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A few years ago, I planned to work as a TESOL teacher in my retirement.

Having obtained the certificate, I waited. My first enquirer was a Korean who went on to get his PhD and is now on a pastoral team back in his own country. He was the first of many Christian brothers I met doing theology or defence studies at Aberdeen University.

Josh Moody

Date posted: 1 Nov 2007

So here’s the kind of question I most commonly get asked about our church. Not ‘what do you believe?’, not ‘what is your vision for the church?’, not even ‘what kind of programmes do you have for our children?’ No, the question I most commonly get asked — by outsiders, you understand — is ‘who do people vote for?’

The election is still a year away (November 2008…), but already positioning is going on for the religious vote. Rudy Giuliani, famed former mayor of New York City, is trying to deal with the possible negative repercussions of his well-known pro-abortion stance. Conservatives, it is felt, will not possibly support him for that single reason. And, in fact, an influential group called The Council for National Policy, has voted that if Giuliani is nominated as the Republican presidential candidate they will seek to form a Third Party. That’s fighting talk.

In this brief article on the vital subject of church planting, I am drawing principles from Acts 16.

An approach that is more practical, and that gives insights into the ways of reaching our materialistic and apathetic society, would be very valuable, but is beyond my competence.

Over the past 29 years of my life I have been an aggressive, creative and strategic supporter of gay and lesbian issues.

As the publisher of a 13-year-old periodical which targets black gays and lesbians, I have had the opportunity to publicly address thousands, influencing closeted people to ‘come out’ and stand up for themselves, which is particularly difficult in the African-American community.

Chris Hayward was the first person I met who convinced me that it was possible to be an evangelical whilst being dedicated to music.

Chris oversaw the music at the Round Church in Cambridge when I first came across him. My immediate reaction to him was deep and selfish jealousy. This was because I heard him as a musician before I met him as a person. I was jealous that, though he was primarily an oboist, his keyboard skills far outshone mine, even though I was an organ scholar at the time. He used to use a spectacular ‘fill’ in the breaks between verses, which I sweated for hours to try and copy. God had given him a very natural musical ability.

In 2006, The Independent on Sunday reported that almost 40% of the male population of Britain had used pornographic websites in the previous year.

The study by Nielsen NetRatings also showed that 1.4 million women in Britain had used online pornography in the same period.1 I would like to think that the situation among Christians is totally different. Sadly, this is not the case.

John Gibbens has given the following moving account of the progress of the gospel in Mongolia, underlining the need for careful translation of the Scriptures.

Mongolia, under Genghis Khan, became the world’s greatest empire, stretching from China and Korea to Central Europe. Mongolians have a history of atheism, with strong Shamanist and Tibetan Buddhist superstitions. Marco Polo noted in the 13th century that Mongolians revere any religion, saying it is the best when it is to their advantage. Mongolia also has influences from Manichaeism, Zoroastrianism and Chinese philosophy. Mongolians comprise what is said to be a people group numbering some ten million people over Mongolia, China and Russia.

There is a mission field that I’ve always struggled to know how to reach with the gospel. It’s made up of what I call ‘choral atheists’.

These are people who belong to church choirs or choral societies, they sing Christ-centred works like Bach’s Matthew Passion or Handel’s Messiah, and yet they don’t believe a word of what they sing. To be honest, I find that choral atheists are more hardened to the gospel than anyone else I meet. Just as hardened are the non-believers who like to listen to this music, which, though I don’t like the definition, I’ll refer to as sacred music.

Ray Pountney of West Hill Baptist Church in Wandsworth knows about SW London’s emerging gang culture.

We should all be deeply grateful to Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harrris and now Christopher Hitchens for putting the existence of God at the centre of public debate.

According to the Guardian, Hitchens’s new book, God is not great sold 4,000 hardback copies in its first week, while Dawkins’s The God delusion sold 300,000 copies in the UK. Hitchens’s sales director is quoted as saying, ‘People find it increasingly hard to marry organised religion with their own view of the world and want a more intellectual, contemporary take on the subject.’

‘The best of times and the worst of times’: most of us can associate with Dickens’ words at some period.

For me it was my three years at Durham University. The amazing highs of new experiences, friends, and opportunities all sadly twinned with lows of wasted time, missed chances and wrong decisions. Without a doubt they proved vital in my Christian discipleship. I owe a huge debt to those of an earlier generation who decided CUs should be student-led.

In an era when full-time ministry training will set you back £75,000, taking you out of circulation for at least three years to boot, an institute in the north of England is quietly running an alternative model.

According to Tim Chester, its director, the Northern Training Institute (NTI) is designed for ‘graduates or those who have significant ministry experience’ and offers a model of training that takes into account the changing face of evangelical ministry and the changing face of secular Britain.

