Mission in the suffering church
Ben Kwashi
Date posted: 1 May 2020
Ben Kwashi, Bishop of Jos, calls Christians to keep sacrificing for the sake of the gospel
Mission is the hallmark of the church. John Stott put it this way: ‘Mission is an activity arising out of the very nature of God. The living God of the Bible is a sending God, which is what “mission” means.’
Co-Mission: praying the Lord’s Prayer
Co-Mission
Date posted: 1 May 2020
Along with
churches
throughout
the
country, Co-Mission churches in London
are adjusting to life in the face of a global
pandemic. We are finding new ways to keep
congregations connected, preach the gospel
of Jesus Christ and care practically for one
another and our neighbours.
On Sunday 15 March, Dundonald Church
met together for the last time before social-distancing
rules made church gatherings
impossible. Richard Coekin (Senior Pastor
of Dundonald Church) led the congregation
in this expanded version of the Lord’s Prayer:
James Wood 1931 – 2020
Keith Ferdinando
Date posted: 1 May 2020
James Wood, who died on 11 March at the age of 88, had a wide and significant pastoral ministry over many years.
Born in Bolton in 1931, he was saved as a boy and sensed God’s call to ministry in his teens. He served for a while at Capernwray Hall with Major Ian Thomas, and intended to train for the Anglican ministry at Tyndale Hall in Bristol following national service (1950–52).
A new church in Liverpool
FIEC
Date posted: 1 May 2020
Plans are underway for a new church plant in a deprived area of Liverpool.
The Cornerstone Collective – a group of FIEC and Acts 29 churches on Merseyside – will, God willing, plant into the Kensington area of the city in January 2021.
news in brief
Australia: mission again
Christian Witness to Israel will restart its mission work in Australia, it was reported in March, nearly 50 years after its first missionaries shared Jesus with Jewish people in that country.
Mark and Rahel Landrum are based in Sydney in New South Wales, where there is a thriving Jewish community of around 50,000 people. In total, Australia’s Jewish population numbers around 120,000, and includes many Holocaust survivors who arrived during and after the Second World War.
A planner’s dream and a church’s vision
Association of Grace Baptist Churches (SE)
Date posted: 1 May 2020
Thamesmead was
the brainchild of
the
Greater London Council’s city planners:
a new town on the south bank of the
Thames estuary. Building on marshland
east of Woolwich, developers
initially
experimented in the new urban architecture
of
the 1960s before returning
to more
conventional Barrett housing in the 1980s.
When phase
two was built, Titmuss
Avenue Baptist Church was planted, with
a new building overlooked by high-rise
homes and aerial walkways. The initial team
under Michael Toogood established a small
fellowship
that
then
received wonderful
pastoral
care
through
the ministries of
Derek French in the later 1980s and Robin
Dowling
in the 1990s. In the 2000s the
church struggled
for direction as Sunday
attendance (paradoxically) increased.
CiS: ‘stay committed’
Christians in Sport
Date posted: 1 May 2020
As the world gets to grips with the impact of the coronavirus outbreak, sportspeople all over the world are also seeing their lives change – particularly those in top-level sport, as their careers are on indefinite hold with serious financial implications.
In April, Christians in Sport (CiS) launched a new campaign calling on Christian sportspeople all over the world to reach out and keep investing in the lives of their sports friends even though sport has been cancelled. In the midst of all the uncertainty, the call to Christian sportspersons remains the same: reach the world of sport for Christ.
Puk Kyong Kim (‘Kim’) 1938 – 2019
Mark Harvey
Date posted: 1 May 2020
In the 1960s, a diffident young Korean, who was an ex-refugee aspiring to be a pastor, knocked at the door of Swiss L’Abri. Cynthia Stanton, Edith Schaeffer’s long-serving worker, opened it and greeted him. In due time, they were to wed.
It was a chalk-and-cheese liaison, but it was to produce much unobtrusive fruit. She was a Londoner, her father running a fleet of black taxi cabs. His father had fled North Korea to Beijing, where he and his wife sheltered refugees. Both Kim’s parents were freedom fighters in a volunteer Korean army against the Japanese in the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). They suffered torture and witnessed atrocities. Kim was born in Beijing one year into that war.
Bible By The Beach special
From the Bible By The Beach Chair of Trustees, David Bourne...
It was with much sadness, but recognising the fast pace of events, that the Trustees took the inevitable and necessary decision to cancel this year’s Bible By The Beach conference which was due to take place at the Congress Theatre, Eastbourne from 1 – 4 May.
We find ourselves in confusing and troubling times, and yet we remain confident in our good and sovereign Lord and in His good purposes.
A dazzling theatre for God’s glory
Sharon James
Date posted: 1 May 2020
Sharon James looks at the role of Christianity in the public square
In 1793 a poor cobbler from an obscure village in Northamptonshire arrived in Calcutta. Driven by the conviction that God should be glorified in all nations, William Carey (1761–1834) is remembered as the father of the modern mission movement and as a great educationalist and social reformer.
You get what you pay for
‘Drink silver particles in water.’ ‘Make your body more alkaline.’ ‘Drink water every 15 minutes.’ These were just three online cures which circulated at the start of the Covid-19 (C-19) pandemic.
All such claims were plainly ridiculous, but there were others that sounded more plausible, due to being wrapped up in nice ‘science-y’-sounding language.