In Depth:  Editorial

editorial

Editorial

What is your church like shortly before a Sunday service starts? In the September issue of en, John Brand raises the important question of whether most church families are, to put it bluntly, too noisy as corporate worship begins.

It’s not that fellowship isn’t important, of course. As Jesus puts it: “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13v35). So there is a place for catching up with each other – it is part of how we show we care.

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Editorial

What is your church like at singing?

Anecdotal evidence and the lived experience of many would seem to suggest that congregational singing is in many churches, if not all of them, much poorer than it used to be. This is not a wholly new development. As long ago as 2008, the now defunct magazine The Briefing carried an article entitled “The Slow Death of Congregational Singing”.

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Editorial

Dear Readers,

Not to us, O Lord! Not to us! But to your name give glory, for the sake of your steadfast love and your faithfulness (Ps.115v1).

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Editorial

Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak, Sir Keir Starmer… Leadership, it seems, is getting increasingly difficult in the UK at the moment.

Some politicians ascend to the top job only for it to become sadly apparent that, quite apart from any party political considerations, they lack the appropriate skill set with which to govern effectively. Into this category we might, sadly, put most of those named above.

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Editorial

We live in days when much of the news seems to be dominated by “big men” – men of power, men with egos, men with weapons; men who strut around the world stage, seeking to impose their will on others. It is not necessary to name any names – we all know who they are.

It is therefore heartening to be reminded of other people – ordinary men, ordinary women – who, unlike those “big men”, live lives that reflect the character and faithfulness of Christ.

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Editorial

As these words are written in March, the situation in the Middle East is fast evolving and unpredictable. By the time you read these same words, it is impossible to know what will be happening there: More war? Less war? Some kind of peace? Change in Iran? We do not know.

As Christians we tend to assess wars in a number of ways: perhaps we use the well-established “Just War” theory; or maybe we have embraced pacifism for theological reasons. We may consider war historically, figuring that some past US interventions (Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan) haven’t worked out too well. Or maybe, for some, there is a particular eschatological grid through which we assess these things (Gog, Magog, Russia, Iran etc). Here is not the place to assess the rights and wrongs of these different approaches.

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Editorial

Is Britain now ungovernable? It seems hard to believe now that one Prime Minister who was in charge for 11 years (Margaret Thatcher) was succeeded by one in power for seven years (John Major) and another who lasted a decade (Tony Blair). By contrast, in the last decade, there have been six PMs.

Various reasons have been suggested and adduced. One is the 2008 financial crisis, which was not only significant in itself but also resulted in a long-term fall in productivity and growth. Another is the long-term structural issue of an ageing population relying on relatively fewer working-age people, creating pressure on public services. Then there are challenges resulting from significant immigration.

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Editorial

The world continues to be in ferment. Words written about events one moment can be immediately superseded by new developments the next. Often today such rapid changes in the news seem to revolve around the President of the US, Donald J Trump.

Among many other examples of an often Trump-centred world in flux, few would have predicted a short while ago that one of the countries making news in 2026 would be Greenland. Such is the unpredictable era in which we live.

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Editorial

In his article, Matthew Roberts draws our attention to some glaring deficiencies that have crept into some of our evangelical churches.

He writes: “We offer no connection to God. We accuse liberals of removing God from the gospel – often with considerable justification – and yet in our worship we have peculiarly fallen into the same trap.” We have lost, he says, “what should be a towering vertical encounter with God”.

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Editorial

There are many thoughts that might initially come to mind in relation to the “Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer” (see this article), now under construction after a £40 million fundraising target was met.

We might, quite apart from anything else, naturally feel somewhat cynical about the whole idea – an understandable reaction, perhaps, given the cynicism-soaked era in which we live. We are all marinaded in a media-enhanced weary distrust of most things at the moment.

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Editorial

The news that a former FIEC-affiliated church has now become Eastern Orthodox (click here to read the article) is an interesting development.

It is a not untrodden path. One of the most influential Orthodox figures in the UK of the last century, the late Kallistos Ware, grew up in an evangelical home; and some while ago, Peter Gillquist, a former leader in Campus Crusade for Christ, led a whole group over to Orthodoxy in the USA.

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Editorial

The term “fin de siècle” literally means “end of the century”. But it has often been used to refer to the last decade of the 1890s, and also, more widely, to a sense of moral decay, world-weariness, and pessimism about the future of civilisation, combined with a feeling that one era is closing and another is in the process of coming.

It is a suitable term to sum up how many feel about the 2020s. It’s a decade that has already seen, in no particular order, Covid, four UK Prime Ministers, wars in Ukraine, Sudan, the DRC and the Middle East, the re-election of Donald Trump, the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan, increasing (and often under-reported) persecution of Christians globally and the continuing rise of China (see John Stevens, p.8). Technology continues to change rapidly, with the increasing adoption of Artificial Intelligence, alongside fears about how it might develop. Environmental issues continue to generate strong emotions, with negotiations for a Global Plastics Treaty, which might have alleviated pollution, collapsing in August.

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Editorial

There are 3.9 million Muslims in England and Wales – 6.5% of the population, up from 4.9% in 2011. The Pew Research Centre suggests this could reach between 12.7% and 17.2% in 2050, depending on migration.

As the Muslim population grows, so do political consequences. One councillor elected this year in Lancashire has called for “segregated areas, segregated gyms” to avoid “free mixing” in public. The new political party being formed by Jeremy Corbyn is likely to attract large numbers of Muslims because of Gaza.

