My good friend, Dr. Lon Allison is the executive director of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College. We also teach together in the graduate school program in evangelism. Besides this Lon is the director for the Institute for Strategic Evangelism at Wheaton College and the co-publisher of Lausanne World Pulse, a helpful on-line publication. In the most recent issue of World Pulse Lon reflects on what God is doing in the world today. His comments are worth your consideration.

1. Through Alpha leaders Lon says that he had learned of a Chinese woman (PhD student) studying in the U.S. who agreed to attend an Alpha course even though she was an atheist. The student called her mother in China, after the first class, and told her what she had learned about Christianity. Five weeks later she called her mother again to discover that her mom had since become a Christian. The simple reporting of what she had learned about Christianity was passed […]

Almost every church that I speak at these days has a "vision statement" or something like it that is called a "mission statement." These statements are often the result of good work done by people who wrote them after spending considerable time and thinking in creating a carefully written short sentence or two. It appears to me that there are several reasons why churches write such statements. Sometimes it might be purely because of trends and/or expectations. I can recall, in the 1970s, when no one wrote such statements. Churches just did what they did and there was no serious discussion about why or how. Things were pretty simple back then. We had a flock, a pastor or two (if the church was quite large) and we conducted the various services and rituals of the Christian faith weekly and seasonally. Our community saw the church as an integral part of life in the town or city. We did not have to do a lot to keep people happy and involved. I came along, as a teen, in the early 1960s when the […]