Stephen Lungu, one of the great evangelists of recent times and revered as the ‘Billy Graham of Africa’, has died of coronavirus, aged 78.

Stephen grew up in pre-independence Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) and was the product of a dysfunctional family, living on the streets and getting involved with street gangs.

New official data reveals that almost 2% of the Spanish population now identifies as Protestant or evangelical.

In the 20 years to 2018, this group multiplied eightfold, to become the fastest-growing denomination in the country. And those evangelicals are now worshipping in well over 4,200 churches across Spain, opening on average 16 new churches a month.

New Secretary General of the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA), German theologian Thomas Schirrmacher, has begun work after being inaugurated.

The WEA was established in 1846 and works in 129 countries. It claims to represent 600 million evangelicals.

More than 100 people were killed after a massive explosion in Equatorial Guinea (central West Africa) in March, with 600 injured and almost 300 in hospital. More than 60 people were rescued from under the rubble by the civil protection corps and the fire service.

Local Christians and churches were badly affected too, with a Baptist pastor (as yet unnamed) killed and several members of the Baptist Church of Bata killed or injured.

Gary Clayton of the Mission Aviation Fellowship writes: For more than 75 years, MAF’s fleet of light aircraft has been flying patients from some of the world’s most hard-to-access areas to hospital.

Many MAF flights involve women facing pregnancy complications, accident victims or people wounded due to tribal conflict. Two, less typical, MAF medevacs involved a two-week-old chimpanzee and a ten-year-old boy.

It’s not very often a preacher has to scale a cliff to get into his pulpit, but that is the kind of terrain that Pu Zhidui must overcome as he oversees eight churches comprising 2,000 believers.

The area in which Pu preaches, Fugong county, has 360 churches and 80,000 Christians, but just 67 lay preachers and four pastors.

The story of Anglican growth in Africa and decline in the West is very familiar, but this is often spoken of as if it were simply the result of underlying social, economic and cultural forces, without giving sufficient attention to the role that leadership plays, for good or ill.

The Anglican Church of Kenya, which has just celebrated its 50th anniversary as an independent Province, is an interesting example. The current Archbishop and Primate, Jackson Ole Sapit, may not yet be as well known outside Kenya as some of his predecessors (such as David Gitari who was a prominent opponent of President Moi’s attempt to entrench one-party rule, and Eliud Wabukala, who was Chairman of GAFCON from 2011 to 2016), but he too is bringing courageous and creative leadership to the Anglican Church of Kenya.

The Global Assembly of Pastors for Finishing the Task (FTT) has held an online forum to discuss how to mobilise churches to cover 5,000 unengaged and unreached people groups.

FTT is a movement of 1,600 churches and organisations who have come together to reach the Unengaged, Unreached People Groups (UUPGs). These are people groups who have no access to a Bible, believers, or a body of Christ and have less than 0.1% evangelical believers. Rick Warren is the director.

90% of pastors have no formal theological education, a specialist in theological education in the Global South has told an international consultation.

Dr Manfred Kohl, who has experience in supporting and financing ministry training, explained that for this reason he funds only people – and not buildings. He also challenges institutions and their funders to think radical thoughts about theological education.

Even though the number of flights MAF made in 2020 was reduced because of coronavirus, its planes were still able to bring hope, help and healing to 26 of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable nations.

In Kenya, where overland travel can be dangerous by day and treacherous at night, Pilot Daniel Loewen-Rudgers flew a baby boy from Dukana, on the Ethiopian border, to Kijabe Hospital, when the condition of the newborn became critical. According to Daniel: ‘It was a miracle we could fly to a good hospital like Kijabe during the pandemic.’

Exclusive photos and report from Phil Good in Beirut, Lebanon. Phil and his wife Sylvie work with the Church Mission Society (CMS) and the evangelical Resurrection Church there.

‘Resurrection Church Beirut (RCB) has raised funds and undertaken to repair 100 homes that have been damaged. Counselling support is ongoing and will be needed for many months to come; the repercussions of this event will reach a long way into the future and the church is preparing for the long haul. After the news fades, so many people will need to rebuild their lives, and rebuilding lives is what the church knows about.

