search

Bill Edgar is both a professor of apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, and an extremely talented jazz musician who has spent a lot of his life in France. He is not only very intelligent and cosmopolitan, but uses his gifts to share the gospel in various ways. EN took the opportunity to interview him while he was in Britain earlier this year.

EN: Bill, tell us about your background?

BE: My parents met in North Carolina during the war, while Dad was in the army. That is where I was born. Shortly after, we moved to Paris, France, and I grew up there. Then we spent seven years in New York. But after that, the rest of Dad's professional career until he retired in 1983, was in Geneva. It was not a Christian home, but it was a wonderful home.

The other week I found myself among the audience of celebrities, record executives and prize winners at the annual Britannia Music Awards or the 'Brits'. It's very unusual for my name to be picked for anything, but as it happened, I had casually voted for certain nominees on the 'Brits' website several weeks previously.

My name was then automatically put into a draw which I promptly forgot all about, until a phone call from the local radio station complete with on-air interview to confirm that I was, for once, a winner. I went from being an ordinary housewife to rubbing shoulders with the stars at the Earls Court all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza.

When preaching, I often feel I should bow to the congregation, like the teacher who daily bowed to his class of boys. 'I never know,' he said, 'if one day a boy might be important.' There was a boy in his class named Martin. His second name? Luther.

Do you realise that every congregation of Christian believers is a group of important and significant persons?

How can you mix church and jazz? What do God and jazz have in common? Well, the answer is 'a great deal' according to Professor William Edgar of Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia.

Not only is Bill Edgar a professor of apologetics at perhaps the foremost Reformed seminary in the USA, but he is also an extremely gifted jazz pianist.

Virago Press keeps alive one of the greatest stories of women missionaries, now all but lost to evangelicals.

Hardly known for its love of Christian truth, Virago republished The Gobi Desert by Mildred Cable and Francesca French in the mid 1980s, and has included an excerpt from that in its Book of Women Travellers.

John Piper, the well-known author, conference speaker and pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, was in England during October. EN obtained an interview with him at the offices of the Zacharias Trust in Oxford. . .

EN: What was the most significant factor in you becoming a Christian?

Back in 1917 the mountain of Communism thrust itself into human history with the revolution in Russia.

During subsequent decades it engulfed one country after another in its Red embrace.

What can you give as a Christmas present which will be both spiritual, encouraging and enjoyable?

Good question. Here are some suggestions from EN.

Operation World

Top of the list this year must come a copy of the new edition of Operation World, the comprehensive guide to global Christian mission. Picking up our news from British TV, fascinated by pictures of horror and working to a secular Western agenda, we very often have a highly distorted view of what is going on in the world.

The following grounds for hope were published in November in the third (2002/2003) edition of Religious Trends. It focuses on the years 1995-2000 with a forecast to 2005 giving information and analysis on church membership and church attendance.

Belief in God is still high

Two-thirds, 67%, of the population believed in God in the 1990s, and over half, 52%, in heaven. Half, 49%, said they believed in Jesus as the Son of God. While these proportions have declined over the past 30 years they continue to be relatively high.

Edinburgh. Wednesday January 5 1972. Elaine was in the basement of the Scripture Union building near the West end of Princes Street, rehearsing for an evangelistic concert.

Elaine was a gifted, warm-hearted extrovert, a few months away from sitting Higher exams at James Gillespie's High School. She was an achiever: academically across a range of subjects; on the sports field; as a musician with a fine soprano voice; and as a leader. That evening she sang a song about discovering faith, strumming her guitar.

Ray Porter

Date posted: 1 Jan 2002

'He's a Pakistani, but I think he's a Christian', was one of the more bizarre comments from Rochester Cathedral at the announcement that Michael Nazir-Ali was to be the new Bishop.

New syllabuses for Religious Education have shown that there is a continuing debate about which religion should be taught in state schools. The Prince of Wales has declared his desire to be a defender of 'faith' or 'the divine' rather than of any religious group. The Archbishop of Canterbury seems to favour a multi-faith Coronation Service for Charles III. There are some suggestions that the evangelisation of ethnic minorities in Britain should be banned as racial discrimination. It is in this climate that we are to speak about the call to cross cultures with the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is not just non-Christians who are confused about the link between race and religion.

The Decade of Evangelism is well and truly over, to the concealed (or unconcealed) delight of many.

There were advances made for the gospel in the Decade of Evangelism but, sadly, church attendance continued to slide and the Christian influence in our nation to wane. In my article last month I pleaded for a renewed confidence in the gospel. That must be paramount; then we need renewed confidence in how to proclaim it.

