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Gladys Aylward was born on February 24 1902 to a working class family in Edmonton in north London.

Her parents both worked for the Post Office, and she worked as a humble parlourmaid. It was when Gladys attended a church service one evening and heard about mission in foreign lands that she embraced the concept of people working in far-flung destinations for the Kingdom of God. Subsequently she became aware of the vast country of China which had hardly even heard of Christianity. These thoughts challenged the young Gladys who had given her life over to God’s service, but she was still not sure what that might be.

Churches up and down the country are shrinking or closing at an alarming rate and, amid the erosion of our country’s spiritual heritage, Christianity is being systematically driven from the public square.

However, alongside the negatives there are many positives. Churches are being planted, people are being saved and men and women are being trained for gospel ministry. In addition, there seems to be a new spirit of partnership among gospel-minded people. An example of this is the number of churches which have committed themselves to the forthcoming A Passion for Life mission.

For many years Peter Anderson has been used by God as an evangelist. Here he tells us of his conversion while on national service in the British Army.

On arrival in Singapore I found myself in an office looking after the pay of Gurkha soldiers. Also in the office was a soldier I recognised from basic training in Devizes. I knew that he was a Christian, but as he slept in a different barrack room from me I could ‘escape’ from him out of office hours.

Josh Moody

Date posted: 1 Feb 2010

Whether or not — and to what extent, and at what speed — the international market economy is recovering is beyond the scope of this paper, and certainly beyond my expertise as a writer.

But from the ground up it still looks like, to say the least, we are in ‘interesting’ financial times, and some list it as ongoing through 2010 at least (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_crisis_of_2007%E2%80%932010). What does this mean for the church?

The world has always been home to many religious faiths and ideologies.

This religious pluralism has become more pronounced for people in the West, due to globalisation and migration between countries. A shrinking world brings adherents of different religions closer to each other. We meet people of other races and learn of their cultures and beliefs through television and the internet. Mosques, temples and non-Western restaurants reflect the increasingly diverse nature of many Western societies.

It is a rare occurrence that on a cold evening students would decide that what they really want to do is leave the warmth and comfort of their rooms and venture out into the cold to a church of all places, sing songs about Jesus and then listen to someone talk about him.

Strangely enough, this seems to be quite appealing to people around Christmas time, for many people this is the one time of the year that they enter a church.

John Brand

Date posted: 1 Dec 2009

On November 9, the Rev. Dr. Colin Peckham, Principal Emeritus of the Faith Mission Bible College, Edinburgh, was suddenly called home.

Colin was born, and also born again, in South Africa. He grew up with a farming background but, after studying agriculture, felt the call of God to Christian ministry and studied for a degree in theology at the University of South Africa. He earned a Master’s degree from Edinburgh University and successfully gained his doctorate.

Ray Porter

Date posted: 1 Nov 2009

The most exciting thing about teaching at a theological college is seeing students go out into ministry.

Some have obtained a curacy and can look forward to a further three or four years of training on the job. Others have obtained similar posts as assistants in Free churches. All of them can now look forward to an assured salary and housing. Their future financing will be the responsibility of their church.

20 years ago I was driving through Germany one November evening when, on the car radio, I picked up some news which was to shake the continent: East Germans were pouring through a breach in the Berlin Wall.

I had been visiting Christians in Poland and Hungary and knew that they would find this almost unbelievable. According to Vaclav Havel, ‘The fall of the Communist empire is an event on the same scale of historical importance as the fall of the Roman empire’. Oxford scholar Timothy Garton Ash has suggested that there is not a corner of the world that has not in some sense been touched by the consequences of 1989.

NM: Could you sum up the purposes of The Square Mile project and how you would like to see them expressed in action?

KK: Our hope is that The Square Mile resource equips and encourages churches to better demonstrate and proclaim the gospel. I long to see churches with a clearer vision for their role in the community and helping Christians connect their everyday lives with God’s work in the world — through mercy (demonstrating God's compassion to the poor), influence (being salt and light in the public life of the community), life-discipleship (equipping Christians for missional living as workers and neighbours) and evangelism (faithful and relevant communication of the gospel).

If you’re not sure who Michael McIntyre is or what he does then you’re either abroad or refusing to switch on your TV.

He is a 33-year-old stand-up comedian who has experienced a meteoric rise to fame over the last couple of years. He’s come from literally nowhere, largely because of the decision by Prince Charles to put him into his own 60th birthday celebrations as well as a Royal Variety Performance in 2006.

I’ve been very encouraged that churches are planning to use music events as part of A Passion for Life.

I’m off to Morden in South London on Saturday to be interviewed at a concert which in past years has been simply that — a concert. The event has proved very popular, so I’m pleased that the organisers have wanted to include some gospel content to challenge the audience to think about Jesus. An evening like this is pretty easy to prepare and doesn’t create a lot of mess, so for those who thought they could never organise a musical bash, here’s a simple recipe for putting on a top gig.

I went to talk to Josh who was a student at Loughborough University and is now a UCCF Relay worker there. I wanted to find out a bit more about the Relay programme from a Relay worker’s point of view.

CP: What is Relay?

