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What are we waiting for?

Luis Palau, international evangelist from Argentina, was speaking at a series of mission meetings in north-west England in May. EN caught up with him, and heard some scorching comments on the lack of urgency in the British church.

EN: You have been visiting Britain since the 1970s and you are just starting another mission. What do you think of the state of the church?

Speaking at this year's Word Alive (Spring Harvest), at Weymouth, Roy Clements challenged the church to rethink its policy on choosing leaders.

In his address Roy said: 'God is looking for people who have learnt the crucial lesson of humility.' And he went on to warn those who seek leadership: 'Beware of selfish ambition.'

Mimi, a regular attender at our Good News Club, stood at the front holding the visual for the next song.

She asked if she could say something. 'When I first started coming to the club, I thought that every time I did something wrong, Jesus had to die again. Now I know that's not true.' Mimi, who was eight years old at the time, smiled at the group; she was beginning to understand the teaching that she heard each week. Before this, she had never heard the gospel explained to her and had never been to a Sunday School.

John Benton

Date posted: 1 May 1999

The first volume of the official biography of John Stott, by Timothy Dudley-Smith, is published by IVP. EN interviewed the subject and the author of the biography...

EN: John Stott, you came to Christ through the work of E.J.H. Nash (Bash) while you were at Rugby School in the 1930s. And the book gives the impression of you as quite an idealistic youth. What was it about the Lord Jesus Christ that led you to surrender your life to him?

Transylvania in northern Romania is associated in most people's minds with Count Dracula and evil deeds. But through his church, God is reaching out in love to the socially-marginalised of this area.

Zoli, a recovered alcoholic from Romania, made the following remark: 'Here in my region, there is an ancient tradition of keeping alcohol in every household and forcing visitors to accept it. In daily life, there is hardly any occasion where drinking is not evident.'

Hilary Jolly, winner of St.. Paul's Cathedral Millennium Hymn Competition, has been using her gift with words since she could put pen to paper.

'My mother used to recite poetry as she did the housework - in the way that other people sing,' and when Hilary was only four years old, she wrote her first poem. But following her conversion at the age of 35, Hilary recognised that her gift with words was a gift from God and resolved to use it for him. 'I became a Christian and knowing that I have this gift, I decided from that moment: that gift is for God; he gave it to me, he shall have it back.'

Nearly eight years ago Chertsey Street Baptist Church (CSBC) in Guildford set itself to re-establish a church which had closed in another area of Guildford.

This has now happened, and on April 17 a thanksgiving service will celebrate the independence of Guildford Park Church.

Derek and Kathy Frost joined SIM in 1974 working in Nigeria, but they ended up in Canada with the mission's media team. However, God had another ministry in mind for Kathy . . .

I came to Canada to assist Derek in the office work here - at present, I log on to computer all the filming that he does, so that it can be catalogued and used at any time. It is very time-consuming and I knew it would be - so I prayed that the Lord would give me something else to do. I was thinking of perhaps women's work or children - but the Lord had other ideas.

David Baker

Date posted: 1 Mar 1999

Ask yourself where the toughest mission fields of the 20th century have been, and you might well think of various distant foreign locations.

But while many of your guesses might be correct, you could easily overlook one of the hardest areas of gospel endeavour in Britain over the last 50 years - and you might be surprised by its location: the world of England's top public schoolboys.

The so-called 'global growth of fundamentalism' is in fact a global - albeit gradual - collapse of liberalism. This is an abridged version of the lecture given last November at the University of Minnesota by Vishal Mangalwadi.

The militancy of the terrorists, the discrimination and persecution of the religious or ethnic minorities, the corruption and oppression of the state, are together demolishing liberalism's assumption that a human being is good enough to govern himself decently without God.

Previous generations of believers have many lessons and truths to tell about God's dealing with their lives.

It is a great blessing to find that members of your family have kept a record of these so that we can enjoy them and learn from them.

John Wyatt has been arguing that even non-Christian doctors have been guided by a Hippocratic-Christian consensus. This extract from his new book, published by IVP, shows how this has been eroded.

It was not until around 1850 that the idea of Christian health professionals going from the West to care for the sick and dying in developing countries came to fruition.

Let's say you are a novice missionary in a foreign country, working among a previously unreached group in the back-of-beyond. What would you do?

This may be slightly presumptuous of me, but I imagine that one thing you wouldn't do was simply what you did back in England: for example, construct a special hut with pews and a pulpit, and meet twice on a Sunday at 10.30 and 6.30.

