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Alastair Bateman, CEO of Church Mission Society (CMS), has resigned from his post and announced he will step down at the end of July 2025 after six years, saying: “I believe the time is right.”

Reflecting on his time at CMS, Alastair said: “Serving in this community – so deeply committed to following Jesus, rooted in prayer, and bearing the fruits of the Spirit – has been the privilege of a lifetime.”

Samuel Escobar, an influential theologian and missiologist from Peru, has died aged 90.

Escobar was a leading figure in evangelical theology in the second half of the 20th century and the first quarter of the 21st century, website Evangelical Focus reports.

The Railway Mission is appointing Mameri Ese as a new Trustee.

Mameri is a senior project manager at Great Western Railway (GWR), with extensive expertise in finance, project delivery, and strategic leadership.

Tributes are being paid to renowned Biblical scholar Gordon Wenham, who has died.

Wenham, born in 1943, was a Reformed British Old Testament theologian and writer, and was once described by US academic Tremper Longman as “one of the finest evangelical commentators today”.

Rachel Cocksedge has been appointed as new Executive Assistant at Faith in Later Life.

“She’ll be playing a key role in supporting our mission to equip and inspire churches to reach and empower older people. Please pray for wisdom, joy and God’s guidance as she serves with us,” the organisation reports.

Andy Mason is the next Mission Director of church-planting network Co-Mission, it has been announced. He will begin the role on 1 September.

Mason will continue to be Minister of St John’s Chelsea, and aims to combine that role with being MD of Co-Mission, doing both part-time. The network aims to ‘plant and establish 360 reformed evangelical churches.’

From the Keswick Convention to Word Alive to local church ministry and beyond – it is hard to overestimate the scope and significance of Philip Hacking’s ministry. He died on 6 December with 93 years of life and nearly as many years of gospel ministry behind him.

Philip was born in 1931 into a working-class family and grew up on the terraced streets of Blackburn, Lancashire. He attended the Church of the Saviour, a fairly new Anglican parish. It had a significant impact not just on his life but his ministry with the patterns that were laid down there. Philip wrote: ‘Prayer and Bible study and expository preaching were the order of the day, and I discovered the joy of seeing the treasures of the Bible unfolded’. They would remain the ‘order of the day’ throughout his ministry. He remembered too how ‘as teenagers we were encouraged to lead our own youth groups and to be involved in Christian witness’. Strikingly, at the same time as Philip, three others from the row of terraced houses in which he lived were called into ordained ministry.

en Board member Carl Knightly, Director of Networks at London City Mission was among those at Emmanuel Centre, Westminster, as part of the ‘National Week of Prayer’.

Writing on X, he said: ‘Many people came together to pray for the UK, and this was one of numerous events occurring across the nation, and indeed nations… It was a blessed and profound time of prayer and worship, as we came before God to lift up the UK to Him. I was privileged to facilitate some of that prayer time, and join with fellow believers in this special afternoon.’

The former pastor of one of the largest evangelical churches on the south coast of England has died.

Tony Sargent, who helped Worthing Tabernacle Church flourish into an even more thriving church, died aged 83. He had an extensive ministry across UK evangelicalism and was previously a director of Evangelicals Now.