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Andy Hawthorne is 37 years old. He's married to Michelle, and has two children aged seven and four. They all live in Manchester and Andy supports Manchester United FC. He's a member of St. Mary's, a thriving Anglican evangelical church in Cheadle.

All of which is fairly routine. Commonplace. Even mundane. However, there can't be many middle-aged Christians who 'front' a dance band whose albums are distributed by a major recording company, featured on Radio 1, been subject to Joan Bakewell's attention on Everyman, and includes someone who was once the UK Breakdancing champion, and a DJ at Manchester's leading nightclub.

After speaking at the Christian Union meeting, I strolled through the town to the student flat where I was to spend the night. Later that evening, with the CU president, I helped as a post graduate student from China become a Christian. Students and others in both English universities where he had studied had befriended him and shared the gospel. I just happened to be there, like a midwife, at the time when he was ready to be born again.

Before we broke up, I suggested the CU president lead us in prayer, which he did ... in fluent Chinese! Not a miracle, just a lot of hard work. Chinese is his degree subject: we had met before in China where part of his course was spent in a university in Beijing! I hope that he will soon be working in China, and living for Jesus there.

During the recent Cambridge Mission, Ravi Zacharias spoke on 'What happened after God's funeral?' We print here a brief extract which touches on the problem of moral relativism, which follows atheism.

I think it was Paul Tillich who said that religion is the essence of any culture and culture is the dress of religion. I believe he was right in this statement. The West has yet to answer the question: 'What is the essential belief in its culture'. With pluralism growing dramatically, it is a question that Western culture needs to answer.

Known to his friends as 'Jack' (he didn't like 'Clive Staples'), C.S. Lewis was born on the outskirts of Belfast on November 29 1898, and died in his Oxford home, The Kilns, almost 65 years later on November 22 1963.

He was equally a scholar and a storyteller, for years an Oxford don, and then Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge.

Stephen Gaukroger is giving the main Bible readings at Word Alive 1998.

Stephen is leader of the pastoral team at Gold Hill Baptist Church in Buckinghamshire. The author of over a dozen books, he is also the Chairman of the Luis Palau Evangelistic Association in Europe, a member of the Spring Harvest Executive and of the Word Alive Committee.

Alexander Mackay was a pioneer missionary to Uganda. He was born in 1849 in Rhyme, a village not far from Aberdeen. His father was a minister of the Free Church of Scotland, so it is no surprise to learn that the Bible and the Westminster Catechism were the two most important books in the house.

Until he was 14 he was home-schooled and during that time he came to love and trust Christ.

I am told that Fanny Crosby is in the Guinness Book of Records for writing the largest number of hymns - nearly 9,000.

This remarkable lady was born in New England in 1820 and lived to one month short of her 95th birthday in 1915. When she was six weeks old, the doctor was called to attend to an eye infection. He arranged for hot poultices to be put on both eyes. These burnt the corneas, scar tissue formed, and as a result, she was blinded. Yet at no point in her life did she ever complain or hold a grudge. In fact, she saw it as the means God used to make her life's work possible.

We stand at one of the most exciting periods of human history. It is truly 'the best of times and the worst of times'. Modern technology is transforming our lives. We perform keyhole surgery with laser beams, we put cameras on Mars, we have more leisure time, more shops, more choice, more holidays, more TV channels, more power over our daily lives. In today's brave new world a virgin can bring forth a son.

But there is an awful truth. And it is this. We face a spiritual peril in which so many in society have everything to live with and nothing to live for. We are a society in danger of 'gaining the whole world' but at the expense of 'losing our own souls'.

Hundreds were streaming into the Capitol. They call themselves 'Promise Keepers' and by Saturday October 4 1997, approximately half a million participated in the largest evangelical Christian gathering in American history.

For six sunny hours, men (and a fair number of women) from the Empire State of New York to the Golden State of California were planted on Washington DC's 'Mall' (a strip of grass between the United States Capitol and the Washington Monument).

‘Sorry, we’re full up. You’ll have to try again next break.’

Ian Fry, Christian schools’ worker in Kingston, often has to say this to pupils queuing up in the playground to get onto the Surrey Good News Bus.

This remarkable woman was born in Aberdeen in 1848, but, when she was ten, her parents moved to Dundee, looking for work as weavers.

Her father was an alcoholic and died young, but her mother was a Christian in the United Presbyterian Church. This church had started a pioneer mission work in Calabar, now part of Eastern Nigeria, and the stories from Calabar were studied in the Slessor house.

