A ground-breaking ceremony for the New Hall at Chapel Porth was the top story in BUC News #1 dated 3 September 1996. This early edition was the initiative of the then newly appointed BUC Communication director, John Surridge.

It was only two pages and sent from a dial up account to just a few dozen subscribers. By December 1996 the newsletter had grown to five pages and Mary Kapon, Communication department secretary, had added formatting and a style that remains in place to this day.

Reflecting on those early days John Surridge, now serving as Welsh Mission President states, "The Seventh-day Adventist Church has always been an 'early adopter' in communication matters. The introduction of an email newsletter and the development of the BUC website were inevitable consequences of the information revolution which took place during the 1990s."

During the 12 years of BUC News the internet world has changed meaning faster and more efficient mailings, the adding of pictures, a website and in 2007, the addition of an RSS feed. With a mailing list of over 2,500 names, and with around a further 5,000 unique visits to the news website each week, BUC News continues to provide timely news and information to the Adventist community and beyond. Church members, those interested in the church, and sometimes those on the fringes continue to benefit from information and interesting, sometimes difficult stories. Recent responses from readers include Sandra who writes, "I always read BUC News. It's always informative and very well done." Japhet represents the kind of comments that come from Brits now abroad saying, "It's one of the only ways left to stay connected with the pulse of the church back home." Also Jane who comments, "The pdf version with pictures is a huge improvement - I was surprised at how much more interesting the whole newsletter seemed when pictures accompanied the reports! Keep up the good work -  I read your letter every week." John Surridge is still an avid reader and contributor to the news. He states, "More than ten years on it is wonderful to see that these technologies have matured and are considered by church members to be part of mainstream church communication."

Naturally, the thanks goes not just to John Surridge and Mary Kapon who worked hard on the news for so many years, or to the current editor, but also to you for submitting the stories. In an interesting quirk, the very first story in BUC News #1 was submitted by another early internet adopter, the current Communication director and BUC News editor, Victor Hulbert.

Thursday morning, 21August saw students at the two Seventh-day Adventist Secondary Schools in England queuing expectantly to receive their GCSE results. They were not disappointed with pass rates increasing significantly in both schools.

Katie Ramharacksingh joined students at the VA John Loughborough School, Haringey, North London and found that "witnessing the students opening their GCSE results was truly an uplifting experience." She told BUC News that while students waited nervously for their envelopes, many expressed to her how surprisingly confident they were and spoke of how hard they had all worked throughout the year.

Previous performance of the school had left students and teachers disheartened, yet the results on Thursday reflected an encouraging transformation with 59% of the students achieving 5 A* to C grades, and 39% attaining 5 A* to C, including English and Maths. Many have decided to advance to further education and have already set up plans to attend colleges across London.

Across the board, individual subjects achieved great success. For example, Music has reached a 100% pass rate of A* to C grades and both Art and Textiles have also succeeded in attaining 95% and 88% pass rates of A* to C.

The current Interim Executive Headteacher, Mrs Laura Osei and Associate Head, Ms Oveta McInnes have both stated how thrilled they are with the GCSE students this year, agreeing that "God has indeed been leading the school on its way to becoming a shining beacon in the community." The work to transform John Loughborough School is not yet over. However, as these results prove, the school is again moving forward.

Twenty miles up the road at Stanborough School in Watford, delighted students achieved a new record for the school with 90% receiving five or more A* to C passes with the students still maintaining 80% A* to C when including Maths and English.

"I am delighted with the GCSE results," Headteacher, Mr Roger Murphy stated. "These are the best set of figures Stanborough School has had - up 9% on last year. It is a wonderful reflection on both the hard work of students and staff. Well done to all!"

Stanborough's best performing student achieved 6 A*s and 5 As. There was a 100% pass rate in the following subjects: Business and Communication, Biology, Chemistry, Geography, RE, English as a Second Language, Portuguese, Korean, Dutch and Chinese.

"This is wonderful," says British Union Conference President, Pastor Don McFarlane. "By God's grace we have seen both schools make significant progress. Parents can be assured that their children will get a good education placing them in an Adventist environment."

Stanborough is a Union-wide school open to pupils across the UK and Ireland with boarding and day school facilities. For more information on the school including their International Baccalaureate Diploma click here. For more on the John Loughborough School click here.

