Churches are being encouraged to embrace cross-cultural mission on their own doorstep by building relationships with people of different backgrounds and generations who may have little or no contact with Christianity.
Experienced practitioners in overseas and UK community-based mission shared their advice for effective engagement during a panel discussion at the Church Resources Exhibition 2026.
Sharing your faith: practical tips for evangelism
Sharing your faith, or evangelising, is not always an easy experience. For those of us who are not naturally extroverted or confident in public speaking, talking about our faith with people close to us, let alone complete strangers, can be nerve-wracking.
Nonetheless, sharing the gospel is something all Christians have been called to participate in through the Great Commission (Matthew 28:19-20), regardless of our personality, intellectual knowledge or position within the church.
As someone who regularly participates in street evangelism and teaches the Bible to young people, I have learnt a few lessons along the way. Here are some practical tips that may help you grow in confidence and approach evangelism with greater love, wisdom and faith.
Radical Hospitality: How Grace Should Shape Your Table
Here’s what I’m learning: The table is one of the most powerful tools we have for proclaiming the gospel. Not because we preach sermons over dinner. Not because we turn every meal into an evangelistic event. But because the act of sharing a table with someone says, You matter. You’re seen. You belong.
In a world that is increasingly divided, isolated, and lonely, the simple act of inviting someone different from you to your table is radical. It’s countercultural. It’s a tangible expression of the grace of God.
And when we invite people who can’t repay us, people who might make things a little messy or uncomfortable, we’re not just being nice; we’re participating in the upside-down kingdom of God. We’re saying, “This is what grace looks like. This is what it means to belong to a community shaped not by status or obligation but by love.”
Ordinary Church? That’s Okay. We Serve an Extraordinary God
We live in a society that wants to be wowed. People want to be amazed. They crave the extraordinary, turning their noses up at the mundane. There is little to no appreciation for ordinary things. In the area of our Christian faith, therefore, we want God to do amazing things—all the time. For example, every time the gospel is preached we expect the multitudes to repent of their sins; we anticipate lives turned upside down, drastically changed; and we’re annoyed when people don’t suddenly sacrifice everything for the sake of following Christ. If I’m honest, that’s what I desire Sunday-to-Sunday. We want the extraordinary. The exceptional.
But often God works in the ordinary ways of life. Therefore we mustn’t miss the ordinary things that God provides to help us grow and progress in our faith. Just think of Paul’s analogy in 2 Timothy 2:6, where he likens pastoral work to the labour of farming. I think we should be more like farmers in our own faith. We plant. We cultivate. Then we wait for the harvest. But as we wait we know that these things take time. You can’t plant today and expect to harvest tomorrow. With that analogy in mind, below I exhort readers to remember that ordinary churches doing ordinary things nevertheless serve an extraordinary Saviour.
Vatican calls for renewed evangelization with the publication of Venite ad me as inherited Christianity falters
The Vatican’s doctrinal office has called for a reordering of pastoral ministry around the proclamation of Jesus Christ, warning that churches can no longer assume baptism, childhood instruction and family tradition will produce believing adults.
Also See: New Vatican document cautions against ‘triumphalism’ over rise in baptismsGrowing number of ‘Lutherpalian’ churches blend two traditions in unified congregations
Barb Bowers and Sue Sachs are both longtime residents of this college town in the center of the state. And both are active in their church, Beloved Community, on the east end of Stevens Point. On a recent Sunday morning before the congregation’s 8:15 a.m. service, both were in the church’s kitchen area assembling finger food for post-worship coffee hour.
What may set the two women apart are their denominational roots — Bowers comes from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, while Sachs is Episcopalian — yet they and their congregation now blend both traditions. The former Redeemer Lutheran Church and the former Intercession Episcopal Church joined in October 2024 to become one Beloved Community. The congregation is officially Episcopal and Lutheran, part of both the Episcopal Diocese of Wisconsin and the ELCA’s East Central Synod of Wisconsin.
