In welcoming you to another LEF News I am encouraged to read these reports of visionary activity around the UK demonstrating that our Local Evangelical Fellowships are expressing what it is to be a movement for change in local communities. My recent thirty-centre consultation tour in preparation for next year's Assembly has enabled me to meet many of you and to hear in the focus group discussion many of the exciting ways in which you are carrying out your mission.
Conversations also reveal considerable variety of expression in working together at local level.
In some areas our members have found it more helpful to identify with Churches Together groups than to run separate evangelical networks. Others find it helpful to identify with Evangelical Alliance as organisational members rather than through the formal LEF arrangement. Elsewhere, groups of member churches are working together without a formal link with the Alliance at all, but see themselves as very much part of the Alliance family and vision. I recognise the need for flexibility and want to encourage every effective way of relating at local level which expresses the reality of what it means to be part of a movement for change. I would also want to recognise the reality of changing circumstances and the need for the models of working to change in some areas.