Youth Leaders
Dinosaurs stand up
Dave Fenton
Date posted: 1 Mar 2009
On occasions, those of us who have stayed with youth ministry in advancing years are the subject of ageist banter from our younger colleagues. But I wonder if the oldies should fight back a little on an area of ministry where, just maybe, our younger partners in the gospel have lost the plot.
I was recently involved in a university mission and the inevitable question arose about how friends are to be invited to the mission events. Different people recounted their successes and failures and one student came out with the statement: ‘I have texted and emailed all my course mates’, and then, as an afterthought, he said: ‘Oh yes, I spoke to one person face to face’, and it almost came out as an expression of failure that he had to forsake technology and speak to a human being. His case is probably extreme but I wonder if inter-personal skills are going out of fashion or, at the very least, conversation fashions are changing.
Every child matters
Kirkley Greenwell
Date posted: 1 Apr 2009
Every Christian schools worker I’ve ever met loves the job. What is there to not like?
Jeans and trainers are the standard uniform. Young people love us because, at any given time, the odds are good that we’re carrying chocolate. And we get to spend hours each week playing games. But, as with any work, there are stressful moments. Here’s a taster of a typical week:
Would you like a box of dates?
Joy Horn
Date posted: 1 Jan 2009
Famous books
The final Latin version of Calvin’s Institutes was published in 1559. The six chapters of the first edition (1536) had now become 80, assembled in four books. This has been called ‘the most influential theological work of the Protestant Reformation’, but it is nevertheless accessible, interesting and inspiring to the 21st-century general reader.
C.I. Scofield’s dispensational, pre-millennial Bible was published in 1909, and gained a wide circulation.
Planting in the cities
John Benton
Date posted: 1 Jan 2009
The evangelical community is growing in London and leading the way for other European cities.
This was just one of the very positive messages coming out of the Urban Plant Life Conference held at the Emmanuel Centre in Westminster on November 18. Sponsored by the London City Mission (LCM) and with major input from Tim Keller and the church-planting arm of Redeemer Presbyterian Church, New York, this was an outstanding event. Apart from Keller’s excellent, clear and challenging teaching, what made it so remarkable was that it drew together Christians from quite different evangelical traditions all heavily engaged in planting churches.
The Third Degree
Richard Cunningham
Date posted: 1 Feb 2009
Did you read about the incredible events surrounding a ‘follow up’ talk to a mission in which the speaker gathered those who had believed and accused them of being both illegitimate and children of the Devil? In response, this group of men turned violent and tried to kill him.
The speaker was, of course, Jesus and the ‘believers’ were religious Jews. To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, ‘If you hold to my teaching you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free’ (John 8.31-32).
Carbon-free Christianity?
James Hindson
Date posted: 1 Feb 2009
While enjoying much of what Paul Helm had to say in his recent article on global warming (EN, November 2008), I would like to challenge a number of points he appeared to be making.
Pastor Cool
Michael McKinley
Date posted: 1 Feb 2009
Show me a grown man with a goatee and I’ll show you a major league baseball player. Show me a grown man with a goatee wearing sandals and I’ll show you a youth pastor.
When I was a kid, I remember that the youth pastor at our church was totally different to any other pastor I’d ever seen. He quoted rock bands and wore blue jeans to church. He was cool in a way that the other adults in my life were not. I was proud to invite my friends to church and see their negative stereotypes of Christians get blown up. The youth group thrived and ‘unchurched’ kids were reached. The one thing that distinguished our group from others was that our pastor was cool.
Training: who pays?
Mark Barnes
Date posted: 1 Feb 2009
It costs £5.7 million to train a fast jet RAF pilot, and almost £250,000 to train a doctor or dentist. Financial consultants KPMG spend £92,000 training a graduate. It even costs up to £30,000 to train a guide dog for the blind. On the other hand, a typical Bible college receives just £13,500 for two to three years full-time training.
As will become clear when we investigate costs later in this piece, an obvious question arises. How does it cost less to train a man for the pastoral ministry over three years than it does to train a dog for a little over a year-and-a-half? And how do you train a pastor, missionary or evangelist for a twentieth of what it costs to train a doctor?
The mission of God
Mission is not just one of a list of things that the Bible happens to talk about. Mission is, in that much-abused phrase, ‘what it’s all about’.
Now this is a bold claim. Does it make sense to speak of the Bible being ‘all about’ anything? Well, Jesus certainly thought so. In Luke 24, first to the two on the road to Emmaus, and then later to the rest of the disciples, Jesus made himself as Messiah the focus of the whole canon of the Hebrew Scriptures (verses 27 and 44).
Call of the Wild West!
James McMaster
Date posted: 1 Nov 2008
Greetings from here in Co. Mayo in the Wild West of Ireland!
In Acts 16 we read of the Apostle Paul and his entourage seeking to enter Bithynia but being forbidden by the Holy Spirit. Finally they reached Troas where Paul has a vision of a man pleading with him: ‘Come over to Macedonia to help us’. This call changed history by changing the direction of the gospel from moving north into Asia, to moving west into Europe.
Messiah: Jesus, the evidence of history
It is a secure fact of history that after the Romans crucified Jesus of Nazareth circa AD 33, his followers met weekly to worship him as Lord.
Pliny, governor of the Roman Black Sea province of Bithynia, reported to the emperor Trajan early in the second century that the Christians met on a ‘fixed day of the week’ and chanted hymns to Christ ‘as if to a god’ (Epistles 10.96). Pliny’s friend the historian Tacitus, governor of the adjoining province of Asia, wrote that Pontius Pilate had executed Christ during the reign of the emperor Tiberius.
Deeper Paul
James Muldoon
Date posted: 1 Jan 2009
Book Review
A BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF PAUL
The man, his mission and his message
Read review
Secular Shelf Life
Shelf life: Looking at secular books
Sarah Allen
Date posted: 1 Jan 2009
Daniel Everett travelled to the banks of an Amazon tributary as an SIL (Wycliffe Bible Translators) missionary in 1977. 30 years later he is still studying their language, but not as a Bible translator, instead he is an academic researcher. Everett’s time with the Piraha tribe has led to a revolution in linguistics and a personal revolution in his own life — he lost his faith and with it his family.
The Third Degree
FREE - launched
Pod Bhogal
Date posted: 1 Dec 2008
The FREE gospel project was officially launched this September at UCCF’s national conference for Christian Union leaders, Forum. Almost 1,000 delegates, staff, volunteers were the first to hold copies of the 400,000 freshly designed copies of Mark’s Gospel set to be distributed to campuses in Great Britain in February 2009.
Since then it has been a fantastic privilege to observe the enthusiasm, commitment and excitement with which the project has been embraced by Christian Unions.
Back to Bongo Bongo land?
At the end of December, the noted gay journalist Matthew Parris published an article in The Times, which encouraged many Christians but simultaneously left us sad for him.
It was titled ‘As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God’. Parris was brought up in what today is Malawi and he returned there recently in connection with the charity Pump Aid. It caused him to reflect on the impact of Christianity. Here is some of what he wrote: ‘In Africa Christianity changes people’s hearts… We had friends who were missionaries and as a child I often stayed with them… In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them… They stood tall.