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If you were a shopkeeper in Iran, you would have to put a card in your window stating your religion, ensuring that most customers would pass you buy, afraid to be seen entering. If you were a pastor, you would receive regular summons to the police station and threatening phone calls that you know are serious - another of your colleagues was killed last year.

And if you were a Muslim who had recently become a Christian almost anywhere in the Muslim world, the chances are that you would be living far from your family and home, perhaps in fear of your life.

Pastor Daniel Ogutu tells of the work in the Mathare Valley just outside the Kenyan capital of Nairobi

This slum is an eyesore, an endemic source of social and moral problems. With a population of 500,000 people, it is located on both sides of the Mathare river. It is only 5km from the city centre of Nairobi. Sadly, due to lack of sanitation, the river has changed into a dump for refuse and filth.

A challenge to Christians to re-orientate their whole way of church life around people who need to know Jesus as Saviour and a removing of the traditional barriers between pastors and evangelists, has come from Stephen Gaukroger and Luis Palau.

Stephen, senior minister at Gold Hill Baptist Church as well as a regular Spring Harvest (Word Alive) speaker, and international evangelist Luis, gave the challenge as they toured Britain to share the vision of city and area-wide missions in the Bristol and Bath area, East Midlands and the North West. Luis will be leading the 'There's More to Life!' mission centred on Bristol's Ashton Gate football stadium this coming June, while the East Midlands regional mission will probably take place in 1998.

In God's providence, one opportunity for ministry is often used to enrich another.

My wife and I were on our way to visit the Tertiary Students Christian Fellowship in Papua New Guinea and Pacific Students for Christ in Fiji (both IFES-related movements like the British UCCF, but in countries we had never visited before, and about which we knew we were ignorant).

Two men emerged and picked up the dead bird, probably destined to make a bedraggled trophy on a shelf somewhere. For many migrating birds of prey in southern Europe and the Middle East, that destination is almost as probable as the remaining woodlands of northern Africa. Estimates vary of the number of all kinds of birds who fall prey to hunters and trappers around the Mediterranean each spring and autumn, but it is probably over 20 million.

On this particular morning, at least, the eagle's demise did not go unlamented; there was an opportunity for A Rocha team members to explain to its hunters a little more of how the bird might have lived if allowed to continue on its way, and to ask them to consider whether they were happy with the idea that their grandchildren might never see the bird in the wild. That was a new idea, it seemed.