An English evangelical led a German man and his Bolivian wife to Christ after he met them by seeming chance in the very highest point of St Peter’s Roman Catholic basilica in the Vatican.

Greg Downes, Director of Ministerial Training, and Dean of The Wesley Centre for Missional Engagement at the evangelical training college, Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, says:

Saudi Arabia has called the United Nations to focus on ‘eliminating Islamophobia’ as an outworking of tackling online racism and xenophobia.

Meshaal Bin Ali Al Balawi, Saudi’s Head of Human Rights at the United Nations Mission in Geneva, addressed the Human Rights Council, flagging the internet as a ‘space for practicing racism’ as he called for the UN to work towards finding a ‘solution’. The Saudi leader stated that the world needs to ‘prohibit racial discrimination in all its forms’.

A round-up of encouraging news stories during the coronavirus pandemic

Uganda: was I dreaming?

For three days in Uganda, blind Anna and her granddaughter lived on nothing but water and a daily cup of milk, given by a neighbour, which the pair shared between them.

Fulani militants were seen to be exploiting lockdown as they launched a series of murderous attacks throughout May.

Militants killed at least eight Christians and injured scores of others on 12 May in one of a series of murderous attacks on villages in Nigeria’s Middle Belt. Large numbers of gunmen stormed the villages of Bakin-Kogi, Idanu and Makyali, in the Kajura Local Government Area of Kaduna State, causing families to flee into the bush and to neighbouring communities.

In May, a judge blocked the appointment of a former Christian missionary and pastor to head the country’s federal Indigenous Affairs Agency after concerns were raised by advocacy groups that oppose evangelical outreaches to tribes in the Amazon.

Ricardo Lopes Dias had worked with New Tribes Mission, now called Ethnos260, for ten years. The group’s missionaries have engaged in efforts to contact unreached people groups and tribes deep in the Amazonian rainforest.

Covid-19 has prompted many thoughts about what life could look like now that we have been forced to abandon, for a while, uninterrupted global travel, foreign holidays, and despite the foreshortened lives and devastated economies, enjoyed with the earth and its airspace a sabbath of sabbaths.

Lambeth 2020 and GAFCON in 2020 postponed gatherings that would have signalled the continuing tear in the fabric of the Anglican Communion. Does this postponement and the pandemic crisis signal a possibility of different opposing groups in the Anglican Communion finding a way of remaining in one Communion both seeking and showing the unity Christ prayed for the church? Seeking the unity of the Church has always been a key commitment of the Anglican tradition. Might there be space for thoughts about what the Global Anglican Communion might look like?

As an unprecedented virus disrupts the planet, MAF’s planes and people are helping to prevent the spread of coronavirus in some of the world’s poorest places.

Implementing every precaution possible to protect its personnel and the isolated areas MAF serves, the organisation has been quick to offer support wherever possible.

A spokesman for the Al-Shabaab terror group active in Somalia declared coronavirus as a ‘punishment visited by Allah upon the disbelievers’ in an audio message reported on 27 April.

As the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Mogadishu began to climb, the militant, known as Ali Dhere, called on Muslims to gloat about the ‘painful torment’ inflicted on any non-Muslims who contract Covid-19.

Six leaders of the Early Rain Covenant Church were removed from their homes and detained by Chinese authorities whilst watching an online service on Easter Sunday. Taking place via Zoom, it was interrupted as police raided members’ homes. Someone watching the service said: ‘I thought it was the network connection issue at first, but I soon heard a quarrel erupt.’

The electricity was disconnected in one of the homes and others received phone calls warning them that the police were coming. All six leaders were later released.

In the 1960s, a diffident young Korean, who was an ex-refugee aspiring to be a pastor, knocked at the door of Swiss L’Abri. Cynthia Stanton, Edith Schaeffer’s long-serving worker, opened it and greeted him. In due time, they were to wed.

It was a chalk-and-cheese liaison, but it was to produce much unobtrusive fruit. She was a Londoner, her father running a fleet of black taxi cabs. His father had fled North Korea to Beijing, where he and his wife sheltered refugees. Both Kim’s parents were freedom fighters in a volunteer Korean army against the Japanese in the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). They suffered torture and witnessed atrocities. Kim was born in Beijing one year into that war.