The merger of Episcopal and Evangelical Lutheran congregations and the sharing of clergy by Episcopal and Evangelical Lutheran congregations are further evidence of the decline in vocations and church attendance in both denominations It is also evidence of the Episcopal Church's abandonment of a longstanding Anglican doctrinal view of the eucharistic presence.When Politics Becomes an Idol: Five Warning Signs for Christians
As another election approaches, political passions are running high. Campaign ads fill our screens, candidates make their promises, and Americans prepare to cast their votes. For Christians, these elections matter. Political decisions affect our families, communities, religious freedoms, and neighbors. We should care about these things. But there is a difference between caring deeply about politics and allowing politics to become an idol.
An idol is anything that takes a place in our hearts that belongs to God alone. And politics, like anything else, can quietly become an object of misplaced worship.
So how can we recognize when our political convictions have become political idolatry? Here are five warning signs.
Roman love
Popular mythology holds that a tolerant and affirmative view of human sexuality prevailed in classical Antiquity until it was crushed by puritanical and repressive Christianity. I passively accepted this view until I read Kyle Harper’s celebrated book, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity. Harper shows that, although the standard picture is not entirely wrong, it is so incomplete as to be fundamentally misleading.
It is true that Roman sexual norms were permissive in some ways. In particular, it was entirely permitted for free Roman men to have sex with male and female slaves and prostitutes, including children. No norm of male fidelity existed: male extramarital sex was not merely tolerated in practice but was generally considered completely acceptable as a matter of principle, even if wives found it hurtful. Many men had a general preference for boys or for women, but such preferences were merely personal taste, not a defining identity; most men seem to have been what we would call bisexual. Although only a small minority of Romans owned slaves, the prostitution of slaves was widespread, so coerced sex was ubiquitous. The price of sex in the Roman Empire was about that of a loaf of bread.
The conservatism of Beatrix Potter
There is a type of academic who can only get noticed by attacking the legacies of greater men and women, and a prime example was cited by Matthew Dennison in The Spectator in his essay “Don’t Cancel Beatrix Potter.” The beloved children’s author has become the target of “specialist in postcolonial literature” Dr. Emily Zobel Marshall, who hilariously claims that Potter failed “to acknowledge her indebtedness to an oral storytelling tradition of enslaved Africans working on American plantations” and that this contributes to “a damaging and recurring appropriation of Black cultural forms that continues today.”
This is frivolous stuff, and Marshall’s claims are a parasitic attempt to gain fifteen minutes of fame by slandering a woman who cannot defend herself. Dennison handily rebuts Marshall, and I’m glad he did—but I can’t help but think that fortunately, some writers are uncancellable. Potter’s books have sold 250 million copies. Her legacy is just fine. Her characters will continue to be household names for countless children, while Dr. Whatserface will have to find a new target if she wants to trigger further discussion of her own work. People who take these accusations seriously should not be taken seriously.
I do, however, think that a study of Potter’s life has something to contribute to current cultural conversations—not in “postcolonial literature studies,” but in the discussions unfolding in traditionalist circles on how to respond to our civilizational moment, in which many things appear to be ending.
Holy Claude! When AI Comes to Church + Jay Y. Kim
What do we lose when our churches become another space for optimizing efficiency?
AI and the expendability of humans
The explosion of AI has been matched by a rising dread: That machines will take our jobs and render human beings obsolete in the workforce.
More than half of Americans fear AI could cost them or someone in their household a job, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll. Meanwhile, many religious leaders have expressed concerns about AI sapping humans of their sense of purpose.
These fears point to something deeply troubling. They reveal what our society actually believes, at a bedrock level, about why human beings deserve to exist.
A Christian’s Guide to AI
Those who use AI widely and those who reject it entirely are both under obligation to think about it well. Thankfully, we are quickly being resourced with helpful books that can guide us. The latest of these is Pete Killingley’s A Christian’s Guide to AI: 12 Biblical Answers to the Questions We’re All Asking.
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