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Editorial

It would be possible these days, it seems to us, to attend a Reformed and Bible-based conference virtually every month – possibly even more often.

Anyone who attempted to do so might well end up extremely well-taught and godly – or mad. Either way, they would almost certainly be quite a lot poorer, given the costs involved.

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Editorial

A rather charming story was reported in a national newspaper recently. The article was about a film called The Last Dive, documenting the extraordinary relationship between a now 83-year-old American sailor and ex-Hell’s Angel, Terry Kennedy, and a Pacific manta ray he names Willy.

For those not familiar with them, manta rays are large sea creatures (in this case six metres wide). They also have the largest brain-to-body ratio of any fish, and apparently can recognise themselves in a mirror.

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Editorial

The “great man theory” of history, often ascribed to the 19th-century philosopher and historian Thomas Carlyle, has a lot at least superficially going for it.

The concept posits that “universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators,” as Carlyle puts it.

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Editorial

What are your views on the economic situation facing the nation and the world? What have you made of discussions in recent weeks around tariffs and globalisation? Such issues can often seem somewhat divorced from our Christian faith. And yet these are matters which affect all of us, every day, in many different ways.

At Evangelicals Now, one of the things we are interested in is “joined-up thinking” in relation to our faith and our world. In other words, if Christ is Lord of all, how does that Lordship affect every area of human life and thought? And that includes economics.

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Editorial

It was of course Pontius Pilate who famously asked: “What is truth?”

Many centuries later, Hannah Arendt, in her famous book The Origins of Totalitarianism, wrote: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (that is, the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (that is, the standards of thought) no longer exist.” It was Goebbels who chillingly observed: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

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Editorial

‘US President Donald Trump has signed an executive order that prevents transgender women from competing in female categories of sports,’ a recent BBC item says.

Trump’s move followed on an earlier order which restated traditional and indeed scientific truths about men and women, declaring: ‘Ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers. This is wrong.’

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Editorial

Across the last few months many Christian organisations and individual evangelicals are among those who have left social media platform X.

Reaction to this has been varied – do Christians have an obligation to be a light in dark places (there are over 600 million on X)? Or is our presence on the platform implicitly condoning what goes on there?

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Editorial

So, here we are… entering 2025. We are roughly a quarter of a way through the 21st century.

This is quite a startling thought if you remember celebrating the dawn of the year 2000. How does the passage of this quarter century feel to you? How have you grown – and struggled – spiritually during this time?

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Editorial

What needs to change in evangelical culture after the publication of the Makin Report? The harrowing details of its contents have been covered in some detail on the en website.

That such things should happen among those professing the soundest of doctrine is repugnant, vile and wicked. Many leaders knew – and yet Smyth was able to continue abusing for decades.

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Editorial

Amid many bleak and discouraging items in the news of late, the Fourth Lausanne Congress on World Evangelisation can bring us both some joy and hope.

Apart from its more major achievements, the Congress produced a staggering number of photographs chronicling the event, and browsing through them it is hard not to be encouraged by the sheer breadth of those attending and the evident joy. It is worth taking a moment to flick through some of those pictures online.

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Editorial

The news that 47% of the estimated 280 million migrants around the world are Christians (see report here) should bring us all up short.

Our brothers and sisters are, it seems, the largest single bloc of people among those moving across the world because of persecution, poverty, war, and so on.

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Editorial

‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,’ is a reasonable comment sometimes made about human beings’ propensity to fiddle with things that are already working quite well, thus making them worse.

But what about US politics? Few would argue that the system is working well, or that the choice of candidates being offered in presidential elections over the last decade or so (perhaps much longer, in fact) is particularly edifying, inspiring or encouraging – especially from a Christian point of view.

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Editorial

The issue of abortion will always be close to the hearts of us as evangelical Christians – and many others of course too.

How can it not be? The slaughter of so many millions of unborn children in the West in the last few decades is one of the great blind spots of our decaying culture. (Of course, there are always situations – for example rape, incest and imminent danger to a mother’s life – where we cannot be so black and white, but they should not distract us from the wider tragedy where no such contingencies apply.)

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Editorial

The recent ‘commissioning service’ at St Helen’s Bishopsgate has attracted predictable criticism.

In that bastion of Church of England liberal thinking, the Church Times, Angela Tilby decried ‘the voice of the angry Puritanism that has been channelled down from the Reformation,’ before adding (oddly): ‘Today’s Puritans find it as hard as their ancestors to live with the creative ambiguity that, many would claim, is the lifeblood of the Church of England and defended by canon law.’ Er, come again? Many would argue that the ‘lifeblood of the Church of England’ is the 39 Articles with their insistence that ‘it is not lawful for the Church to ordain any thing that is contrary to God’s Word written’ etc.

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Editorial

How do we foster evangelical unity? Where do the boundaries of ‘unity’ fall? And how does the New Testament emphasis on unity apply to evangelicals in the Church of England in its current dire state? Some of these questions are helpfully tackled by Andy Mason (see his article). And one terrific example of healthy evangelical unity is the Keswick Convention, ongoing at the moment.

But how should such unity be manifested organisationally elsewhere the rest of the year? Ongoing discussions about a Gospel Coalition UK are an interesting part of this debate. The role of the Evangelical Alliance is also key.