CROSSLINKS
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‘For the word of God and the testimony of Jesus’ (Rev 1:9)
This was the cause for which John was on the island of Patmos. It is also the theme associated with the founding of the Bible Churchmen’s Missionary Society in 1922, at a time when liberal views were greatly influencing evangelicalism. Though our name has changed to Crosslinks, we still see ourselves as following in the footsteps of our forbears, adopting the evangelical convictions of Charles Simeon and others. Crosslinks trustees and members regularly re-affirm their assent to our Basis of Faith.
Coming from this background, it is not surprising that the proclamation and teaching of God’s word to God’s world has been central to all we do. There are surprises though. Whilst we are a recognised agency of the Anglican Communion, where our principal sphere of operations is, we have always worked cross-denominationally. For example, we work with other evangelicals for biblical reformation within the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. We are also committed to the primacy of the local church in God’s economy. As a para-church agency, we are the servant of local churches, seeking to enable them to be faithful stakeholders in God’s worldwide mission, rather than asking them to support us as we do mission on their behalf.
In enabling local churches, Anglican evangelical and others, to engage in God’s global mission, we seek to adhere to two biblical priorities: seizing evangelistic opportunities to reach the unreached and training trainers, by nurturing competent, godly pastor teachers.
One recent initiative which exemplifies the above is that, alongside others, we are seeking to develop what we call Schools of Biblical Training: facilitating teams to train local ministers in faithful Bible exposition. We have been doing this in Myanmar for the last 3 years and are hugely encouraged at the hunger displayed. This seems to have touched a nerve in that requests for such training are mushrooming all over the world. We are also working at materials to help churches develop their mission strategies, both locally and further afield.
All the above goes to show that in Crosslinks we see Christian unity fundamentally as gospel unity. We are therefore hugely encouraged at the initiative represented by Affinity to form a network of gospel unity across the denominations. We look forward to participating actively, especially in the area of International Co-operation.
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