Language Is Not the Only Issue

Steve Ham, who heads up the AiG Worldwide outreach, wrote this important blog post that relates to the United Kingdom:

Many times when English-speaking people consider global gospel ministry, they are thinking about foreign languages and translation. At times this can result in a lack of consideration for other countries that speak our same language. Yet these countries are also in desperate need for the defense of the gospel message, such as AiG is proclaiming. One of the most desperate situations for the gospel message is found in the country that has the namesake of the language many of us speak: England.

England specifically has a population of over 50 million people. In the land of Charles Spurgeon, John Owen, John Bunyan, Martin Lloyd Jones, and other great names in church history, the rapid decline in Christian influence has seen church attendance in England drop to below six percent of the population. There has also been a rise in atheism, and with media that is increasingly hostile toward Christianity, more and more people are seeing believers who know Christ as the only way of salvation as being overly intolerant. This scene in England also portrays much of the UK—there is a real hostility to biblical Christianity. The United Kingdom needs Jesus.

Did you know that Answers in Genesis actually has an office in the UK? Many of the AiG—U.S. team have traveled to the UK to encourage and support our brothers and sisters in the UK office, and we have noticed that the fundamental belief systems of evolution and millions of years have been a major contributing factor to the decline in UK church attendance (and in no small way this is also happening in the USA). As many churches have adopted the secular beliefs of millions of years and evolution, many people have also seen the great disconnect between the foundational history revealed in Genesis and its relevance to the authority of Scripture and the gospel of Christ.

While atheists such as Richard Dawkins are accusing Christians of not having real answers for our world, many Christian leaders in the UK are embracing the foundations of Dawkins’s atheistic religion and attempting to fit it into the pages of the revealed Word of God. If the church understood that observational science confirms the literal biblical history in Genesis, the ripe ground in the UK is ready for confident evangelism that helps people to know that the Bible is reliable and the gospel of Jesus Christ is certain hope of Salvation.

Please pray for the folks in our UK office, and please pray as I travel to the UK very soon to encourage and support our brothers and sisters in that place. Pray for our meetings, and please pray that the Lord would guide us to be a light in a dark culture.

In Christ,

Steve Ham, Senior Director

Worldwide Outreach

(http://blogs.answersingenesis.org/blogs/worldwide/2012/11/02/language-is-not-the-only-issue/)

Ken