Anglicans Pack More than Shoeboxes at Christmas

Senegalese children receive gifts from Samaritan’s Purse. These would be the only possessions many of the children could call their own.      (Photo: Karen Stiller)

BY Karen Stiller

TUCKED AWAY on a narrow side street of Dakar, a barred door opens into a courtyard. Laundry is strung across the open space, drying under the hotter-than-hot sun, mostly t-shirts of the boys who sprawl on mats in the corner watching old cartoons on an even older television.

What appears to be a high-stakes game of UNO unfolds around a card table near a scratched and faded ping-pong table.

This is a boy’s shelter run by a Christian couple in the predominantly Muslim nation

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Gathering at the Marketplace

Josh Wilton (below) believes Marketplace has flourished because it meets an unmet need in providing a safe place for Christians and others to meet and discuss work-related issues.

(Photos: Doug Kelk)

By Doug Kelk

THERE IS A BUZZ in the air as business people and public servants working in downtown Victoria arrive and mingle at the Marketplace Gathering lunch at Church of Our Lord. Inside the community centre adjoining Victoria’s stately old wooden church, a woman loads her plate with fresh vegetables and a ham and cheese wrap. She scans the room of about 45 people, seated at small tables, looking for

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Street Hope Whitehorse

Bishop Terry Buckle is second from left. The Street Hope Team stands in front of the Old Rectory.
(Supplied photo)

By Sue Careless

THREE YEARS AGO, as he sat working at his desk in Whitehorse, the Archbishop of British Columbia and the Yukon could see through his window people on the streets “coming and going, busy with life and business in the downtown area. My thoughts and my heart’s desire were to see a gospel ministry out there where the people were.”

But provincial and diocesan matters and all the paperwork

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Finding God in the Black Hole: Depression

Photo: Sue Careless  (Inset: www.Dreamstime.com)

By Allyson Eamer

CHRISTIANS HAVE TENDED to avoid speaking openly about depression.  It’s not a word that has fit comfortably within the Christian lexicon.  We’re acquainted, through Scripture, with downcast, weary, faint-hearted, despairing and distressed. We can cope with discouraged, troubled

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Two Churches Reach Out to the Depressed

Allyson Eamer (Supplied photo)

By Allyson Eamer

THE JOHN HOPKINS Health Alerts Newsletter recently described studies which suggest that when it comes to combating depression, people with a set of regular spiritual practices and beliefs have an advantage over those who don’t. (1) This further underscores the mandate for church leaders to provide godly support and resources to parishioners with depression. As Paul Scuse, an Individual, Marriage and Family therapist, puts it:

Scripture tells us that God reaches out to us and loves us, even as we are experiencing depression.  God may also bring into our life

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