Letter from America
Trumped
Josh Moody
Date posted: 1 Dec 2016
I am a ‘legal alien’, I carry a Green Card and all our children have been born here, but I cannot vote in America.
With that in mind and also being a pastor, it is inimical, unwise, and probably unedifying for me to talk about party politics.
Niger: YWAM kidnap
World Watch Monitor
Date posted: 1 Dec 2016
The kidnap of a pioneering American missionary on 14 October is a ‘terrible tragedy’ for
the communities he served for 24 years,
according to the local mayor, and it has
raised security concerns among the country’s missionary community.
Jeff Woodke, 55, who worked for a branch
of the US-based Youth With a Mission, was
abducted by unknown assailants from the
town of Abalak
in northern Niger. They
killed two guards and he was taken to eastern Mali where Mujao – a radical Islamic
group – have a stronghold.
news in brief
Algeria: appeal hope
An Algerian Christian’s family appealed in October to the Algerian president for a pardon, after Slimane Bouhafs was convicted of ‘insulting Islam and the prophet Mohammed’ in posts he made on social media.
Bouhafs, who converted to Christianity in 1997, was sentenced to three years imprisonment on 6 September. He had shared someone else’s media posts. The family see the presidential pardon as the only possibly solution to set their father free as he is suffering with ill health and a Supreme Court appeal would take too long to come to court.
Demand for Bible app
Scripture Union
Date posted: 1 Dec 2016
Children and schools in Blackpool are having to join waiting lists for Christian schools clubs as demand has far exceeded expectations for the groups based around Scripture Union’s award-winning app, Guardians of Ancora, it was reported in October.
The clubs, which run at lunchtimes and after school, identified Guardians of Ancora as the perfect fit to engage their target age ranges with biblical stories in a fun and relevant way. Scripture Union commissioned the Guardians of Ancora project to help children grow in faith, in the digital space.
Purchased with blood
Tom Marcus
Date posted: 1 Oct 2016
Tom Marcus suggests the relevance of the story of the early Ugandan and English martyrs for today
To understand the African bishops’ stand on homosexual practice today, it is helpful to remember the heroic early days of the Ugandan church.
Sudan: teachers arrested
Morning Star News
Date posted: 1 Nov 2016
Authorities in southeastern Sudan arrested
the headmaster of a Christian school on 5
September and took over its property.
Armed police
and officials
from
the
National Intelligence and Security Services
arrested the Rev Samuel Suliman and 12
teachers at the school in Madani, capital of
Al Jazirah state. The Christians were accused
of supporting the Sudan People’s Liberation
Army-North (SPLA-N), a rebel group fighting government forces.
Tilehurst launch
Dan Dwelly
Date posted: 1 Nov 2016
ChristChurch Tilehurst launched on 4 September, having first been established as a congregation from Carey Baptist Church in Reading.
Originally operating as a satellite congregation called Carey Westwood Farm, the work grew from about 30 people, including children, to about 60. In 2015, with the blessing of Carey, they began the process of establishing the new church.
Knowing God Better
Uniting God’s people
Jonathan Lamb
Date posted: 1 Nov 2016
Social commentators frequently remind us of a paradox of our age.
Alongside the integration and cohesion of globalisation, there has been an accompanying and more troubling trend – the rise of nationalism and tribalism. Fracture lines are seen across nations, communities and eth-nicities. As Christians we joyfully affirm the counter-cultural unity which the gospel brings. But often we do not see this working as it should. A pastor was once asked if he had an active congregation. ‘Oh yes’, he replied. ‘Half of them are working with me, and half of them working against me’.
What we need now
David Baker
Date posted: 1 Nov 2016
Unless the Lord builds the house, Psalm
127 tells us, its builders labour in vain.
In September’s en I wrote about how we
Anglican evangelicals need a biblical theology of unity and separation, which we seem to
lack. Theology is always practical of course –
for it is about how we follow Jesus. So this
month I want to write about another theological essential for our current situation,
and that is humility.
EA: great commission
Evangelical Alliance
Date posted: 1 Nov 2016
The Evangelical Alliance launched its Great Commission evangelism website on 26 October to help Christians share their faith, and to show people that Jesus is changing lives in the UK today.
New video stories will be released each week on the site, sharing how people have come to faith across the UK. There will also be inspiring accounts of Christians and churches.
Gap year
well spent
amandaporter@paismovement.com
Date posted: 1 Nov 2016
In September, Pais GB commissioned 57
apprentices, the biggest group of missionaries they have sent out in a decade.
