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Show me a grown man with a goatee and I’ll show you a major league baseball player. Show me a grown man with a goatee wearing sandals and I’ll show you a youth pastor.

When I was a kid, I remember that the youth pastor at our church was totally different to any other pastor I’d ever seen. He quoted rock bands and wore blue jeans to church. He was cool in a way that the other adults in my life were not. I was proud to invite my friends to church and see their negative stereotypes of Christians get blown up. The youth group thrived and ‘unchurched’ kids were reached. The one thing that distinguished our group from others was that our pastor was cool.

It costs £5.7 million to train a fast jet RAF pilot, and almost £250,000 to train a doctor or dentist. Financial consultants KPMG spend £92,000 training a graduate. It even costs up to £30,000 to train a guide dog for the blind. On the other hand, a typical Bible college receives just £13,500 for two to three years full-time training.

As will become clear when we investigate costs later in this piece, an obvious question arises. How does it cost less to train a man for the pastoral ministry over three years than it does to train a dog for a little over a year-and-a-half? And how do you train a pastor, missionary or evangelist for a twentieth of what it costs to train a doctor?

Did you read about the incredible events surrounding a ‘follow up’ talk to a mission in which the speaker gathered those who had believed and accused them of being both illegitimate and children of the Devil? In response, this group of men turned violent and tried to kill him.

The speaker was, of course, Jesus and the ‘believers’ were religious Jews. To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, ‘If you hold to my teaching you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free’ (John 8.31-32).

Mission is not just one of a list of things that the Bible happens to talk about. Mission is, in that much-abused phrase, ‘what it’s all about’.

Now this is a bold claim. Does it make sense to speak of the Bible being ‘all about’ anything? Well, Jesus certainly thought so. In Luke 24, first to the two on the road to Emmaus, and then later to the rest of the disciples, Jesus made himself as Messiah the focus of the whole canon of the Hebrew Scriptures (verses 27 and 44).

Greetings from here in Co. Mayo in the Wild West of Ireland!

In Acts 16 we read of the Apostle Paul and his entourage seeking to enter Bithynia but being forbidden by the Holy Spirit. Finally they reached Troas where Paul has a vision of a man pleading with him: ‘Come over to Macedonia to help us’. This call changed history by changing the direction of the gospel from moving north into Asia, to moving west into Europe.

Daniel Everett travelled to the banks of an Amazon tributary as an SIL (Wycliffe Bible Translators) missionary in 1977. 30 years later he is still studying their language, but not as a Bible translator, instead he is an academic researcher. Everett’s time with the Piraha tribe has led to a revolution in linguistics and a personal revolution in his own life — he lost his faith and with it his family.

It is a secure fact of history that after the Romans crucified Jesus of Nazareth circa AD 33, his followers met weekly to worship him as Lord.

Pliny, governor of the Roman Black Sea province of Bithynia, reported to the emperor Trajan early in the second century that the Christians met on a ‘fixed day of the week’ and chanted hymns to Christ ‘as if to a god’ (Epistles 10.96). Pliny’s friend the historian Tacitus, governor of the adjoining province of Asia, wrote that Pontius Pilate had executed Christ during the reign of the emperor Tiberius.

During the week November 3-7 2008, 48 Muslim and Catholic theologians met in Rome to discuss a document elaborated last year by 138 senior Muslim scholars.

The document, A Common Word Between Us and You, proclaims itself to be an attempt to find common ground between the two religions in order to bring peace to the world.

The FREE gospel project was officially launched this September at UCCF’s national conference for Christian Union leaders, Forum. Almost 1,000 delegates, staff, volunteers were the first to hold copies of the 400,000 freshly designed copies of Mark’s Gospel set to be distributed to campuses in Great Britain in February 2009.

Since then it has been a fantastic privilege to observe the enthusiasm, commitment and excitement with which the project has been embraced by Christian Unions.

1957 saw three unknown young students take a step of faith that would have consequences beyond their wildest dreams.

50 years have passed since George Verwer, Dale Rhoton and Walter Borchard, then still in their teens, drove down Route 66 from Chicago towards Mexico City in a beat-up 1949 Dodge truck filled with Spanish gospels and tracts. This was the beginning of what was to become Operation Mobilisation (OM). An unlikely spiritual revolution had started.

As, this month, Joel Edwards stands down from his role as General Director of Evangelical Alliance, he gave an interview to EN.

EN: In what ways do you think evangelicalism has changed during your time at E?

Ray Porter

Date posted: 1 Oct 2008

Alice Compain, the veteran OMF missionary to Cambodia and Laos, died at a nursing home in Pembury, Kent on September 4 2008 at the age of 74.

Alice was prepared by God to be a missionary to Laos and Cambodia. Born into a multilingual Christian family in London. English, French and German were the languages of the home. At the age of six she began to play the violin and that would prove the key to much of her subsequent service.

