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100 years ago this month, the great missionary to China, Hudson Taylor, went to be with the Lord . . .

On June 3 1905, 30 guests from six missionary societies attended a reception at the mission house of the China Inland Mission in Changsha.

?I wish I?d known it would be like this; I would have brought a bus load!? This was just one comment from a student after attending the recent missions conference for university students at New Tribes Mission, North Cotes.

Students gathered from universities all over the UK and indeed Europe, to be part of it. Until they arrived they were not quite sure what they were letting themselves in for, as it was the first conference of its kind ? but a pleasant surprise for waiting ? it was a super weekend.

Have you ever had the experience of feeling that God has guided you only for everything to seemingly go wrong? If you have been, this article from the pen of a missionary of the 1930s, Mildred Cable, might help.

‘It was well that it was in thine heart’.

‘We have carefully considered your case and have very regretfully reached the conclusion that we cannot accept you for foreign service.’

A common complaint among churches is the dearth of candidates for the pastoral ministry.

A recent article contrasted two approaches: selecting men and challenging them to consider this calling, and praying, preaching and leaving it to men to hear God’s call. Actually there need be no conflict between these two approaches; both have been effective. In times of spiritual awakening, under powerful ministry, many more men hear the call than in less fruitful times.

The radio was still on when I opened my bleary eyes. I must have dropped off to sleep the night before without turning it off. The last few weeks of term had been hard work. I rolled over, giving myself ten more minutes under the duvet. Then it hit me ? ten more minutes wasn?t an option.

Steve Price has been performing tricks and illusions since he was a boy. In July this year he left his post as Head of Design in an independent secondary school to use his mix of comedy and magic tricks to reach people for Christ. Here’s what he has to say about it all …

I guess it all started when my parents gave me a book called Ali Bongo’s Book of Magic for my ninth birthday. I played around with a few simple tricks and I’ve been hooked ever since.

Roger Carswell has been an itinerant evangelist for over 20 years, faithfully preaching the gospel at church and university Christian Union missions across the UK.

At the last count he had been the main missioner at over 70 university missions. This year he spoke at Bristol, Durham, Newcastle, Stockton, Sheffield and Exeter. He just loves university missions! EN?s The Third Degree caught up with Roger to find out why.

If you are part of a small church you have a choice. You can choose to see the small size of the congregation as a reason to be discouraged and downhearted. Or you can choose to see the church’s smallness as a reason why you might be just the church God can use.

Where am I coming from with that last statement? Is it just foolish optimism? I don’t think it is. Here is my reasoning.

Elmer Albright was a fellow-carpenter, born in Shamokin, Pennsylvania, whose father was a coal miner. He and his wife, Evie, had come to know Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour at the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church in Shamokin about five years earlier under the ministry of a Scotsman named George Atcheson.

As he worked with Ernie, Elmer began to speak to him of the Lord Jesus Christ, someone he invariably referred to as his Saviour. He told Ernie of God the Creator who made and sustained the universe, whose Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, had been sent into the world to deal with our greatest need, the guilt of our wayward living: ‘We deserve eternal death, because we are sinners, but the Lord Jesus, because he loved us, died for us.’ While Elmer explained the good news to him and urged him to read the Bible, he invited Ernie to come to the Sunday School which the government allowed a small group of Christians to hold in a recreational building on the base.

‘The finest missionary speaker, I ever heard’, Martyn Lloyd-Jones was reported to have said, by one of the six speakers at the memorial service held in Hereford Baptist Church on February 19.

Maths was never my strong point. But if (as Christian Research says) the church in the UK is in decline, it must be because there are fewer people born again each year than are leaving. Surely this is not good news for evangelicals, for whom the gospel is the ‘stuff of life’.

I can remember sitting under ‘faithful gospel preaching’ for years, and wondering why there were no unbelievers to hear it. We were told it was good for the saints to be comforted by the gospel. I still agree with that, but I think it misses the point. Surely the primary target for the good news is the hell-bound sinner who needs to be convicted and converted.

Widnes College Christian Union - possibly the smallest CU in the world.

Both members meet in a shabby classroom every Tuesday lunchtime for prayer and Bible study, led by their FE (further education) CU staff worker, Martin Povey. 'Not exactly the cutting edge of campus-based evangelism', you might be thinking.

The world’s population explosion is a much talked-about topic in development circles, and so it should be. After having taken millennia to pass the 2,000 million mark, it will take barely 100 years to increase from that figure to over 9,000 million by the middle of the 21st century.

The most densely populated countries have majority Muslim populations, so Muslims will constitute an increasing percentage of the world’s population in years to come. Coupled with this is the fact that Muslim communities worldwide are among the poorest. Therefore tackling population and poverty, urgent goals for world leaders in coming decades, will place increasing focus on the world of Islam.

Tim Chester

Date posted: 1 May 2005

Let me explain how I came to write this. I was reading the Bible with two friends who are Muslims.

Each week they faithfully came to my home and we discussed a passage of Scripture over a cup of tea. Many of their questions were about the Trinity: How can God have a son? How can there be three Gods and one God?

It was 50 years ago that Brother Andrew started his ministry to persecuted Christians which has developed over the years and spawned the organisation Open Doors.

Brother Andrew's message to the church in the West at this time is simple. 'The church needs to accept the fact that there is a Suffering Church and repent of our lack of understanding and compassion.