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The Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) is at the heart of attempts to tackle the split between Catholics and Anglicans.

Mark Santer, the Bishop of Birmingham, who was co-chairman of the Commission that produced the latest report entitled 'The Gift of Authority', is quoted as saying: 'the dialogue between Anglicans and Roman Catholics is only one stream in the wider river of ecumenical dialogue. The issue of authority comes up sooner or later in every dialogue which addresses itself seriously to the questions of communion and authority.'

I had just clicked the camera when an elderly woman came running out of the house screaming.

She demanded to know by what permission I had taken a photograph of her house. She certainly had not consented to this act. There we were, in a snow-covered Siberian hamlet. The place appeared to be desolate. The wooden houses set back, looked too flimsy to withstand the harsh climate.

We might be tempted to consider male absence a problem beyond the capacity of pastoral strategies to remedy. After all, we may think, it's produced by a tidal wave of cultural forces far beyond our ability to control . . .

Yet pastors can take specific steps to stem the tide; specific strategies will help us keep men in our fellowships. While not exhaustive, here's three that have worked in my own experience.

We eat to live, we eat for fun and we eat to socialise. But the pleasure of the experience is seemingly under threat by a new range of foods that has crept into our diets.

Every food-shelf and menu throughout the country is soon to be littered with notices advising about the presence or absence of genetically modified ingredients. Do we really need the warnings?

Last September, Geoff King and Clive Bullock visited Ghana at the invitation of Enoch Nketiah, pastor of Global Baptist Church, Kumasi, a church affiliated to the Ghana Baptist Convention.

Geoff and Clive were asked to teach on the attributes of God during the second week of the church's annual Bible Convention/ Pastors' Conference. They were also able to explore the possibility of establishing a continuing link between Global Baptist and Radcliffe Road Baptist Church, Bury, where Geoff is the pastor.

There was once a time when the adjective 'evangelical' before the noun 'Christian' was a sufficient and adequate description of a clear and defined theological position. But then the definition of the noun became so diluted and neutralised that the adjective had to stand on its own.

All sorts of other adjectives now compete to qualify the new noun. So an 'evangelical' can now be conservative or liberal, open or even post. It's all very confusing since some of the descriptive terms seem to deny the meaning of the noun, at least the meaning it used to have as an adjective - if you see what I mean! A couple of years ago, I met a minister who described himself as a 'liberal catholic evangelical', though on further discussion the noun seemed to mean little more than that he thought church growth was better, on balance, than church decline.

Sandinista-turned-Contra-turned-Christian brings economic and spiritual hope to Nicaragua's poor.

Central America is still choking from the smoke of 9,000 forest fires. The international airport at Managua, Nicaragua, has been closed periodically due to skies heavy with 'the brown mist'. In this year's El Nino-driven climate, it is uncertain how long the parched summer will continue. For Mario Aviles, who endured decades of political drought and breathed the gun smoke of a hundred battles, this kind of waiting is nothing new.

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.

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.

David C. Potter, Director of Cause for Concern is this month's Bulldog.

It is in the nature of movements that they have a tendency to stop moving. When that happens they find themselves overtaken by their times.