This year Mission Sunday falls on 21st September and as part of this each parish priest in England and Wales will receive a mission pack which will include a special DVD called Alive in Christ, created by David Payne and the Catholic Evangelisation Services team and CASE (Catholic Agency to Support Evangelisation) encouraging parishes to evangelise. We want to get behind this initiative and thus have rearranged the pagination of Goodnews, so that the centre pages are a special evangelisation pull-out for readers which can be detached and given to parish priests and catechists. This pull-out features a teaching article by Fr Pat Collins CM on the New Evangelisation, a testimony by David Palmer about how going on an Alpha course brought his Catholic faith alive, and details of useful CaF? resources for parishes produced by Catholic Evangelisation Services and contact details for the Sion and Ceili communites who work for evangelisation in Britain and Ireland.

At the National Catholic Conference of the CCR in Ireland in Athlone one of the speakers, Patti Gallagher Mansfield, called on those present to make evangelising young people a priority. She shared some of her own experiences of this in New Orleans. Dympna Sheehan has written up Patti’s thoughts, and we add some examples of different initiatives to evangelise young people. The key to this, is often simply spending time with young people and building relationship and John Edwards tells us about a couple of local things he is involved with. Catholic schools, also, can play an important part in reaching young people with the gospel and we hear from Dominic Dring about an imaginative mission at the Cardinal Newman school in Hove to train the students to reach their peers with the gospel.

Another way of reaching young people is to take them to youth events. The biggest of these, of course, is World Youth Day, which this year took place in Australia in July, and of which we have a short report. One of the most effective charismatic events at reaching young people has been the Celebrate conference in Ilfracombe. This year due to problems with clashing dates it couldn’t take place, but instead gave birth to seven Celebrate weekends (one still to come) as well as Joel’s Bar, a separate young adult event. These have been very successful and over 3000 people including many children and young people attended. Another event that drew many young people to participate was the Spirit in the City, an evangelistic event organised by four central London churches, and which culminated in an outreach in Leicester Square.

There have been various revivals within the Pentecostal and Charismatic streams over the last 20 years and it can sometimes be difficult to know what to make of them when the cultural and church background is so different from our Catholic tradition. How can one tell if they are authentic and helpful or not? Charles Whitehead provides some general guidelines and principles to help us discern whether it is the Holy Spirit, the human spirit or some other spirit operating in a particular context.

Damian Stayne and the Cor et Lumen Christi community, independently of anything going on in other parts of the body of Christ, have been themselves witnessing many healings – 30,000 in the last five years – and in this issue we have a short report of the Catholic Miracle Rally that they ran at the Friends Meeting House in London in July. Key to all this is intercession and Fiona Hendy from the House of the Open Door Community begins a regular intercession column sharing her thoughts on what she and other intercessors feel the Lord is saying at the present time. Martin McTiernan, meanwhile reflects on the strong call to intercession and evangelisation that they have had in Ireland recently.

This year the Church has called for us to look in a special way at the writings of St Paul. To help us in this Fr Chris Thomas in his regular article, gives us some useful guidelines when we study St Paul’s words. We continue our emphasis on promoting the reading, study and living out of the Word of God, with an extract from a new book by Richard Foster on the transforming power of the Word of God. This is followed by several testimonies from readers on how God’s word has changed or significantly influenced their lives in our regular series “You Word is a Lamp for My Feet.

In her article “The Lord Provides”, Bernie Hall, one of the members of the House of the Open Door Community in Worcestershire, brings us up to date on what happened as a result of the terrible flood they experienced last year and the lessons the Lord taught them through it. We have been experiencing funding problems recently within Crew Trust, the charity that underpins the work of Goodnews and Catholic Evangelisation Services and the new chairman of Crew Trust, Charles Whitehead, makes an appeal for help. We also include all the other regular items – news, the Other Half, Good News Books and Agape tapes.