Jesus in the marketplace
Centre for Marketplace Theology
Date posted: 1 Sep 1998
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.
Notes from a second-class convert
Leith Samuel
Date posted: 1 Jul 1998
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!
Turkish delight?
Paul White and Philippa Jones
Date posted: 1 Aug 1998
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.
Post-modernism (POMO) in Chicago
Mr Graham Beynon
Date posted: 1 Aug 1998
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.
Sun, sea and salvation?
Ms Denise Cameron
Date posted: 1 Aug 1998
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.
Past imperfect
Oliver Barclay
Date posted: 1 Jun 1998
Book Review
TRANSFORMING THE WORLD?
The social impact of British Evangelicalism
Read review
Mad for it in Manchester
Stephen Timmis
Date posted: 1 May 1998
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.
The campus - the world
Dick Dowsett
Date posted: 1 Mar 1998
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.
Gattaca
Julie Skelton
Date posted: 1 May 1998
None Review
Gattaca Columbia Pictures, 112 minutes. Cert. 15 'Consider what God has done: Who can straighten what he has made crooked?' (Ecclesiastes 7.13) - the text is used on screen at the beginning of this timely science fiction film, in the mould of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. The audience is invited to consider the evidence before them . . .
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After God's funeral
Mr Ravi Zacharias
Date posted: 1 May 1998
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.
Narnia's man
Colin Duriez
Date posted: 1 Apr 1998
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.
An exciting future
EN
Date posted: 1 Apr 1998
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.
Brief lives: Alexander Mackay
Don Stephens
Date posted: 1 Feb 1998
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.
Brief lives: Fanny Crosby
Don Stephens
Date posted: 1 Jan 1998
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.
The challenge facing Evangelicals (Bulldog for December)
Mr Joel Edwards
Date posted: 1 Dec 1997
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'.