UK & Ireland in Brief

A charity’s support for disabled people in churches across the UK is being trebled, thanks to a £150,000 grant from Benefact Trust. It will mean that disability inclusion charity Through the Roof will be able to increase the number of disabled people it can support from 9,000 to 30,000 within just three years.

The additional funds will be used to recruit three regional co-ordinators to build up local Roofbreaker networks of volunteers across the UK; provide specialist resources and support; and help disabled Christians in leading training and organise events. According to the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization, just five to ten per cent of disabled people ever hear the gospel in their lifetime.

The Ozanne Foundation, headed by LGBT campaigner Jayne Ozanne, has received financial support from the government.

Accounts for the charity reveal a £137,500 grant from the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) for a recent two-day conference of the Global Interfaith Commission of LGBT+ Lives of which Ozanne is director. It was held last December – and hosted by the FCDO in its Locarno Suite. The same month, Ozanne put out a call on Twitter for donations. She said: ‘Things really are quite dire funding-wise at the moment.’

Mission in Ireland looks set to receive another boost after the success of the recent ‘What’s The Story?’ initiative.

The outreach campaign saw a good number of evangelical churches involved from different groupings, and many thousands of people were reached in different ways. Now the Ireland Steering Committee of the project has held an end-of-campaign assessment meeting in Athlone. After assessing the success of the 2022 events it was unanimously agreed to continue ‘What’s The Story?’ as a project, and the committee is now looking to do a follow-up campaign in 2024, God willing.

Engaging in silent prayer within abortion clinic exclusion zones across England will be a crime under the Public Order Bill. An amendment to exclude silent prayer from the Bill was rejected by MPs.

Andrew Lewer MP, who tabled the amendment, said the Bill leads us ‘into the territory of thought crimes and creates unprecedented interference with the rights to freedom of speech and thought in the UK’. Consensual conversations will also be criminalised. Last December, Christian anti-abortion campaigner Isabel Vaughan-Spruce was interrogated and arrested for ‘maybe’ silently praying within a buffer zone at a Birmingham clinic. She has since been arrested again for the same offence. Ian Paisley Jr said the ‘provision really does make a fool of the police’.