Next Wednesday, June 19th, is the final session in our online course on Evangelism and PastorJohn MacKinnon will be back for a return visit, this time speaking about Jesus the Evangelist. John is on the pastoral team at Calderwood Baptist Church in East Kilbride, and is Director of Evangelism at The Word One to One. He brings many years of experience in this field to his input to the course and has an infectious enthusiasm for sharing the gospel.
The session runs from 11.00am – 1.00pm, on zoom, and you can sign up here. Registration is essential, as is payment in advance, and the cost is just £20.
There are just two more sessions in our online series on evangelism and the subject for this week is Evangelistic Preaching. Our speaker is Rev Dr Sandy Roger who has a wealth of experience in this area and whose ministry and input is always greatly appreciated.
This session is on Wednesday 12th June and runs from 11.00am – 1.00pm on zoom. You can register for just this one session or also for the remaining one in the series. Registration is essential, as is payment in advance, and you can sign up here. The cost is £20 per session.
The next in our online series on evangelism is the all-important subject of Children’s Evangelism. Leading this session will be Simon Snodgrass who, with his wife Hannah, is on the staff of Child Evangelism Fellowship and is based in Scotland.
This session is on Wednesday 5th June and runs from 11.00am – 1.00pm on zoom. You can register for just this one session or for others in the series. Registration is essential, as is payment in advance, and you can sign up here. The cost is £20 per session.
In our continuing online series on evangelism, we are looking forward to input next week from Pastor Craig Dyer. Now Pastor of Hamilton Baptist Church in Lanarkshire, Craig served for many years as Training Director with Christianity Explored and brings a wealth of experience to this session on Making a Church an Evangelistic Church.
This session is on Wednesday 29th May and runs from 11.00am – 1.00pm on zoom. You can register for just this one session or for others in the series. Registration is essential, as is payment in advance, and you can sign up here. The cost is £20 per session.
The next session in our online series on Evangelism is on Wednesday 22nd May and runs from 11.00am – 1.00pm on zoom. You can register for just this one session or for others in the series. Registration is essential, as is payment in advance, and you can sign up here. The cost is £20 per session.
Martin Povey will be addressing the subject of Evangelism That Understands Today’s Culture.
Martin became a Christian aged eight but was up and down in his faith for many years. In his early 20s he started to grasp God’s awesome holiness and enormous grace in Jesus and was compelled to share the Gospel! He completed an MA in Evangelism Studies before spending nine years with UCCF and Bishop Hannington Church. Martin now travels throughout the UK with two aims: to equip Christians to communicate and defend the Gospel naturally; and to help those who don’t yet know Jesus hear the life-transforming Good News. He speaks at church, university, and FE college mission weeks/events and loves interacting with people’s objections to Christianity – be it at a Café Night or over a burger at McDonald’s! He’s married to his lovely Essex wife Claire and have two kids
Next up in our online series on evangelism is the inimitable Vinny Commons. Vinny is based in Southport, Merseyside and was converted as a student in November 1979. Since then, he has travelled extensively preaching the gospel to all ages with a particular strength in young people’s work. He has a sports background, playing football to a high level, which he left to concentrate his energies on gospel work. He is a leader with United Beach Missions and was on the staff of Young Life as their North-West worker for many years. We know of no-one more effective in the challenging work of open-air evangelism.
The session is on Wednesday 15th May and runs from 11.00am – 1.00pm on zoom. You can register for just this one session or for others in the series. Registration is essential, as is payment in advance, and you can sign up here. The cost is £20 per session.
In the earlier post about the Polish School for Preachers, Pastor Ben Layer made mention in his video of the online ministry of The Gospel in the Centre. We warmly commend this ministry to you and thought you might be interested in this article written by the European Mission Fellowship back in 2021 and taken from their website.
Just over one year ago a website was launched by the leaders of the evangelical church in Siedlce, Poland – Ben Layer (American missionary), Jan Stefanoff (church elder) and Adam Urban (EMF missionary). Its purpose is to supply trustworthy biblical teaching in the Polish language which exalts the glory and grace of God and equips the church for Christian discipleship and gospel outreach.
These are the three main people invovled in the project – Jan Stefanoff (left), Adam Urban (middle), and Ben Layer (right)
So why is such a resource required? Well, Christians in Poland are in great need. In a country of 38 million people, there are fewer than 600 evangelical churches, the majority of which tend to be decidedly charismatic, and there are very few trustworthy resources available to help the church. This means that there is an ongoing susceptibility of Christians falling prey to the prosperity gospel, the word of faith movement and other forms of shallow, unhealthy theology. Put simply, in Poland there is an enormous need for theologically sound and culturally relevant materials and resources.
The website contains articles from Charles Spurgeon, AW Pink, Mark Dever, DA Carson, John Piper, Paul Tripp, Kevin DeYoung, Stephen Nichols, David Mathis, Thomas Schreiner, and others, with every resource translated into the Polish language. The two largest video curricula are “The God Who is There” by DA Carson and “9 Marks of a Healthy Church.” Two weekly podcasts are also being published – “Ask Pastor John” and “New Morning Mercies” by Paul Tripp. Desiring God, Crossway, and 9Marks ministries have offered lots of support enabling nearly 100 articles to be published in Polish.
In total, since February 2020, 215 different resources have been published with new content coming out on average four times a week. We now have almost 2,500 followers on Facebook and over 15,600 people used the website in its first year!
The feedback being received is also very encouraging. Here is one recent example:
“Thankyou for the effort and work in creating the gospel in the centre website. I’m not fluent in English myself so reading these edifying articles in Polish is a great joy for me. I know that this is a lot of work, so I just wanted to say thank you…”
It is clear that God has richly blessed this initiative since its commencement, and we are excited to see what is in store for the future. One of the next major developments will be adding Polish authors who are faithful Bible teachers to the American and British authors already on the website.
At the end of June, EBC’s Principal, Pastor John Brand, will be in Warsaw, Poland, for an exciting and strategic new venture. The Polish School For Preachers is the result of the vision and burden of Polish EBC Graduate, Pastor Adam Urban. Working with Adam and other national church leaders, John will be leading a three day conference which is the beginning of a three year training programme for Polish preachers and Bible teachers.
The current plan is that this event will be the first of three such annual gatherings, and in the intervening weeks and months there will be online seminars and individual mentoring.
Poland has a population of 37.5 million but there are only about 700 evangelical churches and roughly 60,000 evangelical believers – that’s just 0.17% of the population – with about the same number of liberal Lutherans. The need for strong Bible churches led by gifted and trained preachers is immense and we are privileged to play even a small part in meeting that need.
Listen to Pastor Ben Layer of the Evangelical Church in Siedlce, Poland, where Adam Urban also serves as he explains the need for this ministry and its potential fruit for the Church in Poland.
https://youtu.be/evc6Wo_LEVo?si=1Mpw4Z5T1K73Ip_S
This first training conference takes place on Thursday – Saturday, 27th – 29th June, at Zagorna 10 Evangelical Church in Warsaw where John has had the privilege of speaking in the past and we greatly value the prayers of God’s people that this venture would be mightily blessed by him for the growth of the church in Poland. Please pray for Adam and his team in Poland as they make all the arrangements at their end and for John as he is currently busy writing the course material.