Dr. Chris Wright, Principal of All Nations Bible College, gave the first of this year's two Keswick lectures entitled 'The Old Testament - Antiques Roadshow or Tomorrow's World?'. Into which of these two categories does the Old Testament fit? Both of them, according to Chris Wright.

'The Antiques Roadshow' looks at old furniture and decides whether or not it is old junk. 'Tomorrow's World' looks ahead to the future and asks: 'What will happen?'. The Old Testament has both the value of an antique and also points us to the present and the future.

Chris Sinkinson

Date posted: 1 Sep 1998

Pluralism and the Religions:
the theological and political dimensions
Edited by John D'Arcy May. Cassell. 99 pages
ISBN 0 304 70259 5

This short book is a collection of papers given at a significant gathering of theological scholars from Asia, Europe and America.

The story of Farzin, as heard by an Elam mission team, is very moving ...

Farzin was returning home in Shiraz, on his motorbike, perhaps a little fast, when a young boy of about 11 suddenly appeared in front of him. Knocking the boy over, he fell off his bike and was grazed. The boy, though, was unconscious.

It was the night of her baptism. Just 17, she had recently been converted under the preaching of Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones at Westminster Chapel, but . . . .

When she arrived at her grandfather's house, where her family were staying while their own house was undergoing repairs, Janice Wiseman was denied entry by the butler.

The Evangelical Movement of Wales came into being through an exceptional manifestation of God's saving grace and his overruling providence.

The Spirit of God moved powerfully in the University College of North Wales, Bangor, between 1947 and 1949. One of the men converted was J. Elwyn Davies, a theological student and a zealous Student Christian Movement (SCM) worker. He became the leader of the converted students at Bangor. Another student, Herbert Evans, had been converted in 1941, and the basis of a lifelong friendship was formed between the two during these years in Bangor.

Trevor and Thalia Blundell now work full-time encouraging and equipping people to teach the Bible to children, through leading training days and writing Sunday School materials.

EN: Did you go to Sunday School as youngsters?

Trevor: Yes, but very irregularly.

Thalia: No. I grew up in a pagan home.

Trevor: I went because some of my friends did and it was a great rumble. After some years, I joined the confirmation class/youth group (around 12 years old) and proceeded to run amok. Sunday School was boring and terrifying, especially when the end of term written examination was held and I had forgotten it was coming up.

Can there be a biblical spirituality for the financial marketplace? The Centre for Marketplace Theology shows how.

The Centre for Marketplace Theology is a new teaching resource, think-tank and fellowship/advocacy group established last year to support Christians working in the City of London financial marketplace.

Have you ever heard an exciting story from the lips of some fairly new convert and wished you could tell a lurid story yourself e.g. 'How wicked you were before your conversion'?

Well, I am one of those people with no lurid story to tell. But it doesn't worry me at all now, because it takes just as much of the grace of God to keep a person from falling into vile sin as it does to pull them out!

Are Christian holidays to biblical sites more than just 'sun, sea, sand and Scriptures'? Paul White and Philippa Jones went on a tour of the Seven Churches of Asia to find out.

The wind took Christ's words and whipped them away. We were standing on castle battlements surrounded by the sprawling Turkish city of Izmir. It was the second stop on our whistle-stop tour of the Seven Churches of Asia. The Revelation letter from Christ to his church was being read aloud at Smyrna.

This conference held on May 13-15 1998 at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Chicago, aimed to encourage and equip pastors and other Christian workers in the task of evangelism in an age where post-modern thinking is increasingly prevalent.

It was organised by Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, with sponsorship from the Bannock-born Institute (a centre for contemporary Christian thought, based at Trinity), The Navigators, Inter-Varsity and Campus Crusade for Christ.

My 'journey' began many years ago when I moved from London to Newquay, Dyfed, Wales.

In my 30s, I was a very lost person, trying to make sense of life which to me was not worth living. My favourite place for thinking and sorting my life out was the beach. Although I cannot swim, the sea always draws me and gives me peace. Every day during the summer holiday, I would totter down to the beach - and so would the UBM! Lying on my own, I would listen to the songs and stories. I would listen to God's message through the UBM team. 'What a lot of twaddle,' I thought. I would move further away - but not too far - so that I would not be associated with them. I certainly didn't want my friends to see me with this weird bunch. Me become a Christian? Never.