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Polly Standring shares the remarkable story of global evangelical mission agency Crosslinks, which is now celebrating its centenary.

Crosslinks exists to help people get involved in God’s mission. 27 October 2022 marks our 100th birthday – that’s a century of taking God’s word to God’s world! What God has done through the 1,420 men and women sent out by Crosslinks over the last century is remarkable.

Karen Soole

Date posted: 1 Nov 2022

Vast swathes of our country do not know the gospel – we know that. The Bible Society report ‘Pass It On’ in 2014 showed that 54% of parents thought the Hunger Games plot could be in the Bible , and there is no reason to think things have improved.

Many share the atheism of public figures such as Ricky Gervais, who proclaims loudly – there is no God. His message is clear – you can be religious, live as you like, but none of it is real – there are no spiritual realities. These situations are not new. Ignorance and unbelief have existed from generation to generation. However, we are facing new expressions of unbelief as the culture wars impact the church.

Rebecca Chapman speaks to Krish Kandiah.

Dr Kandiah (see photo) is a social entrepreneur with a vision to help solve some of society’s seemingly intractable problems through building partnerships across civil society, faith communities, government, and philanthropy.

The 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference, widely known as COP27, has just been running in Egypt. In a timely new book*  Dave Gobbett of Highfields Church Cardiff helps us think through a Biblical perspective on the environment. This extract explains how Jesus’ return might impact our thinking on this issue.

‘We believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him … The Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever’ (1 Thess. 4:14, 16).

The Circle of Silence is made up of nine states in Mexico. It is an area where only 1% of people – or fewer – have heard the gospel, even though there are major universities and cities.

David and Maribel Easton and their two children, from Thornton Heath Evangelical Church, are planning to travel to the area as mission partners with SIM – an international, interdenominational evangelical Christian mission organisation. They prayerfully plan to plant churches that are faithful to God’s word. Here, they share their story with en.

In Johannesburg, where I used to live, electricity supply was not always that predictable. Sadly, it was far worse in the poorer rural areas, where many (even today) have no access to the national power grid.

When I ministered in South Africa, I knew of a missionary who moved to work amongst such people. When he arrived, he immediately decided to live like the locals. He moved into a very poorly constructed house and lived without any electricity and water. At first, I thought this all sounded very noble. It certainly fitted with some of my stereotypes about ‘mission work’. But all the locals he worked amongst thought it was an extremely odd decision.

It’s been 17 years since I last lived in the UK.

My wife and I have been serving as mission partners in Southern Africa, first in Lesotho and then in Namibia. Cathy and I left the UK in January 2005 with an eight-month-old son. We arrived back at the end of 2021 with three teenage children. I was in my 30s when we left – I’m now in my 50s. I left local church ministry here for theological education in Africa. When we set off, Tony Blair was the Prime Minister, our mobile phone (we only had one) looked like a small black brick and dial-up internet connection was all the rage. It was a pre-Brexit, pre-Covid-19 world. The UK has changed a lot whilst we’ve been away and so have we.

Jason Roach

1. How did you become a Christian?

Across England, Scotland, Wales and in Northern Ireland, thousands of Christians from hundreds of churches are gathering and preparing for a focused month of mission called ‘Life’ in March 2022. Operations leader Le Fras Strydom writes:

Under the banner of A Passion for Life, over 650 churches are now involved – and more are joining each week. From Brighton to Belfast and Edinburgh to Eastbourne, hundreds of churches up and down the UK and Ireland are already using A Passion For Life’s personal evangelism training resources to get equipped, enthused and excited in preparation for the month of mission and a lifetime of evangelism beyond.

I’ll never be one of the ‘Blokes Worth Watching’ (BWW) nor will many of my friends that don’t fit.

I love leadership and evangelism. I want to invest precious years into mission and the future of the church, so I’m wondering how do I become one of the BWWs [as described in this article in last month's EN] ? How do I get mentored? How do I get invested in so that I can make a significant difference? The problem is, I can’t. I’m a woman. I’ll never be a ‘Bloke Worth Watching’ and neither will half of those made in the image of God.

Andy Mason

Date posted: 1 Aug 2022

What is the state of conservative evangelicalism? Glen Scrivener has given us a challenging answer in his article in the July 2022 issue of en, ‘BWWs: the “Blokes Worth Watching” conveyor belt…’

His article is a strong critique, essentially arguing that we evangelicals are in something of a spiritual crisis. The strength of its criticisms invites a rejoinder. As a fellow pastor, I know Glen and have worked with him. He is a wonderful evangelist, a man of integrity and a very gifted preacher. Most importantly, he loves Jesus and cares for the abused. I think, though, there are some real problems with Glen’s take on our churches.

Jonathan Lamb

1. How did you become a Christian?

Glen Scrivener

Date posted: 1 Jul 2022

In their 2009 book, The Trellis and the Vine, Colin Marshall and Tony Payne gave us the evocative image of supporting structures (the trellis) surrounding the organic growth of God’s people (the vine).

Their argument was: both are needed. Here my brief is to write about evangelical churches in Britain. And as I consider this movement of churches that I love, I can’t help thinking we have a wonderful vine and, at points, a wonky trellis. That trellis – our systems and the assumptions behind them – needs urgent scrutiny.

