Topic Archives: Church & Ministry

Rev. John Macpherson, former Free Church minister in Dornoch and London, and missionary in Peru, reflects on the influence of Bonar’s Memoir and Remains of Robert Murray M’Cheyne on his life and ministry. I had the inestimable privilege of being brought to faith in Christ while I was young, about 14-15 years of age. Although […]

Recently I read the large two volume official biography of John Stott written by Timothy Dudley-Smith. The books are interesting because of the account they give of many events, organisations and people in the British evangelical scene during the second half of the twentieth century. There is no doubting the huge impact Stott made in […]

The Act of Uniformity of 1662 prescribed that any minister in England who refused to conform to the Book of Common Prayer by 14th August 1662 would be ejected from the Church of England. Over 2,000 evangelical ministers left their livings rather than conform to what they saw as extra-Biblical rules and regulations. It was a sad […]

See, I have appointed you this day over the nations and over the kingdoms, to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant (Jeremiah 1:10). Why must we have prophetic preaching in our day? To answer this simply – because business as usual is not working. We […]

But if I say, ‘I will not remember Him or speak anymore in His name,’ then in my heart it becomes like a burning fire shut up in my bones; and I am weary of holding it in and I cannot endure it (Jeremiah 20:9). On Memorial Day, May 30, 1889 John Parke, the resident civil […]

. . . and as many as had been appointed to eternal life believed (Acts 13:48b). Without question the Scriptures teach the absolute sovereignty of God in salvation. That is – ‘[God] chose us in [Christ] before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him. In love He predestined us […]

In the December 2012 issue (No. 591) of The Banner of Truth magazine, Iain Murray asked the question, ‘Where are the Best Tracts?’ As indicated in the February 2013 issue (No. 593), we received some very helpful responses to his question, although not all were included in the magazine. A number of pastors said that they wrote […]

. . . they spent a long time there speaking boldly with reliance upon the Lord, who was testifying to the word of His grace (Acts 14:3). Upon Saul of Tarsus’ conversion on the road to Damascus, Ananias was commissioned by the resurrected Christ to go to this persecutor of Christians and to lay hands on […]

There is a place you can go in the world to learn about evangelism. It is a place unlike any other I have found, where the beauty of God’s creation and the darkness of humanity’s sinfulness stand in such stark contrast to each other. It is a place where evangelism is the focus of the […]

I am coming to you and will remove your lampstand out of its place – unless you repent (Revelation 2:5). The church at Ephesus (in the province of Asia Minor, modern day western Turkey) was established by the Apostle Paul on his third missionary journey (Acts19:1ff). Upon his arrival he found a few believers there, who […]

I solemnly charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus who is to judge the living and the dead, and by appearing and kingdom, preach the word (2 Timothy 4:1-2). Eschewing his privileged religious pedigree – having been circumcised the eighth day, of the nation of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a […]

The material below is dated in that it was published once before 13½ years ago, but also in that the always-trendy-but-always- behind kind of evangelism it describes continues in its evolution of outreach methods. A pleasant consequence of the publication of this article was that the author received a letter of appreciation from Dr John […]

To be casual today is usually regarded as a good thing; it is cool. To be ‘non-casual’ (stiff? formal? intense?) is not good. You need to chill. One of the first books I read as a Christian was The Best That I Can Be by J. Oswald Sanders. On the front cover is a photo […]

Dr. Haddon W. Robinson is the Harold John Ockenga Distinguished Professor of Preaching at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, South Hamilton, Massachusetts. He is considered the doyen of teachers on the subject of preaching in the USA, and his text books are used in many American seminaries. In a recent interview in the magazine Ministry he was asked the […]

Pavel Setchov, youth leader in Tobols I was born in 1978 in the south of Russia in an area known as the Caucasus, in the town of Zhelyeznovodsk. When I was only five years old my father left my mother to bring up three children on her own. He sometimes returned home aggressively abusive and […]