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'How should old mission agencies adapt to the challenges of reaching the world in the 21st century?'

That is a question with which Andy Lines is having to wrestle. Last year Andy became the new General Secretary of Crosslinks, formerly known as the Bible Churchmen's Missionary Society, and EN interviewed him recently to see, among other things, what his thoughts were.

It was in a small student room late one night at Reading University in 1974 that the Holy Spirit whispered to me: 'You must become like a child' (Matthew 18.3).

As I asked God to be my Father, my searchings for truth and reality were finally over, I was born again, I realised that the Lord had died to save me and my life as a true Christian started. I was 18 and in my first year studying Psychology and Linguistics.

Virago Press keeps alive one of the greatest stories of women missionaries, now all but lost to evangelicals.

Hardly known for its love of Christian truth, Virago republished The Gobi Desert by Mildred Cable and Francesca French in the mid 1980s, and has included an excerpt from that in its Book of Women Travellers.

The following grounds for hope were published in November in the third (2002/2003) edition of Religious Trends. It focuses on the years 1995-2000 with a forecast to 2005 giving information and analysis on church membership and church attendance.

Belief in God is still high

Two-thirds, 67%, of the population believed in God in the 1990s, and over half, 52%, in heaven. Half, 49%, said they believed in Jesus as the Son of God. While these proportions have declined over the past 30 years they continue to be relatively high.

John Piper, the well-known author, conference speaker and pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, was in England during October. EN obtained an interview with him at the offices of the Zacharias Trust in Oxford. . .

EN: What was the most significant factor in you becoming a Christian?

Back in 1917 the mountain of Communism thrust itself into human history with the revolution in Russia.

During subsequent decades it engulfed one country after another in its Red embrace.

What can you give as a Christmas present which will be both spiritual, encouraging and enjoyable?

Good question. Here are some suggestions from EN.

Operation World

Top of the list this year must come a copy of the new edition of Operation World, the comprehensive guide to global Christian mission. Picking up our news from British TV, fascinated by pictures of horror and working to a secular Western agenda, we very often have a highly distorted view of what is going on in the world.

The Decade of Evangelism is well and truly over, to the concealed (or unconcealed) delight of many.

There were advances made for the gospel in the Decade of Evangelism but, sadly, church attendance continued to slide and the Christian influence in our nation to wane. In my article last month I pleaded for a renewed confidence in the gospel. That must be paramount; then we need renewed confidence in how to proclaim it.

As I considered serving the Lord abroad I had many doubts about whether he would really provide for my needs as a Christian worker on the field.

Yes, I had read missionary biographies, which spoke of God's wondrous provision for others, but would he really provide for me, a former telecom manager living in suburbia? Could I leave the comfort and security of home?

As I write this, the television is full of images of appalling destruction, the aftermath of the terrorist attack on America. I had planned to write at length this month about our family visit to the States this summer, but for obvious reasons that will have to wait for another time.

Let me instead take a few moments to celebrate one small part of American Christianity, which we encountered during our visit: the Mennonite community in the Central Valley of California. We stayed with a Mennonite family near Fresno, whom we had got to know over the years through their visits to L'Abri Fellowship but had never visited ourselves.

A perceptible change is evident - and not before time!

After nearly 2,000 years Christians are becoming more aware and accepting of people with learning disabilities.

This autumn sees the publication of four books from the Carswell family, and all have the underlying aim of spreading the message of the gospel in differing ways.

Emma Carswell, marketing executive of Paternoster Publishing, would like to see a new approach to evangelism in literature. Working with authors around the world, Emma encourages them to write creatively for unbelievers, as well as persuading Christians to use books as a central tool in evangelism. 'People are very innovative and imaginative in different methods of evangelism, but when it comes to books they tend to be less creative. I would love to see a wider range of evangelistic books that approach the gospel from different angles, and are written for people of varied backgrounds and spiritual stages', said Emma. Her own book, Love in a Box, is written with this vision in mind.

Winning the world

A new 21st century edition of the missions book Operation World is about to be published. Jonathan Francis of Paternoster Press took time to introduce it to us.

Operation World is a book specifically written to change the world. The authors, many of whom have been working on the Operation World project for years, do not shrink from this fact.