As I considered serving the Lord abroad I had many doubts about whether he would really provide for my needs as a Christian worker on the field.

Yes, I had read missionary biographies, which spoke of God's wondrous provision for others, but would he really provide for me, a former telecom manager living in suburbia? Could I leave the comfort and security of home?

As I write this, the television is full of images of appalling destruction, the aftermath of the terrorist attack on America. I had planned to write at length this month about our family visit to the States this summer, but for obvious reasons that will have to wait for another time.

Let me instead take a few moments to celebrate one small part of American Christianity, which we encountered during our visit: the Mennonite community in the Central Valley of California. We stayed with a Mennonite family near Fresno, whom we had got to know over the years through their visits to L'Abri Fellowship but had never visited ourselves.

A perceptible change is evident - and not before time!

After nearly 2,000 years Christians are becoming more aware and accepting of people with learning disabilities.

This autumn sees the publication of four books from the Carswell family, and all have the underlying aim of spreading the message of the gospel in differing ways.

Emma Carswell, marketing executive of Paternoster Publishing, would like to see a new approach to evangelism in literature. Working with authors around the world, Emma encourages them to write creatively for unbelievers, as well as persuading Christians to use books as a central tool in evangelism. 'People are very innovative and imaginative in different methods of evangelism, but when it comes to books they tend to be less creative. I would love to see a wider range of evangelistic books that approach the gospel from different angles, and are written for people of varied backgrounds and spiritual stages', said Emma. Her own book, Love in a Box, is written with this vision in mind.

My children must have been about six and ten. The six year-old happily gave up her room for two of them, the other had the spare room.

'They' were three young workers from a well-known Christian organisation who had come to hold a mission in our town along with our church young people. We had a great week - even though they ate us out of house and home!

Towards the end of the 1950s, Richard Bowdler left the staff of All Souls, Langham Place, and the ministry of 'Chaplain to the Stores' passed to Michael Harper.

He was a Londoner (the family home had been in Welbeck Street) and he had long been an occasional visitor to All Souls. He was converted to Christ in his first year at Cambridge, and during the vacations had alternated between All Souls and Westminster Chapel.

Winning the world

A new 21st century edition of the missions book Operation World is about to be published. Jonathan Francis of Paternoster Press took time to introduce it to us.

Operation World is a book specifically written to change the world. The authors, many of whom have been working on the Operation World project for years, do not shrink from this fact.

Josh Moody

Date posted: 1 Sep 2001

What is the largest Protestant denomination in the world? By some counts, the answer to that question is the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).

The SBC is just astonishingly big. Imagine the biggest big thing you can think of then times it by something even bigger. That's about it. Since its organisation in 1845 in Augusta, Georgia, the SBC has grown to 15.8 million members who worship in more than 40,000 churches in the United States.

Julia Cameron of IFESworld talks with Phocas Ngendahayo, General Secretary of the IFES student ministry in Rwanda.

JC: Phocas, tell us first about yourself.

PN: I have completed two terms at the Cornhill Training Course. One of my main activities in Rwanda is to teach the Bible in student Christian Unions. I'm a physiotherapist, so since I had no formal training in how to teach the Bible, I needed to be equipped in this way.

'Come, ye souls by sin afflicted'. We sang that at least three times at Limehouse, as my annotated Anglican Hymn Book reveals; the last occasion being in 1984, a year of some personal affliction for me. It is a hymn found in other discerning books from Congregational Praise to Christian Hymns, among those still in use.

Whom were we addressing? Probably ourselves and one another; unlike Joseph Hart's marginally earlier 'Come ye sinners, poor and needy' (also in AHB) which made good preaching but not good singing. The one we did sing encapsulates some gospel Scriptures rare in hymns: 'Blessed are the eyes that see him' and so on. But the hymns came to life again as a precious part of local history.

Josh Moody

Date posted: 1 Aug 2001

There is a certain on-going friendly rivalry between Canada and America. One instance of this is the continuing disagreement between the two countries over who won the last war they fought against each other in the 19th century. Americans are taught that they did. Canadians know they did.

Another instance of this friendly rivalry is a radio show in Canada called Asking Americans. In this show, a radio reporter travels down to America and asks Americans various spoof questions. These questions are designed to expose Americans as being woefully ignorant of what is going on in the world outside their national boundaries.

An increasing number of Christians see a demon behind every bush.

Some go so far as to view all the problems of life as demonically animated. So their own problems - temper, sexual lust, discouragement, overeating, loneliness, disappointment, poverty - become personalised as demons of the respective sin or struggle that needed to be cast out.