In the Autumn issue of Tear Times, the magazine of the relief charity Tearfund, the organisation advertised that they had asked Archbishop Desmond Tutu to speak at a conference supported by them on Saturday September 6 in London.

EN was contacted and had conversations with a few evangelicals who felt very uneasy about this and asked us to write and ask Tearfund some questions.

The Christian work and fellowship started by GAFCON in Jerusalem in June 2008 has only just begun.

We are well aware that it faces plenty of dangers and obstacles as it seeks to renew the Anglican Communion in the work of the gospel. We know that it has already been misunderstood in various quarters. This may lead some to hesitate about supporting it. That is why we want to respond to the particular misunderstandings and historical errors that are stated in the article by Iain Murray in the September 2008 issue of EN, although both of us have enormously appreciated books he has written over the years.

Back in January’s EN, Michael Reeves wrote about the imminent launch of UCCF’s online theological centre, Theology Network (http://www.theologynetwork.org). He promised all the thrill of an old-fashioned sweetie shop minus the sugar — and he explained the rationale for this website: ‘To unleash the best biblical teaching so that students and all users might come to know and love the Lord Jesus in deeper, life-changing, mission-igniting ways’.

Behind the launch of Theology Network was our hope that UCCF Christian Unions would be theologically driven — that is, illuminated, empowered, and consumed by God’s gracious revelation of himself in his Son. We launched with the conviction that when students are captivated by the great gospel of Jesus they would be propelled onward in evangelism and tooled-up for discipleship.

The 600 men who attended the fifth Cardiff Men’s Convention in 2008 are still telling us that it was ‘the best convention yet’. Once more the All Nations Centre in Cardiff was filled with men who brought a compassion to worship, a real hunger for truth in the teaching and, maybe most important of all, the encouragement of being with other Christian men.

The title of this year’s convention was ‘Leaving a Legacy’, the central idea being that Christian men have a significant responsibility to create a positive legacy in their churches, their family, their workplace and in the wider community. The teaching was designed to challenge and inspire, but also to equip men to take on that responsibility.

Tasmania isn’t literally the end of the earth, but you can see it from here, and, like island communities everywhere, Tasmanians are fiercely independent and proud of where they live.

Jenny Cullen defines an island as ‘A place where people are usually nice to each other, nobody’s in a hurry, people stop and talk to each other on the street even in nasty weather, there are no secrets, and life just pretty much works the way it should most of the time. It’s not too complicated’. That’s what it’s like most of the time.

It’s Sunday morning. Not much has changed. You throw on some clothes and grab a coffee on your way out the door. Destination — church.

It’s just what you’ve been brought up doing. No rhyme or reason — just habit. There’s a handshake at the door, then you head for the back pew.

Lambeth 2008 ended on a high. As the final service ended in Canterbury Cathedral, the names of nine members of an Anglican Mission Order in Melanesia martyred in 2003 were placed in the chapel of Martyrs of our Time.

Their colleagues processed with their names, from the nave up the many steps to the quire screen, singing the most haunting refrain. They passed from sight through the quire screen. But they continued singing. The refrain echoed round the cathedral. It was as though we had seen the martyrs themselves pass into the nearer presence of God, yet their beautiful singing could still he heard. Strong men wept.

In Sheffield in September 2007, a new training programme began called Porterbrook Training, part of the Porterbrook Network. Michael Jensen interviews its director, Steve Timmis, for EN, to find out what it is all about.

MJ: Before we talk about Porterbrook Training specifically, can you tell us how the Porterbrook Network came into being?

The Clerkenwell Symposium was a gathering of UK evangelists with Tim Keller earlier this year to discuss how to unlock the mind of the unbeliever.

The group sought to develop ways of evangelism which:

The radio work of Grace Baptist Mission (GBM) began in India 50 years ago. It was a cause for deep gratitude that the recommendation from Conference in India to the Mission Council in London asking permission to establish a radio ministry was unanimously accepted in the 1950s.

Not all Strict Baptists of that generation were happy about radio. Even in 1963, when in the UK on furlough, a missionary was told by one pastor that, ‘Radio is the devil’s instrument’.

A small team of solicitors, sent by BMS World Mission to work with the Uganda Christian Lawyers’ Fraternity (UCLF), is engaged in a major project in Kampala, striking at the root of one of Uganda’s greatest needs.

Following in the footsteps of Christian educationalists and healthcare professionals, who have done such pioneering work in Uganda over the past 120 years, these lawyers are laying foundations for justice both now and for the future.

Margaret Clarkson, whose rarely-used first name is Edith, was born in 1915 into, as Margaret herself described, ‘a loveless and unhappy marriage’, which broke up when she was 12.

C. Stacey Woods (‘a name not widely known’) was well celebrated by Julia Cameron in November’s EN. Another of his hidden achievements came in Toronto in 1946. He asked Margaret Clarkson to write a hymn.