Rebecca Chapman

Date posted: 1 Aug 2022

As final preparations for this summer’s Keswick Convention were being made, en spoke to its Ministry Director, the Revd Dr James Robson.

With the much-awaited Keswick Convention of 2022 almost upon us, James joined us on Zoom, from a light-filled room full of books. With all that is happening at Keswick, including the Derwent Project, there was certainly no shortage of things to be grateful to God for…

A new book to be published in June by IVP called God’s Church for God’s World brings together voices drawn from all major Anglican evangelical networks in the UK, demonstrating a commitment to the gospel being proclaimed and a unity both throughout and beyond the Church of England.

With a number of young contributors, it also offers a glimpse of possible futures for the Anglican Church. This extract (with some very minor adaptations for publication here) not only summarises the book’s contents but also gives a flavour of the situation Anglican evangelicals face – a useful overview both for them and also for non-Anglicans to whom the whole Anglican ‘thing’ can sometimes seem understandably perplexing and exasperating.

Jason Roach

Date posted: 1 Jul 2022

I slipped in at the back of the church. In front of me was a family with an eight-year-old girl sitting nervously next to her dad. She looked even more agitated when a man that she didn’t know sat next to her in one of the few seats left.

Her dad saw her nervousness, put his arm around her and said: ‘Don’t worry. Let me tell you a story about this man. Ten years ago, I was new to this country. I walked into this church for the first time not knowing anyone. This guy walked across from the other side of the church and made me feel like family.’

This year marks the 300th birthday of John Brown of Haddington.

In 1722, Brown was born into a poor Christian family in Scotland. As a young teenager, he found himself an orphan after an illness claimed the lives of his parents. Soon after, he found himself quite sick as well. Brown wrote this in his memoirs, ‘Four fevers on end brought me so low within a few months of my mother’s death, as made almost every onlooker lose all hopes of my recovery.’

As we consider our future as evangelicals, we should return to the commission the Lord Jesus gave before His ascension: ‘But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth’ (Acts 1:8).

Sharing our faith is core to our identity as followers of Jesus Christ, and Christians sharing their faith with others has been used by God to underpin the growth of the global church – despite heresy, persecution and scorn, the gospel prevails!

An ancient Chinese proverb reminds us that ‘to prophesy is extremely difficult, especially with regard to the future’.

This is certainly the case as we try to anticipate the future of evangelicalism, and is heightened still further by the fact that we live in a context of considerable social and political volatility, confront a rising and more aggressive secularism, and live within communities with growing non-Christian religious affiliation. But most of all, humility is called for because of the most significant reality of all – God’s sovereign engagement in the life of the church and in the realities of our world. In the midst of so many unknowns, we trust His good purposes.

Geoff Thomas

My name is Geoff Thomas and I was the pastor in Alfred Place Baptist Church (Independent) in Aberystwyth for 50 years. I retired five years ago. My wife Iola died after having Alzheimers for four years. Two years after Iola’s death I married our old friend Barbara and came to live in Chiswick, London. For someone who loves history, London is a most interesting place for an old man, though I do miss the seaside and friends in Aberystwyth. There are many gospel churches in London and it is surprisingly religious. I am a member of Amyand Park Chapel in Twickenham and thank God for the congregation and its pastor, Gerard Hemmings.

Iain Taylor

Date posted: 1 Feb 2022

Eighty years ago what is now an unremarkable industrial estate outside Swindon was a hive of activity. Scores of Supermarine Spitfires rolled off the production lines at the South Marston works in the fight to rid the world of Adolf Hitler.

Today a small part of the same site is, its occupiers claim, busily embroiled in the vital spiritual struggle to send to pastors across the developing world the books they need to teach the gospel accurately to their flocks.

Michael Reeves

Date posted: 1 Apr 2022

The New Testament has a good deal to say about the importance of being gospel people.

Paul’s letter to the Romans, for example, is a New Testament book all about the gospel and about being gospel people. In the first 11 chapters, Paul lays out the ‘gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy Scriptures’ (1:1–2). It is good news ‘concerning his Son’ (1:3), the Last Adam (5:12–21), our only hope. And it is good news concerning ‘the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood’ (3:24–25). In Romans, we read that: ‘None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless;’ (3:10–12).

In my day-to-day interactions, it is rare to find women discussing theology, ecclesiology, the state of the current evangelical church, missions, or really anything vital to the well-being of the church.

Our conversations revolve mainly around two subjects: our children – how we will educate them, what they are eating, if they are sleeping, and our husbands and their jobs. If we are in a close and healthy group, we may intermittently discuss our walk with Christ, spiritual growth, or struggles. But, at least in my experience, those are few – and even in them, true theological discussions are highly uncommon.

Frank Schaeffer (not to be confused with his father Francis) titled his memoir Crazy for God with the helpful subtitle How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back.

His writing is engaging and thought-provoking, especially for myself as a Christian father and pastor. His father, Francis Schaeffer, was a much-beloved Christian thinker who utilised contemporary music, art history, and philosophy to answer the questions of his day. He was truly countercultural in the way he wrote and lived.