search

Culloden Battlefield is where the last battle was fought on British soil, between the armies of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Hanoverian Duke of Cumberland in 1746.

In 2002 the modern housing estates of Smithton and Culloden in Inverness are the scene of another struggle which has nothing to do with flesh and blood!

For a year of my degree I exchanged Irn Bru, ceilidhs, and a campus of 6,000 students for ice hockey, two feet of snow, and being one of 37,000 students at the University of Alberta. I also left behind a thriving Christian Union that packed in a good 200 each Friday night. In Canada, I didn't meet one Christian student.

This summer, thousands of students will be heading overseas on exchange schemes or as part of their degree. For the Christians who are leaving this can be a make-or-break experience. They often depart as unprepared missionaries, who struggle to find a church or Christian students they can meet with. Too many feel isolated and doubt their faith, or compromise their integrity.

The Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union (the CICCU) reached its 125th anniversary on March 9. Bob Horn, EN's former editor and recently retired as UCCF's General Secretary, was asked to speak on that occasion.

I owe a huge personal debt to God for the CICCU. Before I started at Cambridge, I was a Christian, but only half-committed and very uncertain whether I would stand for Christ.

From 400 students in a ballroom at Durham University to a lunch-hour presentation in a Further Education college in north London, students across the UK have been confronted with the gospel in this year's mission season.

The style of mission and individual events varied immensely, but each was organised by a group of dedicated students enthusiastic about evangelism.

I'm sure you've been there. You're trying to explain the gospel to someone, but they just aren't hearing you. They're listening to the words, but you've some huge hurdles to get through before they'll really hear, let alone respond. Christian students in Wales face this problem every day. The fact is, they are speaking the wrong language. No matter how well they present their message, or how appealing an event they put on, if it's in English, many Welsh-speakers will have closed ears.

It was back in the 1970s, when Welsh national pride was first on the rise that the Christian Unions realised they needed to start sharing the gospel in Welsh, if they were to reach the Welsh-speaking community. As the Christian students prayed for opportunities and began to present Christ in the Welsh language, they saw large numbers converted.

In parts of Africa, Eastern Europe, China, etc., there seem to be many people turning to Christ. What are the reasons for fewer conversions in the UK?

The need is there, the gospel is the same, Christ is the same, God is unchanging. Many factors may be suggested, sociological, political, economic, and above all spiritual.

Evangelical feminists, otherwise known as egalitarians, have generally favoured retaining traditional masculine trinitarian language. Scripture is God's inspired Word and the vast majority of egalitarians have sought to defend masculine God-language against the criticism of many of their feminist colleagues. In the process, however, they deny that such masculine God-language has any implications either 1) of superiority of what is masculine over feminine, or 2) that the eternal relations of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit indicate any kind of eternal functional hierarchy within the Trinity.

Let it be said clearly that non-egalitarian, complementarian evangelicals agree wholly with the first of these denials. Because God created the man and the woman fully as his image (Genesis 1.26-27), it is clear that no use of masculine language for God is meant to signal some supposed greater value, dignity, or worth of men over women.

Ray Porter

Date posted: 1 May 2002

Former American President Bill Clinton delivered the 2001 Dimbleby lecture with the title 'The struggle for the soul of the 21st century'. This topic should concern Christians and especially missionaries.

After an interesting review of the problems the world faces in the 21st century, Clinton poses the question as to what is more important in the world today: our differences or our common humanity?

There is a death in this life, which, if experienced by every Christian would be the means of reaching millions more unsaved people with the gospel. It is, simply, death to our own reputation.

Perhaps I'm being unfair, but it seems the church in the West will do almost anything to reach unbelievers as long as we can keep our dignity and respectability, and not appear in any way 'uncool'. How far we have wandered from that bunch of nobodies we fondly call 'the early church'.

A student's email to his CU captured the mood of this year's Word Alive: 'Since I've returned home I've not been able to stop sharing with fellow Christians what I have learned. Please do the same if you have not already - let's encourage each other.'

He continued: '...but let's not forget the lost. I have not yet had the opportunity to meet up with my non-Christian friends, and pray that my inability to keep quiet will be present when I do.' Like so many others, he left Skegness having been spiritually fed and armed for the year ahead.

It was reported in The Times on Thursday January 17 2002 that the alleged British shoe bomber Richard Reid, a suspected agent of al-Qa'eda, managed to stay safe by deception.

The report said that one of his tricks was to hide his religious fanaticism by scavenging empty alcohol bottles (Muslims generally do not drink alcohol) and cigarette ends from rubbish bins to leave in his hotel rooms. Another was putting his passport through the washing machine to remove a Pakistani visa stamp that might have posed difficulties when he travelled to Israel.

Wiesbaden is in Hessen, Germany. With the Nazis completely defeated at the end of World War II, it found itself in the American occupied zone. One kind of victory had been won, but God saw that there was more work to be done in Europe, and he called some men from the American military to be involved.

Advent Sunday 1947 found the congregation of Wiesbaden Baptist Chapel preparing for a pre-Christmas meeting with the Sunday School children. The church was about 50 years old, but now they were meeting in a hall in a back-yard. Following the war there were still terrible food shortages and starvation, and unbeknown to them the poorly-dressed people were about to face one of the most dreadful winters on record.

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.

'My name is Kathy. I'm from China, and I'm wanting to find out about God.' What an introduction! As we began to chat, after a lunch bar event at Leicester University, I saw she was like so many international students in the UK. Kathy hadn't been to a Christian meeting before, or even seen a Bible. However, she was curious to know about the nature of God, and fascinated by the person of Jesus.

In London alone there are a quarter of a million international students. Higher Education is bringing the 'nations' to our doorstep, so we can think globally, yet act locally. At an international evening in the Midlands, the Christian Union welcomed students from literally around the globe. From Brazil to Malaysia, Albania to China, Kazakhstan to the Maldives, Japan to Cyprus, they enjoyed food and friendship, as well as hearing something of Jesus. Many churches and CUs are committed to such work, yet 80% of international students in the UK return to their countries without ever having made a British friend, let alone one who is a Christian.

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.

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.

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.

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.