" Not just the ecumaniacs or the Evangelicals , but everyone " ; " Be as relentless as St Paul " .sx Churches all over England to make a shared start on a missionary decade .sx by Betty Saunders .sx THE DECADE OF EVANGELISM begins officially on Sunday , the Feast of Epiphany , with special services in cathedrals , churches , and chapels throughout the country .sx In York Minster the Archbishop of York will preach at a eucharist to mark the inauguration ; and Dr Habgood will commission twelve men and women as 'advisers for the Decade of Evangelism' , who are to be sent to encourage the York parishes in their outreach .sx Guildford is one of the dioceses where the Decade will be launched tomorrow , 5 January , at a cathedral service followed by a vigil and celebration called " Alight for Christ " , led by the Bishops of Guildford and Dorking .sx Leicester , too , is to start tomorrow night , in Leicester Cathedral , when parish representatives will join in a statement of commitment .sx Roman Catholics are calling it the " Decade of Evangelisation " , but the aim is the same .sx They will share a common approach with Anglicans , Free Churches , house groups , Pentecostalists and members of the Evangelical Alliance , all of whom are to place an emphasis on attracting young people to the churches , especially those who have had no contact with the Christian faith .sx In some places the Decade will be launched on Sunday 20 January , during the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity .sx In Manchester , the presidents of the Ecumenical Council hope to fill the Free Trade Hall at a launching celebration on 21 January .sx The Bishop of Worcester says in his Diocesan News :sx " The main thing is that everyone should go to one or other of the launches .sx Not just the ecumaniacs or the Evangelicals but all , Prayer Book Society included .sx " .sx Unity as the Decade begins will be celebrated in Winchester Cathedral on Sunday , when leaders of local Anglican , Roman Catholic , Methodist and United Reformed Churches are to sign a covenant .sx In some other dioceses churchgoers will arrive in church on Sunday to hear the voice of their bishop delivering a recorded message .sx Many worshippers throughout England will find leaflets in church , giving them information about the Decade , and signed by the Archbishop of Canterbury , Cardinal Hume , the Revd Dr John Newton of the Free Church Federal Council and the Revd Desmond Pemberton of the Wesleyan Holiness Church .sx All four represent Churches Together In England , the new ecumenical body which took over from the British Council of Churches .sx The twice-yearly Anglo-Catholic journal Living Stones devotes an entire issue to the Decade , including contributions from two Evangelical bishops , the Rt Revd John Taylor of St Albans and the Rt Revd Michael Baughen of Chester , who urges :sx " Be as relentless as St Paul in opening up the task and its motivation .sx " .sx Cardinal Hume had the Decade in mind when he preached in Liverpool's Metropolitan Cathedral at the celebration of Archbishop Derek Worlock's episcopal silver jubilee on 21 December .sx " As one historic decade ends , another begins :sx one dedicated to the spread of the good news - evangelisation .sx We are to take with increasing seriousness the task of recognising that the Church is by its very nature missionary , of telling the world about God and the Son he sent , what he has done and will do for us , of speaking to the minds and hearts of thousands of people in search of meaning and purpose to their lives .sx " .sx In Bradford , where 1990 has been " a year of evangelism " in preparation for the Decade , Bishop Robert Williamson has warned of " the communications gap " between the churches and society .sx " A great shock may await us .sx It will drive us to our knees - no bad thing .sx " .sx The new Bishop of Hereford , the Rt Revd John Oliver , said in an enthronement sermon in his cathedral on 22 December that Christians ought not to be tempted , in an unfriendly environment , to pull up the drawbridge and hope for the best .sx " We are in the business of celebrating and sharing our faith , of 'singing the Lord's song' ; we need to do it confidently , joyfully , expectantly .sx The Decade of Evangelism gives us the opportunity and obligation to use every possible means to enable people to know and love and follow Jesus Christ .sx " .sx Peter Mullen on Anthony Burgess , the writer , who asks " What curious game is God playing ?sx " .sx The novel-a-year man who wrestles with the problem of evil .sx PROFILE .sx DECLINING the proffered malt whisky , 14 years old , I took a glass of red wine with Anthony Burgess and his wife , Liana , who have temporarily quit their Mediterranean villa in order to publicise the second volume of Anthony's Confessions in London .sx ( To get that part out of the way , it is called You've Had Your Time , and published at pounds17 .sx 50 by Heinemann .sx ) .sx He came comparatively late in life to writing , beginning when he was frail and 40 , when he was told he had less than a year to