The best kind of mercy ministry is a healthy local church.

Here in Niddrie, we have found the following questions to be very helpful (from a local church perspective) when considering if and when we should receive outside ‘teams’ of young people who come to Niddrie Community Church for a 2 week ‘mission trip’. Obviously, they need to be contextualised to every situation, but they are more […]

Let me tell you a story about a pastor called John who lives in a small town in Scotland. You’ve never heard of him and you’ve never heard of his community. Where he lives unemployment is high, drug abuse is off the charts, and life is hard and short. John was saved about 10 years […]

Between my time church planting in Brazil and my work now in Edinburgh in one of Scotland’s most deprived housing schemes—a mixture of social housing and low-income homeowners—I have been on the receiving end of a lot of short-term missions teams. And while I appreciate the help, I have noticed over the years that a […]

Back in 2014, Matt Chandler kindly took some time to answer the question of how we can grow healthy churches in some of Scotland’s poorest areas. His answer? Growing indigenous leaders. This is the long-term aim of 20schemes as we work to realise our vision of 20 gospel-centred churches in 20 of Scotland’s deprived schemes […]

Here are a few things I’ve learned about discipling drug addicts who have come to Christ.

I live in a scheme which is blighted by drugs. Children as young as seven and eight years old are smoking Cannabis regularly (I smoked my first joint at 12). Heroin is as easy to get as a pint of milk from the local store. Crack, Coke, E’s, LSD, you name it and it can […]

Scotland’s national unemployment rate (pre-COVID) was 4.5%. In the schemes, it’s anywhere from 25–30%.

We have seen a sad development in modern evangelicalism. Churches believe that they exist to make disciples of their own local community. Churches send money to a missionary society in order for that society to make disciples of other nations. We have cut off the local church from its commission to make disciples of all nations. It […]

This article was written by David Binder. According to Pew Research (USA) and the Office for National Statistics (ONS), Christianity in the 21st century is declining. Whilst, broadly speaking, fewer seem willing to identify themselves as Christiansas in the past, leading commentators such as Ed Stetzer have argued that Evangelical Christian numbers are stable, or […]