search

Lambeth 2008 ended on a high. As the final service ended in Canterbury Cathedral, the names of nine members of an Anglican Mission Order in Melanesia martyred in 2003 were placed in the chapel of Martyrs of our Time.

Their colleagues processed with their names, from the nave up the many steps to the quire screen, singing the most haunting refrain. They passed from sight through the quire screen. But they continued singing. The refrain echoed round the cathedral. It was as though we had seen the martyrs themselves pass into the nearer presence of God, yet their beautiful singing could still he heard. Strong men wept.

In Sheffield in September 2007, a new training programme began called Porterbrook Training, part of the Porterbrook Network. Michael Jensen interviews its director, Steve Timmis, for EN, to find out what it is all about.

MJ: Before we talk about Porterbrook Training specifically, can you tell us how the Porterbrook Network came into being?

The Clerkenwell Symposium was a gathering of UK evangelists with Tim Keller earlier this year to discuss how to unlock the mind of the unbeliever.

The group sought to develop ways of evangelism which:

The radio work of Grace Baptist Mission (GBM) began in India 50 years ago. It was a cause for deep gratitude that the recommendation from Conference in India to the Mission Council in London asking permission to establish a radio ministry was unanimously accepted in the 1950s.

Not all Strict Baptists of that generation were happy about radio. Even in 1963, when in the UK on furlough, a missionary was told by one pastor that, ‘Radio is the devil’s instrument’.

Margaret Clarkson, whose rarely-used first name is Edith, was born in 1915 into, as Margaret herself described, ‘a loveless and unhappy marriage’, which broke up when she was 12.

C. Stacey Woods (‘a name not widely known’) was well celebrated by Julia Cameron in November’s EN. Another of his hidden achievements came in Toronto in 1946. He asked Margaret Clarkson to write a hymn.

A small team of solicitors, sent by BMS World Mission to work with the Uganda Christian Lawyers’ Fraternity (UCLF), is engaged in a major project in Kampala, striking at the root of one of Uganda’s greatest needs.

Following in the footsteps of Christian educationalists and healthcare professionals, who have done such pioneering work in Uganda over the past 120 years, these lawyers are laying foundations for justice both now and for the future.

This article is mainly a summary and review of the biography of Caroline Cox, subtitled A Voice for the Voiceless, by Andrew Boyd.

I would like to start with an extract from the foreword to the biography, written by Lord Tonypandy: ‘I regard Baroness Cox as one of the grLion Bookseat women of our generation — a 20th-century prophet. She has awakened the conscience of the House of Lords to the terrible challenges that face Christians in other lands.’

When Marian Evans’s novel Adam Bede came out in 1859 it made the name ‘George Eliot’ justly famous.

Her novels soon took their place among the finest in the English language. To discerning readers, however, Marian’s scepticism indicated a growing problem about Christianity and the church.

’What does it mean to love our universities?’

For many UCCF Christian Unions (CUs) around the country, February means missions.

David Hall describes how one small Anglican church in rural Sussex mobilised for mission.

After a fitful night’s sleep, the soldiers emerge from their dug-in positions, stretch and check their weapons one last time. They have all written their final letters, now they scan the horizon apprehensively, grateful for air support, special forces already in position, artillery back-up, the naval blockade and, above all, their colleagues in the regiment.

One day last summer I lost my church. Or rather, it lost me.

I’d been out of the country a couple weeks, and, therefore, hadn’t been to church in a while. My first Sunday back, I showed up at the usual time and place ready to reconnect with friends through a communal experience of faith.

One of the gravest weaknesses of contemporary Christianity is the little attention paid to the wrath of God. We have become sentimental and have so stressed the love of God as to become unwilling to talk about his wrath.

In part this is because the culture will not let us do so. There is an outcry whenever the clear teaching of the Bible is given in public. Church members have to live in this world. They do not want their minister to talk about unpopular or divisive subjects. The minister is aware of this and he is tempted to soft-peddle on matters that are scriptural. Among them is the subject of God’s wrath.