[Katie Ramharacksingh / Victor Hulbert]

The apostle Paul loved the Olympics. A strange statement to make? Perhaps not when you consider texts like 1 Timothy 6:12 "Keeping your faith is like running a race. Try as hard as you can to win."

That is the spirit of gold medallists such as Christine Ohuruogu and Usain Bolt, who, in an interesting twist, find their faith helps them with their physical race as much as their spiritual journey.

BUC News reporter, Richard Daly is at the Beijing games covering the event from a Christian perspective. He spoke to Christine Ohuruogu just after she won the 400 metre gold. She told him she was overwhelmed by the fact that God was the only one who strengthened her through this time. She says, "I had the message in my head as I ran, 'I can do anything through Him who gives me strength.'" Jamaican sprinter, Usain Bolt, also acknowledges his Christian credentials. With two gold medals and two world records in the 100 and 200 metres, he has reason to be ecstatic. "I'm shocked, I have been aspiring to the world record for so long," Bold told Reuters news. "I ran the corner as hard as possible and once I hit the straight I told myself to keep it up. The 200 medal has been my dream." But his faith helped with the dream. He told Daly that his faith "keeps me relaxed, not to worry too much. It keeps me just ready." Bold was brought up in a Seventh-day Adventist Christian home and values his heritage.

Another Jamaican, Sherone Simpson, became a "born again Christian" about a year ago. Daly asked her about her faith and sport after she reached the 200 metre finals in Tuesday's heats. "Having that faith and knowing you can do it, and do it in God's name is a good thing," she said. Meanwhile, a graduate of Sacramento Adventist Academy, California, won a gold medal on Sunday. Mary Whipple is coxswain for the women's eight-member rowing crew.

As well as interviewing athletes, Daly has had opportunity to visit the Beijing Seventh-day Adventist church where he was surprised to find that it had grown from just thirty or so members a few years back to over 3,000 members today. Daly reports in his blog that he was surprised to find over 1,000 people in church by 9.00 am. An audio interview with a church leader, Grace Yang, detailing how the church has grown is available by clickling here.

Read Richard Daly's daily blog and see a selection of his photos here.

[Richard Daly/BUC News]

This month Channel 4 has been screening a series of programmes, "The Genius of Charles Darwin". BUC News asked John Walton D.Sc, Professor of Chemistry at St Andrews University, Scotland, to reflect on the programmes and give his personal reaction.

This week Channel 4 screened the last in a series of three programmes billed as "The Genius of Charles Darwin", hosted by Richard Dawkins. I was hoping that the superb production expertise of the 21st century media would treat us to a colourful and dynamic account of Darwin's achievements. As so often, the hype surrounding evolution turned out to be hollow. There were no entertaining demonstrations of the power of Darwinian evolution at work advancing medicine or the life sciences. Dawkins himself seemed a thoroughly retro-figure, endlessly recycling tired old evidence of micro-evolution, while accompanying this with futile repetitions of his favourite refrain "Evolution is fact", "Evolution is demonstrated fact", "Evolution is plain truth". He implied that every fossil discovery was incontrovertible evidence of evolution and even flashed up Ernst Haeckel's long discredited drawing of human and animal embryos. Virtually his only peek into modern science touched off his flawed assertion that recent DNA sequencing had beautifully confirmed evolutionary lines of descent. He seemed unaware of the puzzling contradictions amongst these molecular phylogenetic trees and their disagreement with fossil-based analogues. So much confusion has arisen in this area that some scientists have even dared to suggest the history of life cannot be represented by a tree at all. The programmes were all defensive "Fortress Evolution" and displayed no "Enterprise Evolution".

Rather quickly in the series, Dawkins slipped into his operational mode of caricaturing and denigrating religion. For programmes supposedly extolling Darwin's genius it was amazing how much time was taken up by his obsession with fringe fundamentalism. He relished browbeating and ruthlessly interrupting bemused believers but in itself did little to validate Darwinism. He took delight in reading abusive extracts from the hate mail he receives from misguided opponents. It is shameful that supposedly Christian correspondents respond in this despicable way and many genuine Christians will want to join me in apologising to him. Perhaps there is a crumb of comfort in noting that Christian authors, critical of Dawkins, receive equally hateful mail.

