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In 1983 I left teaching in a large comprehensive school to work full time as a travelling evangelist.

Before then, evangelism had been my life, so that when God called me into this work, it was a natural progression from what I had been doing. In the last quarter of a century there have been huge changes not only in society and church, but also in methods of evangelism. Some of this has been rapid.

I know of a woman living in a large town who is suffering from terminal cancer, has few friends, no family close, is very isolated and in need of friendship and support.

I am sure that every true Christian would want to reach out to her to offer friendship, prayer and the encouragement of the gospel. Unfortunately, this has not happened. Sadly, this lady lives in a small bedsit just around the corner from a large shiny new church and they know nothing of her or she of them! Are there many others like this lady on our doorsteps who are not reached? What can be done?

John Brand

Date posted: 1 Dec 2009

On November 9, the Rev. Dr. Colin Peckham, Principal Emeritus of the Faith Mission Bible College, Edinburgh, was suddenly called home.

Colin was born, and also born again, in South Africa. He grew up with a farming background but, after studying agriculture, felt the call of God to Christian ministry and studied for a degree in theology at the University of South Africa. He earned a Master’s degree from Edinburgh University and successfully gained his doctorate.

Ray Porter

Date posted: 1 Nov 2009

The most exciting thing about teaching at a theological college is seeing students go out into ministry.

Some have obtained a curacy and can look forward to a further three or four years of training on the job. Others have obtained similar posts as assistants in Free churches. All of them can now look forward to an assured salary and housing. Their future financing will be the responsibility of their church.

20 years ago I was driving through Germany one November evening when, on the car radio, I picked up some news which was to shake the continent: East Germans were pouring through a breach in the Berlin Wall.

I had been visiting Christians in Poland and Hungary and knew that they would find this almost unbelievable. According to Vaclav Havel, ‘The fall of the Communist empire is an event on the same scale of historical importance as the fall of the Roman empire’. Oxford scholar Timothy Garton Ash has suggested that there is not a corner of the world that has not in some sense been touched by the consequences of 1989.

NM: Could you sum up the purposes of The Square Mile project and how you would like to see them expressed in action?

KK: Our hope is that The Square Mile resource equips and encourages churches to better demonstrate and proclaim the gospel. I long to see churches with a clearer vision for their role in the community and helping Christians connect their everyday lives with God’s work in the world — through mercy (demonstrating God's compassion to the poor), influence (being salt and light in the public life of the community), life-discipleship (equipping Christians for missional living as workers and neighbours) and evangelism (faithful and relevant communication of the gospel).

The Lausanne Covenant, substantially crafted by John Stott, includes the phrase: ‘Evangelisation requires the whole church to take the whole gospel to the whole world’.

One might argue that the three wholes embodied in this ringing phrase are hardly new, and go back to the Apostle Paul, if not to the patriarch Abraham himself. Let us look at what each means.

EN: What’s the point of theological college?

MO: For me, a theological college exists to serve local churches, working in partnership with them to carry out the great commission of Jesus to make disciples of all nations. Everything we do has to be seen in the context of that big picture — we’re here to help churches do what Jesus calls us to do.

One idea which is guiding Oak Hill a great deal just now is that our task is to train the equivalent of GPs, rather than specialists. A good GP has the breadth and depth of medical training to deal with whatever medical problem next walks through the door. They can’t say, ‘I’m only going to treat people who’ve injured their left elbows, but I won’t treat anyone who’s got ingrowing toenails’. The same is true of church pastors. They can’t pick and choose the situations and problems which arise in their churches, but have to offer biblical care and teaching to their people wherever they are in life.

In September, Cornerstone Evangelical Church, Nottingham celebrated the 40th anniversary of Peter and Valerie Lewis’s ministry there.

The story of Cornerstone tells how God can have plans for a small, back-street church in a Midland city which has touched thousands of lives and reached to the ends of the earth. No one should underestimate the potential of small churches, but we can also rejoice in the strategic role of larger churches in Britain today.

UCCF’s mission is to the university. We exist to proclaim the message of Jesus in the student world and see young people becoming his disciples.

To that end, we produce an array of resources to equip Christian students for their mission — tooling them up for the work of mission. A happy by-product of this is that many of our resources can be put to good use in the local church as well: in youth groups, for training, for church-based student work.

This may not seem like a very spiritual article but it has come to me with real force in recent weeks.

Accurate record keeping is not on most youth leaders’ agendas as it is a bit of a pain taking registers of young people and there are many more exciting things to do in an evening of youth ministry. At a recent Root 66 training session (no plug intended!!), I asked the leaders to write down the names of five of their group and asked them to estimate how often each of these students came to the group. The usual response to that question is something like, ‘I suppose it’s about half the meetings this term’.

A university freshers’ week is typified by hordes of people doing exactly what they want; enjoying their new-found freedom, spending their student loan and often consuming vast amounts of alcohol. During this time everyone is trying to find their place, to make new friends and to get off on the right foot.

Imagine, or maybe you have been there yourself, a Christian trying to get by in this. For some it’s exciting, full of opportunities to get involved and have fun, but to stand tall for Jesus. For some it’s terrifying, being dragged to clubs and bars every night and having to explain over and over again why they aren’t getting drunk.

