There are some 70 million people in the UK and the vast majority are not Christian (regardless of what people tick on the census forms). There is a great need to reach these people with the good news of Jesus. At a training conference I attended a while ago, we were told that statistics from the NHS show there were 43 million prescriptions written for depression in 2011. Some of these, no doubt, will have been repeat prescriptions but even after taking this into account, that’s still an awful lot of unhappiness! In the UK there is a crisis of purpose – people are lost and looking for meaning and direction in life. There is also a crisis of spirituality: a spiritual vacuum that people try to fill with all sorts of mystical stuff! And there is also a crisis of contentment or happiness, which ‘affluenza’ (affluence and wealth) have not been able to satisfy. We should tell others the good news of Jesus because people really need to hear it.

R. Ian Seymour, Empowered Personal Evangelism, Weybridge: New Wine Press (2014), p.144