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Christians on the island of Mindanao believe insurgents with the New People’s Army (NPA), the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines, were responsible for shooting Pastor Feliciano ‘Cris’ Lasawang (50) and his 24-year-old son Darwin as they bathed in the Culaman River north of Jose Abad Santos, Davao del Sur Province, early one morning in November.

Pastor Lasawang was shot three times in the body and his son once in the face. The two men died at the site. They had conducted baptisms in the same river where they died, according to US-based Christian Aid Mission, which assists native ministries around the world. NPA rebels are suspected because the guerrillas believe church growth dampens insurgent recruitment efforts, and the pastor had received reports that the Communist militants were monitoring his movements.

In the last 20 years something like 70,000 people have come to Christ in Ethiopia.

This is a story untold by the secular media, but it is a vibrant movement of God’s Spirit in this land presently facing food shortages. Most of the people whose lives have been touched are from an Orthodox Church background, but many Muslims have found Christ too. Those who have seen what the Lord has been doing have been astonished.

Amid ongoing dangers, Christian leaders in Nigeria in October recalled the exemplary faith of indigenous missionaries who gave their lives in areas overrun by Islamic extremist militants.

While President Muhammadu Buhari told an India-African summit in late October that Islamic extremist group Boko Haram has been contained to ‘sporadic’ attacks in remote areas, leaders of the Evangelical Church Winning All (ECWA) told how Nigerian missionaries sent to those areas have suffered.

In November, representatives of the Middle East Reformed Fellowship (MERF) fields and support bodies came together for the International Council (IC) at the John Calvin Centre in Cyprus.

40 years on from small beginnings in Beirut, Lebanon, in the 1970s, MERF now has a ministry in every major country dominated by Islam.

Imagine the scene: you have been a missionary in a river community in the middle of the Amazonian jungle for nearly ten years, and, among other things, have spent over four years teaching the children from Genesis to Revelation.

But now some of the children are entering adolescence and you have decided to begin a Friday evening club to take the older ones ever deeper into the Word. As your wife busily prepares the after-meeting meal, you silently rehearse your notes – an introduction to the Sermon on the Mount. Expectations are running high as the veranda begins to fill up with excited teenagers, all arriving by canoe in the half-light. You thought eight to ten might attend… but in no time 25 have arrived!

Middle East Reformed Fellowship (MERF) partners with Westminster Biblical Missions (WBM) to support the witness of the Bible-believing Lahore Church Council.

Lahore is the capital of the populous Punjab province next to the Indian border.

Freedom 61 is a Christian organisation based in Latvia’s capital city, Riga, and is an initiative of Youth With A Mission (YWAM).

Taking its name from Isaiah 61.1, Freedom 61’s mission is to proclaim freedom to victims of human trafficking, freedom to men who are buying women for sex, and also to protect the freedom of those who are at risk of being trafficked.

Each summer UCCF sends teams of Christian Union (CU) students from all over Britain as a tangible expression of one of the core values of being generous in world mission.

Some teams remain in British towns working alongside local churches in their outreach to communities, while others travel further afield. During June and July this year, eight UCCF summer teams headed to places like Moldova, Serbia, Ukraine and Slovakia, to join alongside the CU movements in those countries. Our prayer is that God has used these summer teams powerfully to bring the nations to praise him.

As a land-locked country, Switzerland doesn’t seem the most obvious place for United Beach Missions to operate.

But in the first fortnight of July, thousands of people visit Montreux for the world famous International Jazz Festival. The ‘Kiosque Biblique’ is a permanent small wooden chalet, built in 1965, situated along the lake front and open from March to October each year. It is owned by the local Christian bookshop and run by volunteers. The kiosk sells drinks, postcards and souvenirs, but its main purpose is to sell Bibles and Christian books in many languages. Everybody who buys something is offered a free leaflet about the Christian faith in their own language.

Nyankunde is a small town near the Ugandan border with the Democratic Republic of Congo, which I visited in 1989 on my very first trip to Africa.

In March I was responding to a request for training and technical help from a young man who has started a radio station to bring a ‘message of reconciliation’ to this war-torn area.

An Islamic State militant has reportedly converted to Christianity after dreaming of a ‘man in white’, who he believed was Jesus, it was reported in early June.

The ISIS fighter had killed many Christians before the dream, and had confessed that he ‘actually enjoyed’ killing the Christians.

In July I found myself in the city of Hiroshima in Japan.

This August sees the 70th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on this city from the US bomber named Enola Gay. There is now a Peace Park at the site under where the weapon was detonated 600m above the city. The museum has a scale model where the bomb is represented as a small ‘sun’ – which in some respects it was – exploding in the air at 8.15am on the morning of 6 August 1945. There will no doubt be ceremonies to mark the anniversary of this ghastly event, which in many ways sadly marks the advent of ‘the nuclear age.’

The generosity of British Christians who saved a penniless Jewish child from Nazi-occupied Austria has prompted support for a rescue mission to save Christians from death at the hands of Islamic State.

Lord Weidenfeld arrived on a Kindertransport train in Britain in 1938 with only a few shillings in his pocket. Now aged 94, he is helping Barnabas Fund to rescue up to 2,000 Christian families from Syria and Iraq and resettle them elsewhere.

‘We are expecting a massive earthquake someday.’

A Christian leader told me this when I visited Kathmandu a couple of years ago. Nobody knew when, but they knew it was coming: the seismologists predicted it.

Despite logistical and financial difficulties, the organisers of a mission in Kinshasa in October were full of praise for God.

The mission had three phases: a forum of evangelists; a church leaders’ training on evangelism; and stratified evangelism in nine venues. The size of the city and the mission being organised with very little finance made it a challenge, especially mobilising the local church congregations. But still 22% of the mission budget was raised locally.

Carl Chambers

Date posted: 1 Apr 2015

The island of Cuba has recently hit the news again, because the US has finally overturned its 50-year policy of isolation by re-establishing diplomatic relations with this state socialist country.

World politics is not the only area where fundamental changes are happening – the church in Cuba is another one.

On 7 March the Free Methodist Church USA announced the release of its kidnapped missionary in Nigeria, Phyllis Sortor.

In a statement signed on behalf of the Board of Bishops of the church, David W. Kendall said 71-year-old Sortor was released by her captors on Friday evening, 6 March. He said armed gunmen abducted Sortor on 23 February from Hope Academy school in Emi-Oworo village in the central Nigerian state of Kogi.