Virtual ministry?
en staff
Date posted: 1 Jun 2017
en looks at how we are being encouraged to utilise online resources in our churches
Everyone values high-quality resources.
Niger: no news on kidnap
World Watch Monitor
Date posted: 1 Apr 2017
It’s been over five months since a pioneering US missionary was kidnapped in Niger.
Jeff Woodke, who worked for Jeunesse en Mission Entraide et Developpement, a branch of the US-based Youth With a Mission, was abducted by unknown assailants in October, from the town of Abalak in northern Niger.
Techno-philiacs
Zuckerberg’s epistle
Ed Brooks & Pete Nicholas
Date posted: 1 Apr 2017
At the age of 33, Jesus Christ was a figure of scorn.
A little more than three years from the beginning of his public ministry, the following he had built had all but deserted him. His mission to establish a global community under the loving rule of God seemed to be a sad joke. He was crucified, dead and buried.
Looking outwards with the gospel
Chris Sugden
Date posted: 1 Apr 2017
In February, the Secretary General of the
Anglican
Communion,
a
Nigerian
Archbishop, Josiah Idowu-Fearon, addressed
the General Synod of the Church of England;
and Growth and Decline in the Anglican
Communion – 1980 to the Present, edited by
David Goodhew of Cranmer Hall, Durham,
was launched at a conference.
Archbishop Fearon clarified that the term
‘Anglican Communion’ referred to churches
which find their common roots through the
CofE and its tradition to the witness and mission of the apostolic church. ‘The very word
anglicana implies a living tradition of faith in
the gospel as this church has received it …
from Augustine of Canterbury … to renewal
in
the English Reformation and beyond.’
‘They feel they owe so much of their faith, in
human
terms,
to
the
faithful giving of
Christians in the CofE over the centuries.’
Mary Sumner’s leaky umbrella
Charles Raven
Date posted: 1 May 2017
The Mothers Union (MU) is one of the great success stories of the Anglican Communion.
Beginning in 1876 with Mary Sumner’s vision for Christian marriage and family life, the movement now numbers some 4 million members worldwide, with the largest concentration being in Africa.
Denis J. Lane 1929 –2017
Ray Porter
Date posted: 1 Mar 2017
In the 1960s and 1970s two remarkable men led OMF International. The General Director was Michael Griffiths, the public face of the mission. The other was the Overseas Director, Denis Lane, who was responsible for its daily running. He was the man who turned vision into reality.
Born in Worthing, in 1949 he graduated from London University with a Law degree. The next year he started training for CofE ministry at Oak Hill. The Vice-Principal at the time was Alan Stibbs, who had served with OMF’s predecessor, China Inland Mission. Denis then went to a curacy in Deptford while completing the London University BD. A second curacy followed in Cambridge before, in 1960, with his wife June, he joined CIM/OMF to serve in Malaya. Isabel Kuhn’s book Ascent to the Tribes was instrumental in leading them to this ministry. They went with their young son and spent six years in the South Perak district.
Nigeria: fighting Boko Haram with books
The Revd Dr Sid Garland
Date posted: 1 Mar 2017
The story of the Chibok girls has gone around the world to make many people aware of the brutal activities of Boko Haram in Nigeria.
The very name conjures fear and conveys their conviction that Western (or Christian) education is wicked. Education standards in the area had been in decline because of the low priority given to schools. The outbreak of the Boko Haram insurgency in 2009 gave a further deadly blow to the little that was left of education in the region. Most schools in Borno State have remained closed since 2013 with many of the children in stop-gap camps or in the homes of relatives across different parts of the country as internally displaced persons.
Conference for the FEW
D.J.Carswell
Date posted: 1 Mar 2017
What do you call a collection of evangelistic workers? Answer: F.E.W.
Under the banner of the Fellowship of Evangelistic Workers (www.thefew.org.uk) there is now an annual conference for evangelists, several regional days around the country with guest speakers, and time for prayer and fellowship.
Helen Roseveare 1925–2016
Julia Cameron
Date posted: 1 Feb 2017
Julia Cameron reflects on the remarkable life and ministry of Dr Helen Roseveare, who died on 7 December 2016 aged 91
Helen Roseveare is widely-recognised as one of the most courageous and influential missionaries of the 20th century.
Churches together again?
David Stone
Date posted: 1 Mar 2017
David Stone’s concluding article concerning lessons from the past about church cooperation
In last month’s article, we looked at the development of the Baptist Union (BUGB) and the Congregational Union (CUEW).
Anglican renewal in Brazil
Charles Raven
Date posted: 1 Mar 2017
Most Christians in the UK probably have
only the haziest idea of what Anglicanism
looks
like
in
South
America.
The
Edinburgh Missionary Conference of 1910
inhibited Protestant and Anglican missionary work in the continent, while the English
language has always been marginal, unlike
most
other
areas
of
the
Anglican
Communion where British influence was
much stronger.
