When Warren Stanley, 59, walks into a crowded Pitt Street auditorium this month, he will be transported back to his days as a young man in 1971. The member of St Paul's, Castle Hill, who became a Christian when he was 17, will listen to Archbishop Peter Jensen's address to the Synod, having witnessed three previous Archbishops take the stage before him.

Christian students at the University of Technology, Sydney fear the unique opportunities they have for evangelism will be lost if a proposal to close the University's Ku-ring-gai campus goes ahead.

Russell Grinter has three years left at Moore College, and plans to work in a rural church after he graduates. Supporters back home in the Riverina are paying his tuition fees, but next year he hopes their money will go to someone else instead. Mr Grinter has signed up for ‘Fee-help', new HECS-style government loans that will be made available to every student from 2005. “If we use Fee-help, then the money can be used for other ministries,” he said. “I'm really pleased about it.”

As a child Marty Williamson was obliged to go to Sunday School. His wife Katherine's experience of church was ‘the odd wedding'. Now their friends are puzzled; even concerned; why would the newly married couple, who lived in a de facto relationship for seven years, suddenly bother to give up their Sunday mornings to go to church?

In this chapter Peter Carnley looks at the progress made towards ordaining women to the episcopate in the Anglican Church of Australia.

As one would expect from the author's earlier scholarly study, and ongoing interest, in the topic of resurrection, this chapter is insightful and commands regard, even when one disagrees with several of its tenets and inferences. This level of writing is most evident in the first section, on resurrection, but is far from absent from the second, the cross. However, this scholarly discipline does not extend to how he portrays ideas, and their protagonists, with which and with whom he disagrees. In exploring the cross, the author's main target is penal substitutionary atonement, and especially Sydney Diocese and Moore Theological College.

It has been said that ‘from the motel room to the classroom – no one escapes the Gideons', but Gideons Northern New South Wales Regional President, Barry Hammond, disagrees. “I love that quote but frankly it is untrue. It may be that there is some truth in it for Western developed countries but it is untrue elsewhere. Even in developed countries like France, there is huge opposition to the reception of scriptures,” he says.

I have a friend who is a Pentecostal pastor. Once when we were having coffee I was giving him a hard time about the title of Brian Houston's book, You Need More Money. What an outrage, I said, how could this guy be serious!