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Thirteen years ago, my ‘gap year’ brought me to Tasmania. Now by God’s providence, wisdom and humour I find myself living and ministering to the university community (with the University Fellowship of Christians) in Hobart, along with my wife and two children.

There are close to 14,000 students on campus in Hobart but the University Fellowship has historically represented about 0.5% of that number. Our ministry is one of evangelism and training leaders. It is an exciting but arduous and slow mission field. Or at least it has been until this year…

When OM Field Leader Youssef and his wife Hie-Tee moved to his native Algeria in 1988 to establish an OM ministry, a revival among the Kabyle people was already sweeping the northern region. ‘Before 1981, there were very few believers,’ Youssef said. Today, he knows of believers in every one of the 2,400 Kabyle cities, villages and towns.

In July 1981, the early Kabyle church, 40 to 50 believers, started a two-year process of praying and fasting, memorising 365 verses about fear. A new Kabyle radio ministry broadcast sermons and teaching across the region, and a church in Ouadiha, led by an Algerian-Swiss couple, began a wide literature distribution campaign in villages and showed the Jesus film in local cafés.

A team of Bible translators in Kurdistan, northern Iraq, working against the backdrop of civil unrest and religious persecution, have completed the first-ever translation of the whole Bible into the Central Kurdish Sorani language and launched it in April.

For eight years, mission partners have worked alongside indigenous Kurds and other foreign nationals drafting text, checking names, terminology and style, and finally checking both the Old and New Testaments so that they could be published together for the first time as the complete Bible.

Did you hear about the Scotsman, the Englishman and the three Irishmen?

Well, no one is more amazed than them that, over the past nine years, around a million people in Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda, Kenya, South Sudan and now Congo have looked at Jesus in Mark’s Gospel using Christianity Explored (CE ). As with all gospel growth, it is the story of God at work in and through his people.

Some things will never change in New Zealand. The spectacular scenery in the South Island, so graphically captured in the Lord of the Rings trilogy of films, will remain for the benefit of future generations, as will the more subtle but equally appealing beauty of the country’s North Island.

Similarly, but less desirable, the country’s location on the Pacific Ring of Fire, prone to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, will remain for posterity.

For the first half of the 20th century, Latin America was an almost exclusively Catholic continent. Though the gospel had been preached in Latin countries for decades, the local evangelical church hadn’t grown significantly. In 1970, only 4% of the population identified as evangelical and the continent was still considered a mission field. But this was about to change.

Operation Mobilisation started with an outreach of a few young students in Mexico, but the focus soon shifted towards Europe, the Muslim World and India. MV Logos, OM’s first ship, was already in service in those parts of the world when the prospect of a second ship opened the possibility for OM to return to Latin America in an impactful way.

Local churches in Dunkirk helped to evacuate terrified migrants on 10 April as a devastating fire spread through their camp in northern France.

La Linière camp in Grande-Synthe, just outside Dunkirk, housed an estimated 1,500 migrants, including a handful of Christian converts, but was reduced to ‘a heap of ashes’, a local official said. Afghan migrants reportedly began to set fire to the chipboard cabins in which the migrants lived and the fires quickly spread. Riot police intervened.

It’s been over five months since a pioneering US missionary was kidnapped in Niger.

Jeff Woodke, who worked for Jeunesse en Mission Entraide et Developpement, a branch of the US-based Youth With a Mission, was abducted by unknown assailants in October, from the town of Abalak in northern Niger.

The story of the Chibok girls has gone around the world to make many people aware of the brutal activities of Boko Haram in Nigeria.

The very name conjures fear and conveys their conviction that Western (or Christian) education is wicked. Education standards in the area had been in decline because of the low priority given to schools. The outbreak of the Boko Haram insurgency in 2009 gave a further deadly blow to the little that was left of education in the region. Most schools in Borno State have remained closed since 2013 with many of the children in stop-gap camps or in the homes of relatives across different parts of the country as internally displaced persons.

Kavana, a 22-year-old in Asia, shared her story of God’s faithfulness in her life.

‘When I was 16 years old, my father suddenly passed away. After that, my mother and I became helpless. We had no work to earn money and meet our needs.

Christians in the south of Nigeria are failing to help their persecuted compatriots in the north, according to a veteran humanitarian campaigner, it was reported in late December.

Baroness Caroline Cox, who has made numerous aid missions to the country said: ‘My personal view is that many of those churches are immensely wealthy and I would hope they could do more to help those who are suffering in the north, particularly the internally displaced people who are left. They could work with churches [in the north] who know the needs to reach those most in need. From a Christian point of view, St Paul said that where one part of the Body of Christ suffers, we all suffer. There is an obligation to help our Christian brothers and sisters.’

Homemade jam is bringing integral mission to Quechua communities of Cusco, it was reported in early August.

For the past four years, ATEK, an organisation that seeks to strengthen local churches through the use of Quechua Scriptures, has provided training in needy communities of Paruro province.

Grace (GIS) is an amazing school for missionary children in Northern Thailand that was set up in 2004 by a group of parents who wanted to keep missionaries on the field.

They recognised a need for a good, affordable education for missionary children, that would enable their parents to stay serving in Asia, to support and care for their children, third culture kids with different needs. Grace is more than a school, to many it is family.