About Us
If you are a current member of a Christian Endeavour group, you will find useful information and help on the websites of the National Unions they will give you details of current events that are happening in CE.
Christian Endeavour was started in America in 1881 by Dr Francis Clark, the minister at Williston Congregational Church, Portland, Maine, as a meeting for young people within his church to help them grow in faith and be trained for Christ's service.
It was so successful that the idea was taken up by other churches and, by the late 1880s, Christian Endeavour Societies had been established in churches across Britain. By 1890, members from these Societies were meeting together at a national level and, at the 6th British Convention, held in Britain in 1896, the Christian Endeavour Union of Great Britain and Ireland was formed.
It continues today to support the work of Christian Endeavour within England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. It seeks to encourage Christian Endeavour at a variety of levels, to maintain the organisation and to extend the movement.
The CEUGB&I is a supranational body which links together the National CE Unions. They, in their turn, provide backing and encouragement to local groupings and to the individual groups or Societies within local churches.
Further information about Christian Endeavour can be found on these links:
Christian Endeavour is church-based and Christ-centred.
CE encourages
- commitment to Christ and the local church. Its motto is 'For Christ and the Church'
- the reading of the Bible and prayer
- active involvement in the planning of and participation in regular meetings within the local
- church - meetings may have a variety of content, ranging from devotional and Bible-
- based to social and activity
- the development of gifts and talents for use in Christian service in the church and the world.
CE is inclusive - as we have one Father and, as Christians, we are all brothers and sisters in the faith.
CE is interdenominational - as it operates across all denominations.
CE is international - as it is a world-wide movement which currently has over 2 million members.
Blogs
Hell on earth does exist. When we see the pictures on TV of the damage done in Gaza by Israeli military action and in Ukraine by Russian bombardment, we are surely seeing ‘hell on earth’. It is almost impossible for those of us living in peaceful countries to imagine the terror being experienced daily in those war-torn areas. In Gaza, in particular, we see the breakdown of civil society and organisations, so that obtaining the necessities of life - food, water, shelter, medical aid - becomes a daily struggle. Normal life becomes impossible. On Remembrance Day we recall those who gave their lives in the horrors of the First World War and subsequent conflicts. For many, those horrors are summed up in one name - Passchendaele - a name which has come to symbolise the horrors of the warfare in the Flanders area. Apart from pictures of men in the trenches and ‘going over the top’, it is pictures of the Passchendaele area that give the stark impression that the conflict there was indeed ‘hell on earth’. Such pictures show that the artillery bombardments reduced the woods to shattered, skeletal tree trunks, smashed the drainage systems and pockmarked the ground with shell holes. Together with the heaviest rain for 30 years, the shelling churned the ground into thick mud, turning the area into a nightmarish quagmire over which men fought and died, a quagmire which swallowed men and horses whole and has buried their remains to this day. It is no wonder that no-one can agree on the number of casualties in the three months of that battle. Estimates vary from 200,000 to 400,000 on each side. Passchendaele speaks of a never-ending hail of bullets and shells, rain and suffocating mud, truly a daily ‘hell on earth’ for those involved. The ‘hell on earth’ of Passchendaele continued in the lives of those who had lost loved ones and those who came back from the war with physical wounds and mental scars and it has been repeated in every conflict and civil war since, as the media reports about Gaza and Ukraine testify. ‘Hell on earth’ is invariably man-made, caused not only by warfare but by random acts of hatred and violence. The knife attacks on innocent civilians in the UK this year have brought the dreadful experience close to home. ‘Hell on earth’ is also caused by extremes of poverty and unemployment, by lack of foresight by individuals, companies and authorities, often in their desire to make, or save, money. The inferno at the Grenfell tower block in London 7 years ago was surely ‘hell on earth’ for those caught up in it. On Remembrance Day, we should recall all those whose experience, in any way, was or is ‘hell on earth’, and determine to do all we can to ensure that nobody has to live in, or go through, a ‘hell on earth’ of whatever kind. Such tragedies, for nations or individuals, should have no place in our world. Wherever there is such ‘hell on earth’, created by mankind in its folly, hatred and selfishness, many would ask, ‘Where is God, the loving God of the Christians?’ Writing about the First World War, the poet S.J. Robinson put it this way : When glory came to the trenches - As an officer, shining bright – Said He'd go over the Top for us Then offered us a light Reckoned our war would soon be over And, at first, we jeered But He told us of His battle plan And took away our fear He promised to always be near us And try to keep us safe Didn't believe in us killed and sacrificed In this dark forsaken place He explained that to die was His job And that we must be content To tell others of His coming here As o'er the Top He went When Glory came to the Trenches We said, of commanders, He was alone "Well, they only came here to send you," He said "I came to take you all home "
