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An American aid worker stressed out after ministering for many months to victims of the Chechnya conflict.

A Palestinian Christian couple serving fellow Palestinians in refugee camps. A Californian doctor on his way to help for several weeks in a mission hospital in Ethiopia. The director of a large Australian missionary society touring their areas of operation with his successor. A group of Norwegian Lutherans returning to missionary service in Madagascar. A Finnish agriculturalist, long retired, meeting up with former colleagues from the United Mission to Nepal. A Peruvian doctor about to begin a new career as a theological teacher in Colombia. City missionaries from all over the UK attending a conference in London.

For many years the mission statement of the American evangelist, D.L. Moody, has been a personal challenge to me.

Why do you get out of bed in the morning? What motivates you from day to day? Moody once replied, ‘I look upon this world as a wrecked vessel. God has given me a life boat and said to me, “Moody, save all you can”’.

Situated just north of the equator on a continent which now boasts nearly 60% of the world’s population, Singapore’s four to five million inhabitants (who live on an island uncannily the same shape and size of the Isle of Wight) punch well above their weight in both the regional and global economies.

The current Singapore Church Directory (2001-02) lists nearly 370 churches, but what is striking is the breadth of ministry. Many provide special language ministries for Indonesian, Filipinos, Tamil (S. Indian), Cantonese and Hokkien (both Chinese), and others too, including more discreet ministries in the Muslim community. Some Sunday ministries begin as early as 7.30 am and continue with their multi-lingual services through to early evening.

Today’s university is a dangerous place for young students. In the marketplace of ideas, secular relativism is the unchallenged king, ruling with the strong arm of tolerance.

The gospel is frequently squashed out and silenced, as in the case of the recent ruling against Exeter Christian Union (CU) by Mark Shaw QC, which maintained that an atheist should be allowed to run the CU. The knowledge of the Living God is suppressed, just as we read in Romans 1, and subject to distortions and dubious personal interpretations. Today’s students are a generation without Christ and without hope in the world; taught to ignore him, indoctrinated to deny him.

Picture the scene: it’s 1993 and a fresh-faced art student sits on the floor of his painting studio next to a cross-legged Buddhist.

For the last half-hour they’ve been talking ‘God’. To the outside listener the conversation seems an incoherent ramble. Yet the student knows better. There’s method in his glibness. Unknown to his ‘enlightened’ subject he’s carefully preparing the ground for an evangelistic piéce de resistance.

It is not given to many men to have two spheres of missionary service during their lifetime, but it was given to Ernest Walton-Lewsey.

Born on January 27 1914 in NW London, he was an only child and remained all his life a ‘lone ranger’. He never married. He did not come from a Christian home, but came under the influence of a godly grandmother. ‘I set out to know for myself the God she so deeply loved’, he wrote. At 12 years old he gave his life to Christ at a meeting at Spurgeon’s Tabernacle, saying, ‘I will serve you, Lord, never wanting anything for myself’.

We have recently seen intense debates in the UK and the US about whether a student organisation may legitimately demand of members and speakers an adherence to a statement of faith.

C. Stacey Woods, a name not widely known, set in place the vital importance of credal definition for an evangelical university movement.

As The God Delusion continues to ride high in best-selling booklists globally, many Christians find this rising tide of hostility towards the gospel deeply discouraging.

But one Scottish minister has grabbed the opportunity created by this anti-God literary phenomenon to take the good news of Jesus back to the nation.

Raymond woke from his broken sleep with a dull ache in the pit of his stomach and an overpowering sense of fear that made his heart beat loudly in his chest. Today was the day he was to voyage to the northern shores of Africa. His passage on board the vessel had been secured for weeks, and his missionary articles were stowed ready. The vessel only waited upon him.

From the open window, the town of Genoa seemed to buzz with public anticipation of his bold ambitions to share Jesus Christ with those of the faith that Europe fought in the on-going Crusades. Picking up his quill pen, he wrote. ‘I am overwhelmed with terror at the thought of what might befall me in the country whither I am going. . .’ The quill shook uncontrollably in his hand. ‘. . . The idea of enduring torture or lifelong imprisonment presents itself with such force that I cannot control my emotions.’

A Christian married couple I know of had to move out of London and leave their church to go north with the husband’s job.

Much to the surprise of some of their long-term Christian pals they began attending the little and very local Anglican church in the village to which they had moved. The friends of the couple had concerns. The church was small, the teaching was not heretical but it was not great, and there was nothing there for their four children.

‘My desire is for students to renew their confidence in the gospel and their commitment to passing it on’, enthused Hugh Palmer, one of the keynote speakers at UCCF’s national CU leaders’ training conference, Forum, in early September at the Quinta Centre in Shropshire.

Engaging with God’s Word, so that CU leaders return to their universities better equipped to speak the gospel out, has always been the objective of Forum. This year’s conference, entitled Trans-mission, pursued that vision in a number of ways.

A few years ago, I planned to work as a TESOL teacher in my retirement.

Having obtained the certificate, I waited. My first enquirer was a Korean who went on to get his PhD and is now on a pastoral team back in his own country. He was the first of many Christian brothers I met doing theology or defence studies at Aberdeen University.

