Ten Questions: Is our gospel ‘too safe’?
Paul Woolley
1. How did you become a Christian?
news in brief
Hope Church Blackwood and Kirkmuirhill celebrates tenth anniversary
Hope Church (Blackwood and Kirkmuirhill) recently celebrated their tenth anniversary as a Free Church of Scotland congregation. Original members of the congregation, along with minister Rev. Ian Watson, had left the Church of Scotland in 2014.
The church’s anniversary weekend featured a meal and ceilidh on the Saturday and a service focused on the anniversary on the Sunday, which included Communion. Rev. Watson said: ‘as we review the past decade the verse that keeps coming back to us is Psalm 118:23: ‘The Lord has done this, and it is marvellous in our eyes.’’
Bridge building
Simon Bowkett
Date posted: 1 Apr 2024
Book Review
STRANGE RELIGION:
How the First Christians Were Weird,
Dangerous, and Compelling
Read review
Haiti: missionary evacuation plan
en staff
Date posted: 1 Apr 2024
Missionaries trapped amid escalating violence in Haiti are to be evacuated under a plan by Florida Governor Ron De Santis.
Speaking on television, DeSantis said: ‘I have authorised rescue flights like we did in Israel after the 7 October (Hamas attacks) because we’ve got a lot of folks who are part of Christian missionary groups and they do things to try to actually help a very troubled country.’
everyday evangelism
Lessons from ‘He Gets Us’
Glen Scrivener
Date posted: 1 Apr 2024
‘He Gets Us’ is a US ad campaign spending hundreds of millions of dollars to prompt faith conversations in America.
It also seeks to lead interested enquirers to do Bible reading programmes and to connect with local Alpha groups. Their most prominent advertisement to date was their 60-second Superbowl commercial, ‘Foot Washing’, re-imagining John 13 with various representatives of polarised groups washing one another’s feet. It finished with the line ‘Jesus didn’t preach hate. Jesus washed feet.’
Evangelical hospital gets railway boost
Milla Ling-Davies
Date posted: 1 Apr 2024
As part of a historic change to the London railway network, an overground line between Stratford to Richmond has been named after an evangelical Christian hospital – which hopes the recognition will further its efforts to ‘do God’s work’.
Transport for London (TFL) named The Mildmay line after the Mildmay Mission Hospital in Shoreditch, largely in acknowledgement of the help it provided during the 1980s during the HIV/AIDS crisis. The honour is a huge boost for the hospital who, just under a year ago, were facing closure due to NHS funding cuts – they now hope the spotlight will bring much-needed financial stability as they continue treating HIV patients and caring for the homeless.
letter from America
‘In wrath, remember mercy’
Josh Moody
Date posted: 1 Apr 2024
It was an unusual Sunday. A group of Ukrainian pastors had been in conversation with the missions leadership of the church to see if we might be able to partner with them.
Their ministry in Ukraine was very active. Church planting. Training pastors. Fruitful evangelism. Baptisms. As they were meeting that weekend with the church, news emerged of war breaking out in Ukraine. The Ukrainian pastors were prayed for in a new context, and they bravely made the hard decision to return to their homeland to shepherd their people.
Student leaders equipped at spring training sessions
UCCF
Date posted: 1 Apr 2024
Each Spring, the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship (UCCF) runs nine regional weekend conferences, known as Regional Forums, to equip new student leaders. Christian Unions across Great Britain hand over their leadership to new committees of students at this time of year, and many have never served in this way before.
This training helps new student leaders to grow into their specific roles, and to work well together as they lead their CUs to the glory of God.
Island Revival
Date posted: 1 Feb 2024
Dear Editor,
I would like to thank you for publishing the balanced review by Tony Wilkinson of the book Island Aflame [en January]. I feel grieved, though, at the subtitle that Tom Lennie chose to give it. I am reminded of the words of our late Queen on the Prince Harry situation: ‘Recollections may differ’. That was after seven months, not 70 years.
Carl Knightly
Luke Randall
Date posted: 1 Jan 2024
Carl Knightly has been appointed as the new leader of the City Mission Movement (CMM) UK and Ireland.
CMM was founded in 1991 and exists to support the 18 City Missions across the UK and Ireland. City Missions work to serve their cities and take the gospel to the people of their cities across the country.
Inter-cultural commission marks ten years
Milla Ling-Davies
Date posted: 1 Feb 2024
More than 100 delegates have gathered at the London City Mission headquarters to celebrate ten years of the Evangelical Alliance’s ‘One People Commission’ (OPC).
Anchored by Titilola Babarinde, the co-ordinator of the OPC, the celebration began with a time of collective worship.
Tony Baker: ‘Evangelical statesman’ 1938–2023
James Dudley-Smith
Date posted: 1 Feb 2024
James Dudley-Smith writes: Tony was an evangelical statesman in the Church of England, a lifelong preacher and lecturer, pastor and servant of Christ.
