search

Wings of Love, the newest plane to join Mission Aviation Fellowship’s life-saving fleet, has touched down in Africa.

The aircraft, a Cessna Caravan, had departed from Winnipeg, southern Canada, to begin its 6,000-mile, transatlantic journey to Angola.

letter from the

So it begins. A new life as missionaries, 7,000 miles from home, in the far east country of the Philippines – in particular, a densely populated municipality named Santa Maria, about 15 miles north of the capital city.

This is a work that my wife and I have been preparing for and praying over for almost a decade. The two of us met as teenage freshers at Aberystwyth University, and from then until now, every day, from that very first meeting, we have had the call for gospel witness in this needy nation heavy upon our hearts. And now, at last, we’ve made it!

A petrol tanker which crashed, overturned and exploded – unleashing a fireball killing 90 – is the latest in a series of tragedies for Haiti, after which Christian agency MAF has helped bring disaster relief.

The Mission Aviation Fellowship has been at the forefront of assisting in the wake of this most recent traumatic event – only a short while after starting to wind up its humanitarian response to an earthquake which had claimed 2,200 lives a few months earlier. When the devastating 7.2 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti’s western peninsula on 14 August 2021, causing major damage and destroying tens of thousands of homes, MAF personnel responded immediately.

Iain Taylor

Date posted: 1 Apr 2022

The Slavic Gospel Association (SGA) is a supporter of the Grace Shelter, an orphanage run by Grace Church (Baptist) in Odessa, a port on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, since 2004.

Fifty-three children, aged from about three to 18, and their ‘orphan parents’ lived there. The site also hosted a ‘transition house’, which provided a number of small apartments for young adults for a couple of years whilst learning to become independent.

Children for Christ Ministry (CFCM) has trained over 800 Sunday School teachers over the last two years in Malawi.

This remarkable achievement has taken place during four successive waves of Covid-19, where restrictions on gathering were commonplace. Furthermore, whilst many organisations focused on the cities, CFCM deliberately targeted teachers throughout the length and breadth of the country, which is roughly the size of England.

Christian missions from across the world, which are based in Hong Kong, may be forced out, it is feared.

There is an increasing ‘climate of fear’ in the former colony, according to a missionary speaking under a pseudonym to Evangelicals Now.

Iain Taylor

Date posted: 1 Mar 2022

Evangelicals Now is regularly privileged to come across much faithful gospel witness by often small and (humanly-speaking) under-resourced evangelical ministries in sometimes far-flung areas of the world. The GoodWORD Partnership (GWP), founded by Blair Carlson in Minneapolis in 2005, is one of those.

Blair coaches national church leaders in local evangelism, guiding them with their outreach, including preparation and follow-up within local churches. He has just returned from Russia and Poland, where GWP helped lead a major evangelism training conference, the Forum for Evangelism in Russia, which is now in its fifth year. Blair spoke to Evangelicals Now afterwards:

Iain Taylor

Date posted: 1 Mar 2022

International Mission to Jewish People (IMJP) is organising evangelistic coach tours in order to reach Jewish Holocaust survivors with the gospel.

An increased openness among Jewish people to hear about Jesus as Messiah means that hundreds of Jewish people are now regularly joining IMJP’s Bible tours, where they visit sites in the Holy Land which have a particular significance in the story, life, and claims of Jesus.

Iain Taylor

Date posted: 1 Mar 2022

As this edition of Evangelicals Now went to press, the trials of Finnish Christians Päivi Räsänen MP and Bishop Juhana Pohjola, of the Evangelical Lutheran Mission Diocese of Finland, had started.

Both are accused of agitation against an ethnic group, specifically Räsänen’s ‘insulting’ of homosexuals on a radio programme and in a booklet published in 2004 by Pohjola.

Samaritan’s Purse is once again sending over 9million shoebox gifts to thousands of churches around the world to give out to children in their local communities and take the opportunity to share the gospel with them.

Over 1,000 churches and many more families and individuals in the UK donated at least 250,000 shoeboxes to the Operation Christmas Child annual project. Additionally over 300 churches around the nation opened their doors as collection centres in November. The gifts are being sent to 2,355 churches in Albania, Belarus, Bosnia, Central Asia, Liberia, Middle East, Moldova, Nigeria and Serbia. The largest consignment of ten containers (80,000 shoeboxes) was sent to 556 church partners in Liberia and the smallest shipment of one container to the Middle East will be distributed in refugee camps and among the persecuted Christian community.

Our worldwide Anglican news focuses this month on the life of a Christian community in India. Chris Sugden writes:

Divya Shanthi Church, School and Community Services grew out of St John’s Church ( Church of South India) Bangalore, India as a mission initiative to serve poor families in North Bangalore.