Josh Moody

Date posted: 1 Nov 2007

So here’s the kind of question I most commonly get asked about our church. Not ‘what do you believe?’, not ‘what is your vision for the church?’, not even ‘what kind of programmes do you have for our children?’ No, the question I most commonly get asked — by outsiders, you understand — is ‘who do people vote for?’

The election is still a year away (November 2008…), but already positioning is going on for the religious vote. Rudy Giuliani, famed former mayor of New York City, is trying to deal with the possible negative repercussions of his well-known pro-abortion stance. Conservatives, it is felt, will not possibly support him for that single reason. And, in fact, an influential group called The Council for National Policy, has voted that if Giuliani is nominated as the Republican presidential candidate they will seek to form a Third Party. That’s fighting talk.

Over the past 29 years of my life I have been an aggressive, creative and strategic supporter of gay and lesbian issues.

As the publisher of a 13-year-old periodical which targets black gays and lesbians, I have had the opportunity to publicly address thousands, influencing closeted people to ‘come out’ and stand up for themselves, which is particularly difficult in the African-American community.

In this brief article on the vital subject of church planting, I am drawing principles from Acts 16.

An approach that is more practical, and that gives insights into the ways of reaching our materialistic and apathetic society, would be very valuable, but is beyond my competence.

Chris Hayward was the first person I met who convinced me that it was possible to be an evangelical whilst being dedicated to music.

Chris oversaw the music at the Round Church in Cambridge when I first came across him. My immediate reaction to him was deep and selfish jealousy. This was because I heard him as a musician before I met him as a person. I was jealous that, though he was primarily an oboist, his keyboard skills far outshone mine, even though I was an organ scholar at the time. He used to use a spectacular ‘fill’ in the breaks between verses, which I sweated for hours to try and copy. God had given him a very natural musical ability.

In 2006, The Independent on Sunday reported that almost 40% of the male population of Britain had used pornographic websites in the previous year.

The study by Nielsen NetRatings also showed that 1.4 million women in Britain had used online pornography in the same period.1 I would like to think that the situation among Christians is totally different. Sadly, this is not the case.

John Gibbens has given the following moving account of the progress of the gospel in Mongolia, underlining the need for careful translation of the Scriptures.

Mongolia, under Genghis Khan, became the world’s greatest empire, stretching from China and Korea to Central Europe. Mongolians have a history of atheism, with strong Shamanist and Tibetan Buddhist superstitions. Marco Polo noted in the 13th century that Mongolians revere any religion, saying it is the best when it is to their advantage. Mongolia also has influences from Manichaeism, Zoroastrianism and Chinese philosophy. Mongolians comprise what is said to be a people group numbering some ten million people over Mongolia, China and Russia.

There is a mission field that I’ve always struggled to know how to reach with the gospel. It’s made up of what I call ‘choral atheists’.

These are people who belong to church choirs or choral societies, they sing Christ-centred works like Bach’s Matthew Passion or Handel’s Messiah, and yet they don’t believe a word of what they sing. To be honest, I find that choral atheists are more hardened to the gospel than anyone else I meet. Just as hardened are the non-believers who like to listen to this music, which, though I don’t like the definition, I’ll refer to as sacred music.

Ray Pountney of West Hill Baptist Church in Wandsworth knows about SW London’s emerging gang culture.

We should all be deeply grateful to Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harrris and now Christopher Hitchens for putting the existence of God at the centre of public debate.

According to the Guardian, Hitchens’s new book, God is not great sold 4,000 hardback copies in its first week, while Dawkins’s The God delusion sold 300,000 copies in the UK. Hitchens’s sales director is quoted as saying, ‘People find it increasingly hard to marry organised religion with their own view of the world and want a more intellectual, contemporary take on the subject.’

‘The best of times and the worst of times’: most of us can associate with Dickens’ words at some period.

For me it was my three years at Durham University. The amazing highs of new experiences, friends, and opportunities all sadly twinned with lows of wasted time, missed chances and wrong decisions. Without a doubt they proved vital in my Christian discipleship. I owe a huge debt to those of an earlier generation who decided CUs should be student-led.

In an era when full-time ministry training will set you back £75,000, taking you out of circulation for at least three years to boot, an institute in the north of England is quietly running an alternative model.

According to Tim Chester, its director, the Northern Training Institute (NTI) is designed for ‘graduates or those who have significant ministry experience’ and offers a model of training that takes into account the changing face of evangelical ministry and the changing face of secular Britain.

From March 31 to April 5 around 1,800 students attended Word Alive, making it the biggest student conference in Europe. For over 15 years Word Alive has been bringing ‘Rolls-Royce’ Bible expositions, seminar tracks and workshops to build up the people of God and resource them for mission.

With over 130 Christian Unions represented at this year’s conference, Word Alive continues to be a major event in the CU calendar and is a massive opportunity to equip Christian students for mission on campus. The Chronological Bible Overview, Understanding and Communicating the Bible and Using the Bible in Evangelism were among the most popular seminar tracks this year.