Many refugees coming to Christ
Disillusioned by the horror perpetrated by followers of Islam, Muslim refugees in Switzerland and Germany are converting to Christianity at a dramatic rate after experiencing the love of Christ and hearing the truth of the Gospel, said Switzerland's Counselling Centre for Integration and Religious Affairs. 2,000+ Muslims have turned to Christ since 2014, and the number keeps rising. Recently it’s mainly Afghans and Kurds who have converted. One reason why refugees embrace Christianity is that they have witnessed brutal extremist groups carrying out horrific acts in the name of Allah.
Dementia: Living in the Memories of God
The Michael Ramsey Prize, which is sponsored by the Lambeth Trust and administered by SPCK, was inaugurated in 2005 to encourage the most promising contemporary theological writing and to identify it for a wider Christian readership. This year the prize was awarded to John Swinton's Dementia: Living in the Memories of God at a ceremony at the Greenbelt festival. The Archbishop said, ‘It is a cross-disciplinary book that goes straight to the heart of tackling one of the most profound failures of our society - the failure to value people in other than economic terms and to see the dignity of the human person.’ The book is challenging, with a coherent theological approach and a clinical understanding. Dementia is one of the great issues of our society and Justin said, ‘He has done the church and our country a huge service.’
Muslims and the media
A Muslim family were accused of being terrorists on their trip to Skegness. They won't be returning: they said, ‘It didn’t really bother us until a man shouted “terrorists”.’ A survey found a 326% rise in anti-Muslim hate crime last year. Is the media responsible for this rise in Islamophobia? The press regulator, IPSO, judged the Daily Star Sunday’s headline, ‘UK mosques fundraising for terror’ to be ‘significantly misleading’ - the mosques were not involved in any way. A week earlier The Sun was forced to acknowledge that its headline ‘1 in 5 Brit Muslims sympathy for jihadists’ was similarly misleading. The Times claimed Muslims were ‘silent on terror’. This allegation was unequivocally rebuffed by Theresa May and senior counter-terror officers. See:
Parents’ concerns about school
TLG, a Christian education charity, reports that almost one in four parents are concerned about their child's progress in school as they return after the summer break. TLG polled 1,000 parents and found that 23% were most concerned about their child making the right progress. The main concerns were about their child being bullied, feeling unhappy at school and being exposed to inappropriate language, conduct or material. The concerns coincide with a decline in the overall proportion of children achieving A* to C in their GCSEs, (from 69% to 67%), and an increase in school exclusions. Pray for churches to do more to support parents who are concerned about their child's progress at school. Pray for the children needing appropriate resources for them at the local school. Home life has 80% of the influence on the child and school only 20%. Pray for parents to be encouraged to support their children more.
