Welcome home?
Missionaries on home assignment have many responsibilities. They talk to their mission, report to churches, reconnect with their home church, contact supporters, deal with health issues, see family and maybe get some holiday. This article is not addressed to them!
Supermarket halal
Patrick Sookhdeo
Date posted: 1 Dec 2010
All over the UK today, supermarket chains, shops and restaurants are selling halal meat.
We may find it on the menu at our children’s school or the local hospital, or be offered it when we go to a sporting event. If we go for a meal with Muslim friends, any meat we are served will probably be halal. It can be hard to avoid eating this meat, especially as it is often not labelled and little information is available to the consumer.
Tumbling pulpits
John Brand
Date posted: 1 Oct 2010
Book Review
WHY JOHNNY CAN’T PREACH
The media have shaped the messengers
Read review
Missionary kid!
Heidi Sand-Hart
Date posted: 1 Nov 2010
Being a child of missionary parents is not easy. Heidi Sand-Hart has written a book on the subject and spoke to EN about it.
EN: Tell us about your background. Were your parents missionaries?
God set to use London?
John Benton
Date posted: 1 Sep 2010
Does God have a plan for London? People from all kinds of ethnic and cultural backgrounds from across the globe pass through or have become part of Britain’s capital city.
The world is in London. This means that, even apart from what might happen as people come for the Olympic Games in 2012, London has enormous potential in God’s purposes for worldwide mission and it seems that many Christians have begun to understand this.
A 21st-century Reformation: recovering the supernatural
Hwa Yung
Date posted: 1 Oct 2010
One of the big surprises of the 20th century was the dramatic growth of the churches in the non-Western world.
A bigger surprise was that, as Philip Jenkins asserts, those churches growing fastest are all strongly supernaturally oriented. ‘In this thought world, prophecy is an everyday reality, while faith-healing, exorcism, and dream-visions are all basic components of religious sensibility.’
Daddy cool
Stephen Trump
Date posted: 1 Oct 2010
Book Review
FATHER FICTION
Chapters for a fatherless generation
Read review
Fund nationals!
Graham Went
Date posted: 1 Aug 2010
Book Review
REVOLUTION IN WORLD MISSIONS
One man’s journey to change a generation
Read review
A pattern for evangelistic missions
Roger Carswell
Date posted: 1 Mar 2009
In 1983 I left teaching in a large comprehensive school to work full time as a travelling evangelist.
Before then, evangelism had been my life, so that when God called me into this work, it was a natural progression from what I had been doing. In the last quarter of a century there have been huge changes not only in society and church, but also in methods of evangelism. Some of this has been rapid.
Turnaround churches need older ladies?
Julian Mann
Date posted: 1 Sep 2010
A fresh influx of old ladies converted to lively Christian faith in their 80s is now sorely needed to revitalise small local churches.
An influx of old gentlemen of that generation would also be wonderful but an old lady born in 1930 brings the following benefits to a local church that is in urgent need of major spiritual surgery:
Blind faith?
Philippa Woodcraft
Date posted: 1 Jul 2010
I was born blind, without eyes. This came as a great shock to my parents, but, despite this, and their questions as to why God had allowed this to happen, they were determined to treat me as normally as possible. I was included in all family activities, and I went through mainstream education all the way from playschool to sixth form. It was a challenge, but, with help from God and friends, family and staff, I got through it.
I was raised in a Christian family and attended church and Sunday school regularly at Potton Baptist Church. I can’t say what date I became a Christian, but I remember always asking God to help and forgive me, right from a very young age. He is my best friend. I was 12 when I knew for sure I was a Christian and wanted to make my faith public by being baptised.
The Third Degree
Charlotte Petra
Date posted: 1 Jul 2010
The summer holiday is definitely one of the perks of student life; months without coursework deadlines or exams, but does student ministry take a break too? With many students going home, travelling or working, it may appear that there isn’t much opportunity to reach the student world with the good news about Jesus. But things aren’t always what they seem...
This year six UCCF-led teams of students are going overseas, to Lithuania, Bulgaria, a country in the Former Yugoslav Republic, Russia, Paris and an East European country. Each team is made up of students from Christian Unions across the UK and led by Christian Union Staff Workers.
Gospel-centred life
Principle: Eternal glory offers more than this life.
Consider this
Sitting in the dentist’s waiting room, Lucy flicks through House & Garden magazine. She loves the photo shoots of beautifully restored homes. She dreams of a country cottage. But she and her husband have decided to serve God in the city. Looking at the antique furniture and cottage garden of some rural idyll in the country, she begins to wonder whether it’s worth it.
Letter from America
Letter from America
Josh Moody
Date posted: 1 Aug 2010
Let me talk about an important book bearing on the American scene.
Sebastian Junger’s War (New York, 2010) is a specifically non-religious book, but with great relevance to assessments of the effects and experience of war in Afghanistan for American troops. Junger ‘embedded’ himself with the ultimate front line troops in a far flung outpost of Afghanistan to experience daily life in combat.
What's in a name?
Robert Dale
Date posted: 1 Jun 2010
‘Joseph, a Levite from Cyprus, whom the apostles called Barnabas (which means Son of Encouragement), sold a field he owned and brought the money and laid it at the apostles’ feet’ (Acts 4.36-37).
In May 2008 there was a Number 1 song: ‘They call me Stacey, they call me her, they call me Jane, that’s not my name’. Barnabas could also have said, ‘That’s not my name’. His real name was Joseph, but the apostles called him Barnabas, and that is how he was always known.
60 years of ministry to children
Jennifer Haaijer
Date posted: 1 Jun 2010
‘This is the story of how a powerful and extraordinary God uses ordinary people to accomplish his purposes.’ This is how Sam Doherty summarised the work of Child Evangelism Fellowship in Ireland during the past 60 years. He should know for he was there at the beginning!
In November 1949, Sam Doherty was a recently qualified teacher and a brand new convert to Christ, with no gospel background whatsoever. He took the words of his spiritual father, Fred Orr, seriously: ‘God always saves people for them to do something; you’d better ask God what he wants you to do’. Sam and his wife Sadie began to pray for God’s direction.
Cloud of ash to cloud of witnesses
Nigel Gordon
Date posted: 1 Jun 2010
Sometimes spiritual triumph arises out of natural disaster. Few had ever heard of the volcanic tongue-twister that is Eyjajallajokull before April 14; now we know that its ash crippled European airlines for a week, costing the aviation industry over £2bn, stranding 300,000 passengers and its effects have been ongoing.
One of its more remarkable spiritual consequences, however, was that the eruption deprived Medias, Romania, of a team of American evangelists who were to run a major outreach under the auspices of the Luis Palau Association's (LPA’s) Next Generation Alliance programme. In so doing, it propelled local churches into taking full responsibility for the mission and forced local pastors to bring the gospel themselves to their friends and neighbours. The result of being made to step out in faith, in these apparently unpromising circumstances, was a rich harvest of souls for Christ.
Maximum miracle church
I have been in Western Kenya over the summer. Each time I visit the country there are invariably advertisements for big ‘Christian’ rallies promising the most extraordinary divine interventions.
One that sticks in my mind from a previous trip was the ‘Holy Spirit Explosion’ crusade. This time a certain well-known health and wealth preacher who frequents London was plying his trade among the poor of the city of Kisumu promising ‘financial breakthrough’. It was the usual approach. People are assured that, as they give their money to finance his ministry (and luxurious lifestyle?), the Lord will take them out of their poverty and make them wealthy.