New leaders for CofE evangelicals
CEEC
Date posted: 1 Apr 2021
Lis Goddard and Ed Shaw have become Co-Chairs of the Church of England Evangelical Council (CEEC), it has been announced.
Ed Shaw is pastor of Emmanuel City Centre Church in Bristol, a congregation established in recent years via a Bishop’s Mission Order. He is also Director of Living Out – an organisation run by same-sex-attracted Christians setting out an orthodox, Biblical view of sexuality.
Christian medics rush to aid of boy and chimpanzee
Gary Clayton of the Mission Aviation Fellowship writes: For more than 75 years, MAF’s fleet of light aircraft has been flying patients from some of the world’s most hard-to-access areas to hospital.
Many MAF flights involve women facing pregnancy complications, accident victims or people wounded due to tribal conflict. Two, less typical, MAF medevacs involved a two-week-old chimpanzee and a ten-year-old boy.
Churches badly harmed by Equatorial Guinea blast
Iain Taylor / Evangelical Focus
Date posted: 1 Apr 2021
More than 100 people were killed after a massive explosion in Equatorial Guinea (central West Africa) in March, with 600 injured and almost 300 in hospital. More than 60 people were rescued from under the rubble by the civil protection corps and the fire service.
Local Christians and churches were badly affected too, with a Baptist pastor (as yet unnamed) killed and several members of the Baptist Church of Bata killed or injured.
New leader for global group
Christian Today / ThomasSchirmacher.net
Date posted: 1 Apr 2021
New Secretary General of the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA), German theologian Thomas Schirrmacher, has begun work after being inaugurated.
The WEA was established in 1846 and works in 129 countries. It claims to represent 600 million evangelicals.
ten questions
David Norbury
1. How did you become a Christian?
Bishop Pat Harris 1934 – 2020
Chris Sugden
Date posted: 1 Feb 2021
Bishop Pat Harris, former Bishop of Northern Argentina and of Southwell and Nottingham, and onetime Secretary of Partnership for World Mission for the Church of England died peacefully in December.
His family write: ‘Patrick was a man of deep faith, with strong convictions as a Christian since his Army days as a young officer. From there he went to Oxford to study law (at Keble College) where he was President of the Christian Union. After attending theological college (Clifton Theological College, Bristol), he was a curate at St Ebbe’s in Oxford from 1960-63.
All Nations’ 90% IT cash boost
All Nations College
Date posted: 1 Feb 2021
All Nations College has announced an ambitious plan to invest in technology for the College after a loss of £170,000 in expected income due to the pandemic.
They are budgeting £51,000 for a two-person team of ICT personnel that they say is needed. The scheme includes an ambitious new ‘Student Management System’ which will help All Nations to track and to manage all student data more effectively.
Skull plans to bring new life to Brighton’s dry bones
Association of Grace Baptist Churches (SE)
Date posted: 1 Feb 2021
David Skull (aka Skully) has been serving Grace Church Guildford for the past 13 years. In July he will be moving with his wife Naomi and their four children to lead Grace Plant Brighton. He explains how this happened.
Back in 2012, Montpelier Place Baptist Church sadly closed. It represented a community of Christians who had been gathering in Brighton since 1834. The building was demolished in 2017, but we don’t believe this is the end of the story. Grace Plant Brighton is sowing the seeds of a new church in central Brighton in 2021.
New director for HOPE
Hope Together
Date posted: 1 Feb 2021
Dr Rachel Jordan-Wolf has taken over from Roy Crowne as executive director to lead HOPE Together in the UK.
Rachel has worked closely with HOPE Together since 2010, when she was the Church of England’s National Mission and Evangelism Advisor.
Church planting: is the old method best?
Deiniol Williams
Date posted: 1 Feb 2021
Church planting can sometimes seem like a relatively new phenomenon, but whether it is or not depends on what you mean by church planting.
A good friend and mentor of mine – who has planted two churches in France – believes that when Paul instructed Timothy to ‘do the work of an evangelist’ (2 Tim. 4:5), he was instructing him to plant churches. To evangelise – to make disciples of all nations (Mat 28:19) – is to see churches started. Church planting, in this sense of the term, is as old as the early church.
2021: LOOKING AHEAD
A variety of evangelicals reflect on what might lie ahead in the next 12 months
Innovative evangelism? Adrian Reynolds, Associate National Director FIEC
I hope and I pray that 2021 will see churches give evangelism its appropriate focus. In general terms, the lockdown has held us back: churches have often succumbed (understandably) to survival mode – let’s just keep going! Others have seen opportunities, but have not really known how to make the most of them. Others still have not known how to adapt to a changing environment and have simply mourned what they cannot do rather than explore what they can.
China: Preacher Pu climbs cliffs for the gospel
Bible Society
Date posted: 1 Mar 2021
It’s not very often a preacher has to scale a cliff to get into his pulpit, but that is the kind of terrain that Pu Zhidui must overcome as he oversees eight churches comprising 2,000 believers.