A great deal of imagination goes into inventing all sorts of weird and wonderful creatures to represent and symbolize the dark forces of evil in science fiction and in stories and programmes for Hallowe’en. Sometimes they are so fantastic that we could well follow Victor Meldrew’s repeated exclamation, ‘I don’t believe it!’ But would we be so fascinated by some of the monsters dreamed up by writers and screen technicians if we did not, somewhere in our own imaginings, harbour some fragment of belief in the possibility of these terrifying creatures and the power of evil? There is much debate about the origin of Hallowe’en as we know it today. The Christian event started in the early 8thcentury as All Hallow’s Eve, a vigil or devotional period in preparation for All Hallow’s Day (Nov.1st), now usually called All Saints’ Day. This is the day when all the saints of the Church, known or unknown, are commemorated. This is followed by All Souls’ Day (Nov.2nd) when all the faithful departed are remembered. Those first two days in November would be a time when the people would feel that the gulf between earth and heaven was not as vast as they normally thought. It was not difficult for the mediaeval mind to imagine that there would also be times when the opposite was true, when the veil between earth and hell had become much thinner so that demons in hell and ghosts (the souls of those they believed were in purgatory) were more easily seen. All Hallow’s Eve became one of those times (Christmas was another). So, with the allusions to connections with pagan myths and festivals and to the occult added later, we have our present day Hallowe’en. ‘I don’t believe it!’ might be the response of many to the suggestion that Hallowe’en could have grown out of Christian beliefs but it is possible to see Hallowe’en and All Saints’ Day as two sides of the same thing. Hallowe’en is a reminder that, as Christians, we believe in the reality of evil and All Saints’ Day declares that we believe in the reality of good. In the present world, it is no bad thing to identify the evil around us as real and to choose to do that which is good. There can be no doubt that forces of evil exist - the mass media seem to concentrate on the effects of their influence and show us the reality of evil every day; rarely do they headline the good things that are also happening. Jesus faced all the evil of the world when He, the Greatest Good, gave up His life in love for us on the Cross at Calvary. He came to be the Light of the World (John 8.12) so that we need not walk in darkness on Hallowe’en or any other day. The powers of evil may challenge us at every opportunity but they cannot stop the love of God for us displayed on the Cross. The darkness can never overcome the Light (John 1.5). Only a Victor Meldrew would say ‘I don’t believe it!’ to that.
I wonder if it is Lionel Bart’s words about ‘Food, glorious food’ that has initiated all the food programmes now on TV. They have moved from Delia’s instructions about how to achieve perfection with normal cooking to competitions in which chefs aspire to offer new taste combinations in artistic presentations. How many of these will find their way into normal menus I do not know, but there are now so many new vegetables and fruits available in supermarkets that the usual ones are seemingly being pushed into a corner. I now find myself confronted by mooli and mibuna when I enter my local supermarket. The exotic foodstuffs now becoming available to us are standard foods in other parts of the world. They remind us of the importance of transport links, of the integration of cultures, and of the infinite wisdom of the mind of God to provide such a wide variety of taste, texture and colour to stimulate our senses. We really do have glorious food. At least, such glorious food is available to those of the world’s population who have a high standard of living. For those in poorer areas of the world, the choice is much more limited. Sometimes there is no choice and diet is monotonous; sometimes there is not even the ‘take it or leave it’ choice as crops fail and livestock die because of drought or flood, or because the distribution system breaks down through warfare or other disasters. On the TV news, too often we have seen pictures of starving adults and emaciated children searching the ground and rubbish dumps for anything they can find to stem their hunger. Even in this country, food banks, organised by churches and charities, are becoming increasingly necessary in our economic situation. Such people would give anything for food, even if it wasn’t glorious food. As the urchins in Lionel Bart’s ‘Oliver’ sing, ‘Don’t care what it looks like… Burned! Underdone! Crude! Don’t care what the cook’s like... What wouldn’t we give for That extra bit more…’ It is said that, in the UK alone, 18 million tonnes of food a year end up in landfill, the waste coming almost equally from the supply chain, from the retailers and from households. If such waste could be prevented in the wealthier nations, there would be enough food saved to feed the 1 billion people who at present are undernourished and starving. As we celebrate Harvest and give thanks for the prospect of good food with plenty of choice in the coming year, we should be mindful that others have very little. Anything we can do to help them, even by reducing the wastage in food usage, would assist in bringing in the day when everybody could truly sing about food, glorious food.
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