The International Bible Society (IBS) has sent Scripture booklets, Bibles and New Testaments to Southern California churches and fire department chaplains in the wake of the most devastating wildfires in the state's history.

Missionaries and supporters who attend January's CMS Summer School at Katoomba will get the chance to meet Marion Gabbott, 63 – wife of the rector of Christ Church, Bangkok, Stephen Gabbott – and hear about a ministry that extends from supporting refugees and reaching out to prisoners in a Bangkok jail, to convincing expatriates of the importance and relevance of the Bible.

Paul and Jecinta were two of the students from the two-week Creation to New Creation course (also known as Introduction to the Bible) conducted during October in Nairobi, Kenya by the Rev Peter Sholl, assistant minister at St Matthew's, Ashbury.

The present case before the Civil and Administrative Tribunal in Victoria, under that State's Racial and Religious Tolerance Act, has raised the real questions of freedom of speech and religious tolerance in a civil society. The case concerns vilification purported to have been done by a charismatic Christian group in a seminar on the differences between Christians and Muslims. What stand should Christians take in such a matter?

Michael Youssef's dual-language broadcasts of the gospel have uncovered a great spiritual hunger.

I grew up in Greenacre, Sydney with my Polish parents. They were WWII refugees. I am 43, have two daughters and two grandkids, and I work as a chef and a TAFE teacher. My wife Jen and I live 40 minutes out of Orange on ‘Kataan', a sheep farm where we moved in 1991 to escape the ‘rat race'. My Dad had just died of cancer.

Orange Evangelical Church has found annual missions an effective strategy to keep evangelism on the agenda.

MADELEINE COLLINS meets Catherine Hamlin, an extraordinary Australian who has spent the last 44 years in Ethiopia, bringing the gospel to young women suffering the pain and the shame of fistula.