Neo-Darwinism is virtually devoid of rigorous quantitative explanations, relying instead on woolly scenarios. Nobody does arm-waving scenarios better than Richard Dawkins, but his fabled eloquence faded into incoherent equivocation as he tried to distance evolution from its involvement in dark-side eugenics. As the originator of the "selfish" gene idea, Dawkins showed he is troubled by the widespread manifestation in nature of all kinds of cooperative and altruistic behaviour. The explanation he seemed to be proposing was that selfish genes are somehow "misfiring" when they permit selfless and self-sacrificing actions. No wonder critics say evolutionary scenarios are flexible to the point of meaninglessness. Apparently, even self-contradictory explanations are acceptable - so long as they come with the label of evolutionary science.

The sensitivity and humanity of Charles Darwin as a father and husband was painted in a most sympathetic way. However, Richard Dawkins was eager to enlist Darwin as an atheist sympathiser and to identify "Origin of Species" as the Old Testament of evolutionary naturalism. Dawkins' own relentless self-promotion made it abundantly clear that he regards his own book "The Selfish Gene" as the New Testament.

Dawkins didn't engage with any of the critiques of his books, but anyone feeling challenged by this series would be well advised to dip into one or more of the compelling rebuttals of the "The God Delusion". Alister McGrath's "The Dawkins Delusion", John Cornwell's, "Darwin's Angel", David Robertsons' "The Dawkins Letters", Thomas Crean's, "A Catholic Replies to Professor Dawkins" and John Lennox's "God's Undertaker, Has Science Buried God?" are all worthwhile.

[John Walton]

An Adventist Discovery Centre has been launched in the Irish Mission. The new centre, known as The Adventist Discovery Centre Ireland, located in the Galway church, will primarily provide a Bible and Health correspondence facility from an Irish address.

The need for such a facility was quite evident in that students residing in the Irish Mission faced greater correspondence costs than elsewhere in the United Kingdom. This, coupled with the inherent delays associated with international mail, often became a barrier to many potential students.

The idea of setting up such a school began with former ADC Principal, the late Pastor Dalbert Elias. "I am very happy that we could bring financial and human resources together and deliver on this promise" said current Principal, Des Rafferty. "I believe a significant obstacle has been removed from the hearts and minds of potential students. The way is now clear for many new students to join the centre and start their journey of discovery with God."

The Irish ADC will run in close cooperation with the Irish Mission executive committee, BUC administration and the ADC board. Des Rafferty said "I would like to express sincere thanks and appreciation to all participants for their support in getting the project to this point."

From an IT perspective "The Irish centre is now fully operational" said Andrew Leonce, who has been providing temporary IT support at the BUC. In one of his final assignments with the ADC before his cover for maternity leave comes to an end, he accompanied the Principal to Ireland last week to set up a merged computerized system. He said "this unique configuration allows all registrations, lesson updates, reports etc to be handled remotely from a secure central database serving the two organizations. It has the potential to cope with many tens of thousands of students in an efficient and effective way."

Stephen Wilson, pastor of the Galway church will, in addition to his other pastoral duties, serve as Principal of the correspondence centre. At the dedication service on Sabbath, 9 August in the Galway church, all the members joined hands in dedicating the office to the work of God. In particular Pastor Wilson thanked God for the first responses received that week - the first fruits of recent card distribution.

The centre will now write to over one hundred former students inviting them to re-establish contact with the Discovery Centre Ireland and to acquaint themselves with the enhanced service available closer to home. Meanwhile the Irish Mission are planning for a major launch of the Irish ADC at their Day of Fellowship on Sabbath, 20 September. Mission President, Pastor David Neal says, "Our vision for Ireland is that the Adventist Discovery Centre - Ireland will be a new and dynamic agency for helping the 4.3 million people here connect with the truth about God."

[Des Rafferty, ADC Principal]

Spend a little time with a 6 or 7-year-old boy and you will soon find yourself discussing dinosaurs in some depth. Where once all you knew was 'Tyrannosaurus Rex' soon you discover the intricacies of the Camarasaurus and then the Ultrasaurs.

Thus, since Sabbath morning worship aims to involve all age groups the idea of Dinosaur Day at Middlesbrough Seventh-day Adventist church explored this interest in dinosaurs.

