May 2020 marked 185 years since three Victorian visionaries – horrified at the huge numbers of people in London living in appalling conditions and without the hope of Christ – formed the London City Mission. They quickly assembled a group of missionaries to go to the slums to proclaim the gospel.

Yet most of our missionaries were forced to mark the anniversary by staying at home. Despite a massive increase in people raising serious questions about life, death and the meaning of it all, we are having to enforce social distancing and stop our physical meetings – initially it was so frustrating.

Over 75,000 people took part in online sports quizzes run by Christians in Sport from April to June as most competitive and elite level sport stopped.

Teams would take part in four rounds of creative sports questions and then hear a short gospel talk from either Graham Daniels or Ian Lancaster, with Christian team-mates given follow-up questions to work through with their teams.

Would you accept a call to pastor a church of six or seven people?

That is what David Wilson did back in 2015. High Road Baptist Church in Finchley had reached a low ebb and, when David was inducted in February 2016, his mission was to ‘re-establish’ the church.

The national Christian organisation Pais GB brought teams and some of the young people they work with to Lancashire for a weekend of mission over the first May bank holiday weekend.

They organised multiple fun days and mission projects, using the opportunity to train their young people in evangelism and mission and to advance the Kingdom in the Northwest.

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.

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.

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.

Manchester CU students woke up on the final day of Home, their February mission week, to a Facebook review that was painful to read. A student, who had attended events during the week, had written: ‘I can’t fault the friendliness of those helping with the week … but Home has put me off Christianity more than any other engagement I’ve had with faith.’

An estimated 50,000 students will have attended a Christian Union (CU) mission over these past few weeks. Across the country, CUs have sought to give every student an opportunity to hear and respond to the gospel through high-profile, focused weeks of engaging, persuasive and creative evangelism. As the Parable of the Sower tells us, the response will be mixed. This Manchester review was a sobering reminder that, despite all the CU’s efforts to bring people to Christ, some seed falls on the path and is immediately snatched away.

I’ve had people worry that the work of the London City Mission might be exploitative. Elderly people can be ripped off by someone pretending to be a friend; a homeless person could be exploited by heavy shepherding whilst they are weak.

That risk has been used by some to suggest that we should avoid evangelism amongst children and vulnerable adults lest we are accused of spiritual abuse. And yet I can think of no greater abuse than to know the good news of Jesus and to willingly hold it back from someone in desperate need. The vulnerable need Jesus!

St John’s Wood is west of Regent’s Park in London, a neighbourhood made famous by Lords Cricket Ground. The Edgware Road is also a centre for London’s Arab population.

At the heart of this community is St John’s Wood Road Baptist Church, a Grace Baptist church that has served this area for well over a century. In 2005 it had fallen on hard times, but Chris and Helen Hawthorne came to revitalise it, gathering a growing community around God’s word. During their time they sent a member to church-plant in Bordeaux, and another returned to serve in Assam, India. Finally, in 2018 the church sent Chris and Helen through GBM to head up Proclamation Institute Zambia, leaving Scott Little as the new pastor.

It was announced in December that the Evangelical Alliance has appointed Peter Lynas as its UK director.

He will work alongside new CEO Gavin Calver, as he champions the voice of evangelicals to the media and brings leadership to the core areas of advocacy, mission and unity within the Alliance.

In the summer of 2019, a group of young people representing 14 European nations met in Italy for Ready Set Go Multiply (RSGX). This is an annual summer programme to train future sports ministry leaders and is facilitated by the European Christian Sports Union, a network of churches, charities, and individuals seeking to make disciples in sport across Europe.

The delegates on RSGX spend two weeks in Bible and sports training ahead of a week running sports camps or community projects in another European country. This summer they served at a camp in Eastern Europe.