After Oxford University and then Clifton Theological College, Bristol, he served curacies at St Ebbe’s in Oxford, and Welling near Bexleyheath. He was vicar of Redland in Bristol 1970–1979 during which time he was part of the lecturing staff at Tyndale Hall and then Trinity College Bristol, where he was Director of Ministry and Mission. He was vicar of Christ Church Beckenham 1979–93, and vicar of Bishop Hannington Hove 1994– 2003 before retirement to Eastbourne.
The gospel was preached – then a bomb exploded: this is what happened afterwards in Ukraine
Milla Ling-Davies
Date posted: 1 Feb 2024
A Russian bomb exploded near a Christian mission worker sharing the gospel in Kherson, causing him to dive for cover, en has been told.
Daniel Rus is a Romanian working with the Global Network of Evangelists (part of the Luis Palau Association), who has organised and led 24 humanitarian trips to Ukraine. In December 2023, on day two of his most recent visit, he and his team visited five villages surrounding Kherson. While distributing food parcels at the third, a mortar bomb exploded 40 metres away, in the garden of the house they were in front of, and the team were forced to run to their cars.
Javier Milei: Do cry for me, Argentina?
Iain Taylor
Date posted: 1 Jan 2024
The Church Mission Society (CMS), which absorbed the South American Mission Society (SAMS) in 2009, has responded to the election of far-right populist outsider Javier Milei as the new President of Argentina.
Speaking exclusively to Evangelicals Now, CMS spokesperson Naomi Steinberg commented: ‘From a mission point of view, we can see that the political, economic and environmental situation in Argentina is precarious and needs much prayer. Our people in mission in the region are praying that the new President will be surrounded by a leadership team that is wise, compassionate and full of integrity’.
‘Patient, gracious’ Roger Forster dies
Luke Randall
Date posted: 1 Mar 2024
Roger Forster, the founder of Ichthus Christian Fellowship, has died aged 90.
A husband to Faith and father to three children, he was a well-respected theologian, best known for founding the neo-charismatic Ichthus Christian Fellowship in 1974.
The answer to an 11-year prayer: new church opens
Milla Ling-Davies
Date posted: 1 Mar 2024
On Saturday 6 January 2024, Dan James had an encouraging answer to the prayer he’d been praying for 11 years: a church was planted on his council estate in South Leicester.
In 2013, primary school teacher Dan and his wife Jamie moved into Eyres Monsell council estate and their hearts were gripped by both its physical and spiritual needs – there was no gospel church there. ‘Convinced that God’s primary mission strategy is a healthy local church, we started praying for one to begin,’ Dan shared with en. Just over a decade on from those first prayers, after plans, bold initiatives and setbacks, 100 people gathered on the estate this January to commission Eyres Monsell Community Church and Dan as its pastor.
Gospel beauty parlour offers inner transformation
Agnes Wilson
Date posted: 1 Mar 2024
It’s not often you hear of churches being taken over by beauty salons. But that’s exactly what happened at one East London church recently, all to reach those on the margins of society.
On a rainy day, London City Missionaries Marlen and Amanda-Lee, alongside volunteers from LCM Church Partner, The Liberty Church, came early in the morning to transform a modest church space into somewhere that women could get their hair cut, enjoy beauty treatments for their hands and feet, and hear the good news of Jesus Christ.
Contagious holiness in contentious settings? Making holy the unholy
Craig Blomberg
Date posted: 1 Mar 2024
In the ancient Middle East, people took hospitality more seriously than most of us, and were more guarded with whom they ate. Most cultures had dietary restrictions and taboos. In some instances, eating the wrong food could render a person ritually unclean.
But whereas the Pharisees avoided contact with ‘sinners’ so that they would not become ritually unclean, Jesus befriended sinners – because He believed that His holiness was contagious.
‘We ruined good people’ – Dawson
Nicola Laver
Date posted: 1 Mar 2024
A former staff member at the Universities of Colleges Christian Fellowship (UCCF) has apologised for the part she played in an ‘unhealthy and damaging’ UCCF culture, saying she has kept quiet for 20 years out of fear.
Nay Dawson worked for UCCF for 18 years, becoming a team leader in 2006. Writing in Premier Christianity, she reflected: ‘The urgency of our mission and the significance of our role led to an arrogance in my heart. I’d lost my humility… So when I started to notice that things weren’t quite right, I was in so deep. I felt I couldn’t – and so didn’t – ask questions.’
Bullying and exclusion: Why evangelicals need new C of E structures
It is still being assumed by those pursuing change in the Church of England that we can simply ‘agree to disagree’ over matters of same-sex marriage and blessings. In practice, this means that the permission not to use the Prayers of Love and Faith is a sufficient provision and that either no or minimum structural rearrangement is necessary.
This, however, remains a theological ostrich with its head in the sand. How can the Church of England simultaneously say that same-sex marriage and blessings are both sinful and holy? And as someone who holds to a globally acknowledged Biblical position on human sexuality, my conscience will not allow me to simply accept a Church of England that blesses sin as if it were holiness.