This is a pity, because out of the continuing
crisis
in
the world-wide Anglican
Communion a reinvigorated and missionary
church is emerging in South America, in
spite of official persecution and rejection. In
fact the pattern of North America is being
repeated. Just as a new GAFCON-recognised
Province,
the Anglican Church
in North
America (ACNA), arose out of the aggressive
and assertive revisionism of the American
Episcopal Church (TEC) and the Anglican
Church of Canada, so in South America a
new orthodox Province is coming into being
as the Anglican Episcopal Church of Brazil
(IEAB) and various TEC satellite provinces
in central and northern South America
follow the
lead of their North American
counterparts.
Reflecting on spiritual abuse
Karen Soole
Date posted: 1 Apr 2017
Karen Soole tells of her own experience and reminds us of some needed lessons
Horrific stories of historic abuse within the evangelical community were recently exposed by Channel 4 News.
Glasgow: planting the gospel
Paul Brennan
Date posted: 1 Apr 2017
Paul Brennan brings us up-to-date with new congregations linked to The Tron Church in Glasgow
The last year has been one of significant change for The Tron Church.
news in brief
Egypt: false imprisonment
A 15-year-old Coptic Christian boy was sentenced to 15 years in an Egyptian prison for sexual assault, even though forensic reports showed no evidence of a crime.
His mother says her son, Fadi, is innocent and was targeted only because her Muslim neighbours, whose eight-year-old son was the alleged victim, ‘don’t like Christians’. The Muslim boy’s grandfather is imam at the local mosque. The family were forced to move home, which itself is a crime against the Egyptian Constitution where Article 63 prohibits arbitrary forced displacement of citizens.
Major developments at Keswick
Jonathan Lamb
Date posted: 1 Apr 2017
Cumbria
is an English county known
worldwide, not least for having at its heart
the beautiful Lake District National Park,
nominated to become a World Heritage site.
Then there’s the Keswick Convention, a
name which has also rippled around
the
world. And yet another famous export are
Derwent Pencils.
The Third Degree
Making friends in Kingston
Kate Duncan
Date posted: 1 Apr 2017
‘Would you be interested in our events this week?’
I was offering an information flyer to passersby in the university hallway, a busy thoroughfare en route to lectures. Most students had taken one. Some even stopped to chat, asking ‘What’s this about?’ or having a go on the ‘Question Wheel’ – discussing purpose, identity or love over a free bowl of cereal or cup of coffee.
Before it’s too late
Tim Sunderland and Phil Walter ponder the sad case of a declining church putting things off for too long
Goodway Road was a small church on a housing estate in the north of Birmingham.
Knowing God Better
Depending on God’s Spirit
Jonathan Lamb
Date posted: 1 Feb 2017
‘I believe in the Holy Ghost,
I believe in the Holy Ghost.’
It was apparently the habit of the great
Baptist preacher, C. H. Spurgeon, to say this
quietly under his breath every
time he
mounted
the
steps of
the pulpit at
the
Metropolitan Tabernacle in London. Even if
the story is apocryphal, Spurgeon’s ministry
affirmed the importance of the Spirit’s work:
‘Men might be poor and uneducated, their
words might be broken and ungrammatical;
but if the might of the Spirit attended them,
the humblest evangelist would be more
successful than the most learned divine
or the most eloquent of preachers.’
Huge momentum!
Ray Evans
Date posted: 1 Jan 2017
Book Review
SPIRIT EMPOWERED MISSION:
Aligning the Church’s Mission with the Mission
of Jesus
Read review
Crossing the Culture
Hearing God in Silence
Angeline Liles
Date posted: 1 Feb 2017
‘God still sees us even though we worship in secret.’
In rural 17th-century Japan, a native Christian convert assures two newly arrived Jesuit priests on a mission from Portugal that his faith, and the faith of his fellow villagers packed into the dimly lit hut, is fervent and resilient, even in their impoverished and persecuted state.
Joan Margaret Wales 1916 –2016
Ronald Clements
Date posted: 1 Jan 2017
Joan served with China Inland Mission
(CIM) as an evangelist from September
1945 until her expulsion from China in
April 1951.
She continued as a missionary, working in
Thailand with OMF International, until her
‘retirement’ in 1983. In her 70s and 80s she
was able to return to China on short-term
teams,
teaching English. Her biography,
Point Me to the Skies (Monarch Publications),
was published in 2007.
Daisy Barclay 1916 –2016
Sue Brown and others
Date posted: 1 Jan 2017
Daisy Barclay died in November, just a
few weeks after her 100th birthday.
Born in 1916 in the east end of London,
Daisy Emma Barclay (née Hickey) was the
youngest of seven children. After the death
of her mother, when aged two, she was fostered by a Baptist couple
in Cheshire.
Through them she came to faith in Christ.