The area in which Pu preaches, Fugong county, has 360 churches and 80,000 Christians, but just 67 lay preachers and four pastors.
Safeguarding questions
Date posted: 1 Mar 2021
Dear Editor,
In the January John edition of en, Benton drew a striking parallel between the recent advent of safeguarding officers in the church and the introduction of video assistant referees (VAR) in English Premier League football. Provocatively, John chose to transpose the initial, lumbering use of VAR (seen as ‘petty’, ‘unjust’ and ‘dominant’) with the worst-case scenario of safeguarding officers subverting their roles to wrest authority from local church elders.
Contextualised gospel?
Date posted: 1 Mar 2021
Dear Editor,
I was bemused and saddened by Tim and Lois Wells’ article in the February edition the merits or otherwise of of en about contextualising the gospel.
Peter Anderson 1931 – 2021
John Blanchard
Date posted: 1 Mar 2021
On 21 January, the British evangelist Peter Anderson died in a care home in Leicester.
Born in Glasgow, he enrolled in the Army when he was 18 and was posted to Singapore, where he became a Christian under the ministry of a Chinese doctor. Sensing a call to full-time evangelism, he applied for a place at Redcliffe College – only to find that it was for ladies only! He then enrolled in Matlock Bible College (later called Moorlands) and on graduating, immediately began itinerant evangelism.
EMW hits the road in Wales
The Evangelical Movement of Wales writes:
‘Rather than holding our residential English language conference in Aberystwyth, we are making plans for the main speaker, Sinclair B. Ferguson, to preach in smaller venues around Wales in August. These meetings will also be live-streamed.
Christians in Sport reaches 70,000 in Covid and launches new evangelism resource
Jonny Reid of Christians in Sport writes: In the first lockdown, Christians in Sport encouraged sportspeople to Pray STAY Say – encouraging Christians to stay in the lives of their sports mates. As part of that campaign we delivered five online sports quizzes with a short talk explaining the Christian faith. We’re thrilled that over 70,000 people joined in.
In November, the second lockdown saw elite sport able to continue, but for competitive amateur sportspeople, sport halted once more. However, the guidelines gave opportunities for sportspeople to do something outside with one other person, so we launched Train 1-2-1. This brand-new resource encouraged people to go for a run or cycle with friends, and then ask them three questions about Jesus’ identity, mission and call.
Awr i blant? Syniad gwych!*
Two encouraging pieces of news from the
Evangelical Movement of Wales (EMW).
Steffan Job writes:
A group of officers and leaders from the
camps and conference work have produced
some online videos to fill the gap left by the
summer cancellations, and so began Awr i
blant (An hour for children).
evangelicals & catholics
Roman Catholic universalism?
Leonardo De Chirico
Date posted: 1 Dec 2020
It has been rightly called the ‘political manifesto’ of Pope Francis’ pontificate.
In fact, there is a lot of politics and a lot of sociology in the new encyclical All Brothers, a very long document (130 pages) that looks more like a book than a letter. Francis wants to plead the cause of universal fraternity and social friendship. To do this, he speaks of borders to be broken down, of waste to be avoided, of human rights that are not sufficiently universal, of unjust globalisation, of burdensome pandemics, of migrants to be welcomed, of open societies, of solidarity, of peoples’ rights, of local and global exchanges, of the limits of the liberal political vision, of world governance, of political love, of the recognition of the other, of the injustice of any war, of the abolition of the death penalty. These are all interesting ‘political’ themes which, were it not for some comments on the parable of the Good Samaritan that intersperse the chapters, could have been written by a group of sociologists and humanitarian workers from some international organisation, perhaps after reading, for example, Edgar Morin and Zygmunt Bauman.
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:
Kenya: church marks 50
years with warning
Charles Raven
Date posted: 1 Dec 2020
The story of Anglican growth in Africa and
decline in the West is very familiar, but this
is often spoken of as if it were simply the
result of underlying social, economic and
cultural
forces, without giving sufficient
attention to the role that leadership plays,
for good or ill.
The Anglican Church of Kenya, which
has just celebrated its 50th anniversary as
an independent Province, is an interesting
example. The
current Archbishop
and
Primate, Jackson Ole Sapit, may not yet
be as well known outside Kenya as some of
his predecessors (such as David Gitari who
was a prominent opponent of President
Moi’s attempt to entrench one-party rule, and Eliud Wabukala, who was Chairman
of GAFCON
from 2011
to 2016), but
he too is bringing courageous and creative
leadership to the Anglican Church of Kenya.
Global partnership to reach the world
China Christian Daily
Date posted: 1 Dec 2020
The Global Assembly
of Pastors
for
Finishing the Task (FTT) has held an online
forum to discuss how to mobilise churches
to cover 5,000 unengaged and unreached
people groups.
FTT is a movement of 1,600 churches and
organisations who have come together to reach
the Unengaged, Unreached People Groups
(UUPGs). These are people groups who have
no access to a Bible, believers, or a body of Christ and have less than 0.1% evangelical
believers. Rick Warren is the director.
