,000 students for ice hockey, two feet of snow, and being one of 37,000 students at the University of Alberta. I also left behind a thriving Christian Union that packed in a good 200 each Friday night. In Canada, I didn't meet one Christian student.

This summer, thousands of students will be heading overseas on exchange schemes or as part of their degree. For the Christians who are leaving this can be a make-or-break experience. They often depart as unprepared missionaries, who struggle to find a church or Christian students they can meet with. Too many feel isolated and doubt their faith, or compromise their integrity.

The Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union (the CICCU) reached its 125th anniversary on March 9. Bob Horn, EN's former editor and recently retired as UCCF's General Secretary, was asked to speak on that occasion.

I owe a huge personal debt to God for the CICCU. Before I started at Cambridge, I was a Christian, but only half-committed and very uncertain whether I would stand for Christ.

From 400 students in a ballroom at Durham University to a lunch-hour presentation in a Further Education college in north London, students across the UK have been confronted with the gospel in this year's mission season.

The style of mission and individual events varied immensely, but each was organised by a group of dedicated students enthusiastic about evangelism.

I'm sure you've been there. You're trying to explain the gospel to someone, but they just aren't hearing you. They're listening to the words, but you've some huge hurdles to get through before they'll really hear, let alone respond. Christian students in Wales face this problem every day. The fact is, they are speaking the wrong language. No matter how well they present their message, or how appealing an event they put on, if it's in English, many Welsh-speakers will have closed ears.

It was back in the 1970s, when Welsh national pride was first on the rise that the Christian Unions realised they needed to start sharing the gospel in Welsh, if they were to reach the Welsh-speaking community. As the Christian students prayed for opportunities and began to present Christ in the Welsh language, they saw large numbers converted.

In parts of Africa, Eastern Europe, China, etc., there seem to be many people turning to Christ. What are the reasons for fewer conversions in the UK?

The need is there, the gospel is the same, Christ is the same, God is unchanging. Many factors may be suggested, sociological, political, economic, and above all spiritual.

Evangelical feminists, otherwise known as egalitarians, have generally favoured retaining traditional masculine trinitarian language. Scripture is God's inspired Word and the vast majority of egalitarians have sought to defend masculine God-language against the criticism of many of their feminist colleagues. In the process, however, they deny that such masculine God-language has any implications either 1) of superiority of what is masculine over feminine, or 2) that the eternal relations of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit indicate any kind of eternal functional hierarchy within the Trinity.

Let it be said clearly that non-egalitarian, complementarian evangelicals agree wholly with the first of these denials. Because God created the man and the woman fully as his image (Genesis 1.26-27), it is clear that no use of masculine language for God is meant to signal some supposed greater value, dignity, or worth of men over women.