It used to be the Belgian Congo, it later became Zaire, and today it’s back as the Democratic Republic of Congo. I want to tell you as best I can of what God most wonderfully did for our church in the NE corner of the country back in the 1950s.

God sent a wonderful visitation of the Holy Spirit to us. In the Congo-Swahili language that we used, we called this visitation Baraka ya Roho Mutakatifu (the blessing of the Holy Spirit).

The past 20 years have been like no other in history. Everything about the way we think and live has changed.

The under-25s entered education when the concept of Truth had already become historical, even quaint. And the last quarter century has, as a result, proved fertile ground for amoral pragmatism, which, not surprisingly, gained easy acceptance in many areas of life. The church needs leaders who can discern the times, leaders like the men of Issachar (1 Chronicles 12.32).

Churches and Christian charities are now subject to closer scrutiny by the Charity Commission. Although this gives rise to some concerns, the new obligations also give opportunities for the gospel.

The legal landscape within which churches and Christian charities operate has changed radically in recent years. The Charities Act 2006 contained two particularly important provisions. The first is that all churches with an annual income of more than £100,000 must now register with the Charity Commission. The second is that all charities are required to demonstrate and report on the way in which their activities benefit the public.

Oliver Barclay has always been a wise and insightful contributor to important issues in evangelical thinking and so I read with interest his article ‘Where is Academic Theology heading?’ (EN, December 2006).

He queries how helpful academic theology is for preparing men and women for any kind of ministry, even if it does provide the churches with excellent resources. However, the academic theology he talks about in his article is not the only type of theology studied in Bible colleges and universities. Increasingly, in recent years, there has been a growing interest in the discipline of Applied Theology. Dr. Barclay ends his article with a question: ‘What sort of theological study is most useful to the ordinary student, who has no aspirations to become an academic or to do serious research, but wants useful knowledge and skills?’ To me, the answer is Applied Theology. This article attempts to set out the case for it.

One of the memorable features and purposes of the annual Keswick Convention in days gone by were the early morning prayer meetings.

Queues formed at the crack of dawn at the two venues — the church in Southey Street had an overflow outside in the street — as earnest believers of many nationalities shared spontaneous, audible intercession for the work of the Lord Jesus Christ worldwide.

September 24 2009 marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of Charles Simeon, a great man of God whose 54-year ministry at Holy Trinity, Cambridge (1782-1836) had such a remarkable impact on the work of the gospel in this country and much further afield.

At the time of his conversion as a first-year undergraduate, there was only a handful of evangelical ministers in the Church of England, but, by the time of his death, it is estimated that a third of Anglican pulpits were occupied by evangelicals, as many as 1,100 of whom had been profoundly influenced by Simeon at Cambridge. What can we learn today from his teaching and example?

We regularly receive appeals in the West to help feed the poor and hungry of the world. But we understand by faith that there is a greater famine going on, a famine of hearing the life-giving, soul-nourishing Word of God.

Even in countries where there are packed and thriving churches, very often the pastors have little training and a poor grasp of how to teach the Bible properly. This makes many Christians, in Africa and elsewhere, extremely vulnerable to false teachers and prosperity gospels.

Every parent, grandparent and youth worker knows the gnawing sense of anxiety they feel when someone they know first goes up to university or college. Especially if they’ve had the experience themselves, they know the full-on impact of those first few days and weeks as a fresher.

The bewildering numbers of new faces and names and choices; deciding what clubs to join and sports to pursue; managing the laundry and working out how to survive on a student loan; and, of course, learning to negotiate the campus and the timetable! The freedom and the options that university or college life inevitably offer can be a heady mixture. So many parties and so little time! Life back home, especially life in the church youth group, can seem so tame and restrained and, oh, so far away. For a Christian young person there is the challenge of finding a good church, making new Christian friends, and not abusing their newfound freedoms.

James Cary

Date posted: 1 Aug 2009

When poets talk of the birds twittering in the trees, a different picture is now evoked.

Imagine sparrows and starlings pecking away at laptops, telling the other birds who are ‘following them’ what they’re doing. Twittering or, more correctly, tweeting, reached critical mass a few months ago when Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross both decided to use Twitter. But what is it?

I wonder how David felt as he stood in Goliath’s shadow, slingshot in hand with just five smooth pebbles? Pure fear?

The full realisation that he was puny and the one he was about to fight was a literal giant? No doubt he should have been petrified of what was in front of him but he knew the saving power of God behind him.

Ray Porter

Date posted: 1 May 2009

James Hudson Taylor III died on March 20 at his home in Hong Kong. Like his great-grandfather he loved Christ and the Chinese and served them to the end. Some of his last words were, ‘God is good’. He was a great example of a godly man and a warm friend and colleague.

James was born in China to missionary parents who resolved to stay in the country to serve the Christian believers as the war with Japan developed. He was interned with other children and staff of the CIM Chefoo school. His grandfather, Herbert, was in the same camp and he got to know him well and thus had a direct personal link with Hudson Taylor himself!

At Forum last September, UCCF’s fifth Gospel Project, FREE, was officially launched. Around 1,000 students, staff, and Relay workers saw the unveiling of 400,000 copies of impressive new FREE gospels, and more than 20 additional resources.