The word went out to the children, 'bring your dinosaur models' and sure enough many rubber and plastic models arrived at church, along with a collection of books about dinosaurs. Anna, who has recently been given the all-clear after a long battle with cancer, was right at the heart of things with beautiful dinosaur books that her caring Grandma had bought and encouraged Anna to read.

Morning worship began on Sabbath, 16 August with a story about Fred the T-rex who had died just before Noah's flood. The younger children were introduced to the idea of fossils with a practical demonstration of how fossils were formed. The sermon was entirely focussed on dinosaurs and featured information and ideas from the book written for children by Dr Elaine Graham Kennedy, "Dinosaurs, where did they come from and where did they go?" published by Pacific Press. Instead of having restless children wondering when it would all end our large audience of children, including visitors who came 'just for the day', said, "Can we come back next week?" Our five and six year olds really enjoyed their interactive worship experience.

The adults were not left out. While intently examining fossils from local beaches plus those donated for the day from the local museum, they were strongly encouraged to take Creation studies seriously since our children are exposed to evolutionary thought from their first day at school. "Adults need to expose their children to Christian thought patterns," Pastor Jeynes told them. The older children were advised to recognise that they don't need to accept 'what teacher says' without a further thought while the younger children discovered that dinosaurs were still made by God and were therefore things of beauty.

The impact of the day was not seen after the special dinosaur themed games in the afternoon at a local dinosaur park, or as the children collected fossils from a local beach later in the evening, but as the children and some adults asked during the pot luck lunch if dinosaurs were in the ark and if it was "really OK to colour dinosaurs pink". The answer to both was 'probably' and 'yes'. Our congregation had begun to think seriously about creation - and that can never be a bad thing.

[Peter Jeynes]

It was a cool summer day on Sabbath, 5 July that heralded the first Area 4 Children's and Family Day of Fellowship hosted by the Ashford and Canterbury churches under the auspices of Pastor Vartsaba.

The local children gave scintillating presentations in mime, song and skit. They also put the adults to the test, with a quiz about the countries which were the beneficiaries of last quarter's mission offering. To the delight of the children they knew more than the adults did.

The theme for the day was 'Creation Sabbath' and the main presenter's were Pastor Bernie Holford and his wife Karen. They were given a warm welcome by Pastor Israel Williams, leader of Area 4. Their unique worship style included children in the service and made the day of worship truly a joy and delight for families. The afternoon programme was a wonderful journey around tables tasting sumptuous items of food and engaging in activities as families or in small groups, sharing past experiences that have made the Sabbath a special day for each person.

The result? One seven-year-old boy was overheard saying to his friends, "this is the best Sabbath I have ever had." Many adults and children would agree with him.

[Margaret McBean]

Great Yarmouth Seventh-day Adventist church took to the streets on Sunday, 17 August to share the "Adventist Health Advantage" with the citizens of Great Yarmouth along with many holiday makers.

Elsie Staple, SEC Health Ministries director and her husband, Eldon, joined the Yarmouth team, supervising the programme and training the staff. The Health Screening itself took place in The Market Gates shopping mall. The team were there at 09:00 and ready by 10:00 when the doors opened. Over 100 members of the public came to have their BMI, blood pressure, carbon monoxide, blood sugar and cholesterol tests taken and were deeply touched by the fact that the programme was free of charge, as well as by the friendliness and interest that the church members had in their well-being.

It has certainly built a lot of bridges and painted a positive image of our church in the local community. Evaluation forms were filled in and many positive comments were made, some of them include sentences like "excellent idea", "we need more programmes like this", and "this programme is really excellent, the church staff are fantastic, very helpful, caring people. Thank you very much for your help." Some members of the public recognised in this ministry a true Christian attitude in following Jesus' example -  meeting people where they are. Others asked questions about our beliefs and enquired about the location of the church. One person has asked for Bible studies.

[Izabela Clarry]

"Serve our Saviour," a report of the BUC Pathfinder Camporee is the lead story in the latest edition of the Messenger, the official journal of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in the UK and Ireland.

It can now be found online at www.adventistnews.org.uk/messenger. Also David Marshall gets into Jamaican slang and learns a lesson on preaching, Heather Haworth talks about forgiveness and abuse, a church employee explains how he copes with depression, and there is the normal full round-up of news.

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