First, let's see the 28-year-old John Elias fighting one of his greatest battles. It is the Battle of Rhuddlan.

It is the late summer of 1802. Unlike South Wales, North Wales is still largely a mission field, and Rhuddlan is playing host to a fair on a Sunday. There are men and women dancing, drinking and revelling. Musicians and singers are everywhere. People have come to Rhuddlan from miles around in the hope of being hired to work in the harvest fields.

Bishop Timothy Dudley-Smith lives in retirement with his wife Arlette. Ordained into the Anglican church after the war, he edited Crusade magazine, was Secretary of CPAS, and became Bishop of Thetford and President of Evangelical Alliance. But he is most well-known as a hymn writer. EN had the opportunity to interview him at his home in the countryside just outside Salisbury.

Q: Could you begin by telling us how you became a Christian ?

EN talked to Merrily Richie of DivorceCare, an initiative to train local churches to help people in marital trauma.

Q: When did you become a Christian?

A: I was nine years old when I realised that because of my sin I needed Jesus to be my Saviour. I don't remember much about this decision since it occurred more than 40 years ago. My pastor talked and prayed with me after a worship service in our Reformed Presbyterian church.

This extract is taken from Upon high places, stories from the mountains of Wales by Mike Perrin, published by Gwasg Byntirion Press at £6.99, and is used with permission.

From high on the hillside above, only the occasional bleat of a sheep broke the silence of the night. A gust of wind rustled some rushes nearby. I shivered, drew the hood of my sleeping-bag a little tighter and lay there looking up at a host of stars.

I have a confession to make. It's not that I have done anything illegal or even grossly immoral. It's just that sometimes I question my role.

You see, I work as a psychologist down in the East End of London. That place where the soap opera comes from - except there aren't any cameras. It is not a lack of work that is my problem, there has always been plenty of that. Nor do I question the effectiveness of psychology in helping many of the people I meet.

When I heard that Eric had cancer of the bowel, I felt very guilty. I had lived next-door to this 70-year-old man for seven-and-a-half years and never spoken to him of Christ.

Somehow it did not seem appropriate now to knock at his door and tell him he needed to be saved. How could I reach this dying man with the message of the gospel when I had done little over the years to show him God's love and had hardly ever prayed for him?

For me the past year or so has been a time of diverse experiences and challenges, but the most testing, both spiritually and emotionally, have been the many instances where I have tried to help despondent Christians ejected from the current merry-go-round of the 'signs and wonders' movement.

Those whose lives have suffered under what is described as 'Radical Christianity' need hope and consolation. But worse still is the burden to reach those still held captive by this movement. Most individuals caught up in the so called 'move of God' will only ever have fellowship with like-minded enthusiasts. Their personal experiences become their doctrinal yardstick and the wider picture is obscured to them.

Leith Samuel, a former minister of Above Bar Church in Southampton, and senior evangelical statesman looks back on family conversions.

'Janet, are you sure you are married?' the missionary, home from Africa, asked my mother.

Concluding his article from last month, Dr. Holmgren details parallels of behaviour change in other social areas.

The best examples of sustainable changes of large population groups come from grass-roots movements. These have often used all available channels, such as the power of small groups and peer pressure to convince people about the value of behaviour change.

AIDS intervention programmes have often been characterised by an obsession with the theory, rather than the practical outworking of that theory.

Thus the two extremes in approach of activists wanting to change sexual behaviour are described as the 'moralisers' and the 'public health fundamentalists'. These are said to be mutually incompatible with a strong polarisation of their approaches and their messages.

It is now four years since three Americans working with New Tribes Mission were kidnapped in Panama by Colombian revolutionaries.

In the village of Pucuro, Panama, just 15 miles from the border with Colombia, phase one of chronological Bible teaching was completed. The entire village had been given the opportunity to hear the gospel in their own language. The New Tribes missionaries, Dave Mankins, Mark Rich and Rick Tenenoff were now discipling Kuna believers.

Can our future be in Europe?

How fresh manuscript evidence can help us to face today's question . . .

From time to time, scholars poring over fragments of dusty documents startle the world with some amazing new discovery about the origins of the Christian church, and indeed of the faith itself.

If you were a shopkeeper in Iran, you would have to put a card in your window stating your religion, ensuring that most customers would pass you buy, afraid to be seen entering. If you were a pastor, you would receive regular summons to the police station and threatening phone calls that you know are serious - another of your colleagues was killed last year.

And if you were a Muslim who had recently become a Christian almost anywhere in the Muslim world, the chances are that you would be living far from your family and home, perhaps in fear of your life.