Josh: Relay is a year of discipleship training in a student context. There’s a lot of training, input from Staff Workers and others involved in UCCF. It involves a lot of study, but also you get to learn by doing and you get chucked in at the deep end. At the same time you’re really supported as well, there’s great teaching and it’s a lot of fun.

The Lausanne Covenant, substantially crafted by John Stott, includes the phrase: ‘Evangelisation requires the whole church to take the whole gospel to the whole world’.

One might argue that the three wholes embodied in this ringing phrase are hardly new, and go back to the Apostle Paul, if not to the patriarch Abraham himself. Let us look at what each means.

EN: What’s the point of theological college?

MO: For me, a theological college exists to serve local churches, working in partnership with them to carry out the great commission of Jesus to make disciples of all nations. Everything we do has to be seen in the context of that big picture — we’re here to help churches do what Jesus calls us to do.

One idea which is guiding Oak Hill a great deal just now is that our task is to train the equivalent of GPs, rather than specialists. A good GP has the breadth and depth of medical training to deal with whatever medical problem next walks through the door. They can’t say, ‘I’m only going to treat people who’ve injured their left elbows, but I won’t treat anyone who’s got ingrowing toenails’. The same is true of church pastors. They can’t pick and choose the situations and problems which arise in their churches, but have to offer biblical care and teaching to their people wherever they are in life.

In September, Cornerstone Evangelical Church, Nottingham celebrated the 40th anniversary of Peter and Valerie Lewis’s ministry there.

The story of Cornerstone tells how God can have plans for a small, back-street church in a Midland city which has touched thousands of lives and reached to the ends of the earth. No one should underestimate the potential of small churches, but we can also rejoice in the strategic role of larger churches in Britain today.

UCCF’s mission is to the university. We exist to proclaim the message of Jesus in the student world and see young people becoming his disciples.

To that end, we produce an array of resources to equip Christian students for their mission — tooling them up for the work of mission. A happy by-product of this is that many of our resources can be put to good use in the local church as well: in youth groups, for training, for church-based student work.

This may not seem like a very spiritual article but it has come to me with real force in recent weeks.

Accurate record keeping is not on most youth leaders’ agendas as it is a bit of a pain taking registers of young people and there are many more exciting things to do in an evening of youth ministry. At a recent Root 66 training session (no plug intended!!), I asked the leaders to write down the names of five of their group and asked them to estimate how often each of these students came to the group. The usual response to that question is something like, ‘I suppose it’s about half the meetings this term’.

A university freshers’ week is typified by hordes of people doing exactly what they want; enjoying their new-found freedom, spending their student loan and often consuming vast amounts of alcohol. During this time everyone is trying to find their place, to make new friends and to get off on the right foot.

Imagine, or maybe you have been there yourself, a Christian trying to get by in this. For some it’s exciting, full of opportunities to get involved and have fun, but to stand tall for Jesus. For some it’s terrifying, being dragged to clubs and bars every night and having to explain over and over again why they aren’t getting drunk.

It used to be the Belgian Congo, it later became Zaire, and today it’s back as the Democratic Republic of Congo. I want to tell you as best I can of what God most wonderfully did for our church in the NE corner of the country back in the 1950s.

God sent a wonderful visitation of the Holy Spirit to us. In the Congo-Swahili language that we used, we called this visitation Baraka ya Roho Mutakatifu (the blessing of the Holy Spirit).

Churches and Christian charities are now subject to closer scrutiny by the Charity Commission. Although this gives rise to some concerns, the new obligations also give opportunities for the gospel.

The legal landscape within which churches and Christian charities operate has changed radically in recent years. The Charities Act 2006 contained two particularly important provisions. The first is that all churches with an annual income of more than £100,000 must now register with the Charity Commission. The second is that all charities are required to demonstrate and report on the way in which their activities benefit the public.

The past 20 years have been like no other in history. Everything about the way we think and live has changed.

The under-25s entered education when the concept of Truth had already become historical, even quaint. And the last quarter century has, as a result, proved fertile ground for amoral pragmatism, which, not surprisingly, gained easy acceptance in many areas of life. The church needs leaders who can discern the times, leaders like the men of Issachar (1 Chronicles 12.32).

Oliver Barclay has always been a wise and insightful contributor to important issues in evangelical thinking and so I read with interest his article ‘Where is Academic Theology heading?’ (EN, December 2006).

He queries how helpful academic theology is for preparing men and women for any kind of ministry, even if it does provide the churches with excellent resources. However, the academic theology he talks about in his article is not the only type of theology studied in Bible colleges and universities. Increasingly, in recent years, there has been a growing interest in the discipline of Applied Theology. Dr. Barclay ends his article with a question: ‘What sort of theological study is most useful to the ordinary student, who has no aspirations to become an academic or to do serious research, but wants useful knowledge and skills?’ To me, the answer is Applied Theology. This article attempts to set out the case for it.

One of the memorable features and purposes of the annual Keswick Convention in days gone by were the early morning prayer meetings.

Queues formed at the crack of dawn at the two venues — the church in Southey Street had an overflow outside in the street — as earnest believers of many nationalities shared spontaneous, audible intercession for the work of the Lord Jesus Christ worldwide.