The Slavic Gospel Association has marked its 70th anniversary by sending 70 new mission partners to spiritually- needy areas. Mark Foster, Director of Field Ministries, reports:

Covid-19 put an end to national and international travel in 2020, but not to gospel outreach and expansion. Slavic Gospel Association [UK], as part of its 70th Anniversary Projects, had planned to support the sending of 70 new missionaries into spiritually-needy communities – one for each year of its existence – to bring the good news of salvation in Christ. What would become of such a project in the paralysing lockdown due to the pandemic? Was there any hope of even getting near to that target? If it were reached, was any kind of spiritual return possible?

A five month-old girl named Sangai, who needed urgent medical treatment for a flesh-eating condition, has been saved by a Mission Aviation Fellowship pilot in Liberia.

Little Sangai was also suffering from hydrocephalus – a build-up of fluid on the brain. The condition, if left untreated, can damage brain tissue.

Moldova has suffered particularly badly in the Covid pandemic, coming as it did on the heels of a severe drought and disastrously poor harvests in 2020, which added to the already heavy burdens of the poor and vulnerable.

Poverty is endemic in large sections of the populace, and its consequences are evident not only in material terms but in the realm of relationships, and particularly family life. This scenario is common in a number of East European countries. Families are poor. The parents cannot find work to sustain their children and their homes. They take the decision to go to other countries where work can be found, and children are left in the care of ageing grandparents who themselves find life difficult and challenging. Often this results in children growing up without adequate parental guidance and discipline, and falling prey to many dangers and temptations, including addiction, sexual abuse, and even human trafficking. It is no exaggeration to say that chaos is evident in many family situations.

John Woods

Date posted: 1 Oct 2021

It is great to be in Latvia in late summer when the daylight still holds until late evening and the temperature can still be hot. It was a particular delight for me to be there with Anthony Billington, associated with the London Institute of Contemporary Christianity, to teach a weekend course on Whole Life Preaching as part of the two-year School of Preachers programme at the Latvian Biblical Centre (LBC) in Riga.

It had been nine months since the group were able to meet in person. We have managed to maintain the teaching via Zoom involving three languages. It was lovely to have the buzz of personal interaction in those September sessions.

On 7 July, MAF Pilot Mike Brown loaded a new Kodiak Quest 100 aircraft with food supplies and Bibles and flew to Emdoman, central Papua.

The first operational flight for MAF’s newest aircraft had taken almost three years to reach MAF’s Indonesian programme due to coronavirus restrictions.

24 September 2021 marks the inauguration of the newest province of the Anglican Communion, known as the Igreja Anglicana de Mocambique e Angola (IAMA, or the Anglican Church of Mozambique and Angola).

To proceed, the project required a minimum of two thirds of the Anglican Primates to vote in favour and this threshold was reached in August.

Iain Taylor

Date posted: 1 Oct 2021

Evangelical Christians and the Vietnamese Government appear to have learnt from past mistakes – and their joint response to a recent coronavirus outbreak in Ho Chi Minh City has highlighted the benefits of prompt co-operation.

After some students at the Evangelical Church of Vietnam South’s Institute of Bible and Theology developed coughs and fevers last summer, church authorities immediately called the government health department. Tests revealed that 290 of the 306 students and staff on the campus had Covid-19. The authorities immediately quarantined the campus and sent in a medical team. Two Christian doctors and five volunteers of a Christian student fellowship also entered the campus to serve the sick. The 15 who needed hospital treatment included the Dean of Students, pastor Nguyen An Thai, and his wife.

For decades, DR Congo has suffered from chronic political instability, corruption and underdevelopment, worsened in recent years by the growth of Islamist insurgency. One of the dioceses worst impacted is Boga in Uturi province on the border with Uganda. In August 2019, the Anglican hospital in Boga was destroyed by Islamist insurgents and 200 people were abducted.

The diocese also has a Bible training school which focuses on the essential work of training catechists and evangelists who are on the front line of mission. It functions as a training community of 86 people, 13 married students with their families, and 17 single students. This too was in Boga, but recently the security situation deteriorated to the extent that it became too dangerous to continue.

Iain Taylor

Date posted: 1 Sep 2021

Two new developments in the past few days appear to hasten the final demise of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM).

Firstly, a number of donors in the USA have filed a complaint in a Georgia federal court, claiming that the organisation covered up its founder’s abusive conduct. They allege they were misled to believe that their donations were being used to promote ‘Christian evangelism, apologetic defence of Christianity, and humanitarian efforts.’ However, the donors claim they were misinformed as they were told there was no evidence of abuse; instead ‘Zacharias was a prolific sexual predator who used his ministry and RZIM funds to perpetrate sexual and spiritual abuse against women’.

Global health charity Mercy Ships has taken possession of its brand-new vessel at an event at the Tianjin Xingang shipyard, China. The Global Mercy, which is 174 metres long and displaces 37,000 tonnes, is the world’s largest civilian hospital ship.

Mercy Ships has been working on this new project for more than eight years. Contracts were signed in 2013, and the keel laid in 2015. Sea trials were successfully completed in late April this year. The Global Mercy will now sail to Antwerp where it will be fitted out with IT and medical equipment. The ship’s volunteer crew will also start to arrive then, before it will be presented to sponsors, future volunteers and the media in early 2022.