From March 31 to April 5 around 1,800 students attended Word Alive, making it the biggest student conference in Europe. For over 15 years Word Alive has been bringing ‘Rolls-Royce’ Bible expositions, seminar tracks and workshops to build up the people of God and resource them for mission.

With over 130 Christian Unions represented at this year’s conference, Word Alive continues to be a major event in the CU calendar and is a massive opportunity to equip Christian students for mission on campus. The Chronological Bible Overview, Understanding and Communicating the Bible and Using the Bible in Evangelism were among the most popular seminar tracks this year.

Relay is UCCF’s training and discipleship programme for new graduates. Each year, around 60 students leave university and begin the ten-month scheme, centred on serving Christian Unions and growing in their knowledge and love of God.

I am writing on the penultimate day of the third Relay Training conference of this academic year. 63 of us have gathered at the Quinta for the final week together — partly a debrief and partly a commissioning for whatever lies ahead. This week much of our time has been devoted to reviewing our year on Relay. We have honestly laid out the struggles, celebrated the joys and rejoiced together in God’s grace to us in the gospel.

Josh Moody

Date posted: 1 Jul 2007

On Sunday June 3, eight of the Presidential hopefuls for the Democratic Party lined up for a publicly televised debate on CNN out of Manchester, New Hampshire.

On Monday June 4, the three ‘first tier’ candidates (Clinton, Obama, Edwards) lined up for a publicly televised event broadcast by CNN out of George Washington University in Washington DC. This time they talked about their faith.

The ‘tacit atheism’ of our age believes that there is no revelation from heaven, no word from Almighty God and all religions are therefore just matters of opinion, equally valid.

Many faiths and sects abound today. In Athens Paul found all kinds of ‘gods’ worshipped in the city. In that sense, since early times the world has been ‘pluralist’, with many rather than just one faith.

In 1919 a student called Norman Grubb began the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union in response to a theologically-weakened Student Christian Movement. Within the space of a few years, new Christian Unions sprang up around the UK and, in 1928, Grubb established Inter-Varsity Fellowship with a vision to see ‘an evangelical witnessing community on every university campus’.

79 years later, nothing has changed except the name. UCCF: The Christian Unions is still focused on making disciples of Jesus Christ in the student world and, just as Grubb had hoped, the gospel is proclaimed by witnessing communities on more than 300 university campuses across the country. This original vision is being powerfully worked out in 2007 as 92 Christian Unions (CUs) have held missions: weeks of intensive evangelism and gospel proclamation on their campuses.

It can be unmercifully hot near the coast in West Africa, and especially when humidity levels are high.

It was like this when Thomas walked down the gangplank from the deck of the sailing ship which had brought him from Gravesend, and stepped carefully into one of the rowing boats which took the passengers to the shore. He sat down next to his wife, and gazed at the exotic landscape before him.

The Lord used a simple gospel tract to save me back in the early 1980s. Shortly after my conversion, my wife Linda also came to trust in Christ as her Saviour.

As time went by the Lord began to give me a real burden for the souls of people that lived around me — people who were not hearing the gospel and who needed to be saved. I remember praying, ‘Lord, if it’s your will, send me to them’. I started a prayer meeting with a brother from our church who felt the same — to seek the Lord in this matter.

Each summer, UCCF CUs (Christian Unions) send students out around the UK and the world on Summer Teams.

This year, 16 Summer Teams are planned the world over along with four International Student Outreach Teams which will take place around the UK, reaching out to international students who come to study English. Each team and country visited is unique, but activities may include leading Bible studies for Christians and non-Christians, English lessons, running sports camps, doing practical work, carrying out surveys, or even running campus missions. A key element is meeting with local student groups and encouraging them in their evangelism. Below is a taster of this year’s trips.

Word Alive is alive and well and planning for the New Word Alive event on April 7-11 2008 at Pwhelli in North Wales.

It was sad when Spring Harvest, for their own reasons, ended the partnership this year after 14 years, but we are so grateful to them for their fellowship and help over the years and continue to wish them well for the future.

I feel sorry for parents today. So many people tell them not to smack their children. They are told that smacking only modifies behaviour in the short-term. They are told that it models violent behaviour and can therefore teach the child to be violent towards others.

If a child’s behaviour must be changed then they are told that it can be done more effectively by other non-violent means. The logic of these arguments, based as they are on the social psychology of aggression and the behaviourist theory of reinforcement, seems to be irrefutable.

Ali writes well, her opening is striking as she describes her mother’s and grandmother’s upbringing in nomadic clans in Somalia. Life is harsh and honour-based, Islam a mere veneer on ancient animistic culture.

The national press has never paid much attention to Christian Unions, but things are changing.

The Times gave a front page in November to four well-regarded universities where Christian Unions face discrimination. Rightly so, for religious issues on campus are not local difficulties (November 18 and letters following).