Their apprentices, coming from Germany,
Brazil, America, India, Kazakstan, Ukraine,
Zimbabwe and the UK, comprise 17 teams
based in areas as far north as Newcastle and
as far south as Exeter!
Missionary marriages in trouble
Mike Peterson
Date posted: 1 Aug 2016
Mike Peterson asks: ‘That missionary family might be smiling in the photo on your fridge, but is their marriage hanging by a thread?’
I winced as the lights suddenly cut off.
Capital Gains
The invisible mission field
Graham Miller
Date posted: 1 Nov 2015
Reading through Scripture I am struck by Christ’s commitment to those on the margins of society.
I feel challenged that he didn’t use clever strategies to aim first to reach the best and brightest from the Jerusalem temple school so that they could be useful for his efforts. Instead, Jesus spent time with lepers, tax collectors, fishermen, women and Samaritans. In recent years the movement to revitalise the church with new plants and initiatives has sometimes focused on the young, the bright and the mobile. If we are to be faithful to the Great Commission we must be careful that our outreach doesn’t leave out large segments of society.
London Underground
Around two years ago, a young and newly ordained minister and his wife had a vision to plant a church in the heart of Central London which would last for 100 years.
But rather than taking a group of around 40 people, as is the usual church planting route, they did something crazy. With the blessing of their sending churches and a number of Christian organisations, Malcolm (formally at St Ebbe’s Church in Oxford) and his wife decided to move to London with no money, no people and no place to plant a new church. Two and a bit years later we praise God that there is a new church in Central London meeting in Leicester Square.
Keswick: Global Tour
Peter Maiden
Date posted: 1 Aug 2016
We need to be informed of what God is doing in his world.
The information will cause us to appreciate the greatness of our God and the certainty of his promises. It will also stimulate us to prayer for many of our brothers and sisters who are paying a high price to follow Christ today. In Europe it is possible to think that as Bible-believing Christians we are part of an ever-decreasing minority, yet we are a protected minority, though the fear is that these protections are fast disappearing.
news in brief
No ghost trains
A visitor to Perrygrove Railway in the Forest of Dean has reported that it has decided to become a Halloween-free attraction.
Appreciating that not every family wants ghosts and ghouls when out with their family through all of October, which includes the half-term break, the railway attraction has decided to go ghost free.
Audrey Osei-Mensah 1936 –2016
Julia Cameron
Date posted: 1 Oct 2016
Audrey Laura Osei-Mensah was born
in
East Ham and professed faith in Christ aged
14,
through her confirmation class
in
Wanstead.
In
1955
she went up
to
Birmingham University to read geography.
As she wrote in her memoirs: ‘It was during
my first year that Bible study replaced geography as my first
love, which
it has
remained ever since!’
She served on the Birmingham CU Exec
alongside a thoughtful student from Ghana:
Gottfried Osei-Mensah, with whom she maintained
a
friendship while
teaching
at
Clarendon School
from 1959 to 1962. In
1962 she applied for a position with SIM in
Nigeria, whereupon Gottfried, by now with
Mobil Oil in Accra, proposed to her. At her
father’s suggestion, she first went to Ghana for
three months to get to know Gottfried’s family
and context. They married the following year.
Roger Cook 1941 –2016
Jim Sayers
Date posted: 1 Oct 2016
Roger’s great contribution in his many years of
service was developing radio ministry in both
France and Francophone Africa.
Known widely
among Grace Baptist
churches for his work
in GBM Radio at
Abingdon, he and his wife Helen began their
missionary service in Belgium. In 1967 they
were the first GBM missionaries to be sent
into Europe by their church in Hounslow, as
GBM adopted a church-based approach to
mission.
In 1969
they moved
to Mons,
where they worked to plant a church, coming face to face with the growing ‘practical
atheism’ of an otherwise Catholic culture.
A pair of shoes led me to Christ!
Randy Newman
Date posted: 1 Oct 2016
A quarter of a million Jewish people live in the UK – and this month, most of them will be celebrating Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. But for Randy Newman, author of Questioning Evangelism, it was this Jewish Festival that started his journey to faith in Christ. Everything changed when he looked down at his shoes…
I was born into a Jewish family in the suburbs of New York City.
Healthy church evangelism
JEB
Date posted: 1 Oct 2016
Duke Street, Richmond was the venue for
the second Healthy Churches Conference
which took place on 5 September and is
from the ‘9Marks’ background.
Last year the speaker was Mark Dever of
Capitol Hill Baptist, Washington. This year,
with the focus on evangelism, it was Mack
Styles of Redeemer Church, Dubai.