live .sx He resolved to write ten novels in that last year in order to provide some sort of income for his wife .sx In the event , she died - violently and grotesquely of cirrhosis of the liver - and Anthony lived to write 33 novels in as many years .sx And he is still writing .sx On the way this 'bottle-a-day man' gave up booze .sx The 14-year-old malt sat stoppered in its decanter .sx In all that fictional output , his concerns are sex and metaphysics .sx He reminded me of Goethe's insistence that every good novel must in some way or other be obsessed with love and death .sx Of course , if you live as we do in a post-Freudian , post-Darwinian world , it is no longer possible to write about sex and death as the gently ( rather than heavily ) breathing lady novelists of the last century did .sx Unless you are Barbara Cartland .sx BURGESS is a religious writer in the sense that he is concerned with those two eschatological preoccupations of all time , the utopia and the dystopia .sx These have always inspired great writing .sx We think of Dante - the Inferno and Paradiso ; of Milton , of course , and Thomas More ; of Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's 1984 .sx 1985 was Burgess's great dystopia :sx an unhappy world of punk , faithlessness and violence in which the supreme accolade is " You was on the telly .sx " Well , you've only got to look at programmes like Blind Date to see how life mimics art .sx He had already written A Clockwork Orange , which demonstrated not the immorality but - a much worse thing - the amorality of our age .sx He saw in that novel the social consequences of a world which says , " Evil , be thou my good , " and commits therein the sin against the Holy Spirit .sx But his big novel - it may be compared for its range and depth with Middlemarch and Ulysses - came out in 1980 .sx It was called Earthly Powers .sx Of this work he said :sx " This extensive structure had at its core a mere anecdote .sx A Pope is to be canonised .sx The Vatican needs evidence of saintliness :sx a miracle , for instance .sx When he was a mere priest , the Pope cured a child of terminal meningitis through the power of prayer .sx This child grows up to be a sort of James Jones , the leader of a religious sect who orders his followers to commit suicide .sx " God , permitting the miracle , clearly intended its beneficiary to perform an act of great evil .sx Free will does not come into it ; since a disease has free will , and its lethal progress has been reversed .sx If the child had died he would not have caused the death of others .sx " What curious game is God playing ?sx If God is also the Devil , then it is as likely that evil will come out of good as the other way round .sx Perhaps more so .sx If our century is to be explained at all it is in terms of God becoming his opposite .sx " .sx Now this is unpalatable to say the least .sx But it reminds me of Job , the Old Testament God and the whirlwind .sx Certainly it is a piece of creative conjecture ; and does not all creativity proceed from the Holy Ghost - or would you give the Devil a half share in it ?sx If you would , then you concede Burgess's point and the world instantly becomes Manichaean - 'half golden , half rotten .sx ' .sx EARTHLY POWERS should be on the reading-list of all the theological colleges .sx It raises , frighteningly , the question of the nature of God in the century of the Somme , Auschwitz and Hiroshima .sx On the human level , Earthly Powers questions the 'free-will defence' and with it all the 'liberal' and 'enlightened' answers which our age gives to that question raised by Job , by Paul and by Augustine :sx the question of the undisputed reality of evil .sx In a sceptical age when 'liberal' opinions flourish , perhaps all we can do - in the absence of the mixed blessings of authoritarianism - is raise the questions in those places where answers used to be .sx Burgess certainly raises the questions .sx And , since he does so in a story which has real characters , he makes the questions more urgent because they are not abstracted ( as in the philosophy class ) but incarnated in human specimens we can believe in .sx He smokes a cheroot and ruminates .sx I sense he is really remonstrating with himself .sx No , he does not believe in personal immortality - and he is , moreover , relieved not to feel the pressure to believe in it .sx A Roman Catholic brought up in Manchester , where his father played the piano in the silent movies , he still goes to mass now and then .sx But he thinks the discontinuing of the Latin rite " disgraceful" .sx He agrees with Auden that , in the matter of spurning the Prayer Book , The Church of England merely " spat on its luck " .sx Burgess is nothing if not controversial .sx But then so was the prophet Jeremiah .sx I was immensely encouraged by him and all his works .sx Here is a man asking and , in his prolific procession of novels , trying to uncover the issues which have always perplexed us .sx I admire him .sx And all the more so for being able to keep the stopper on the whisky .sx In short , I suspect the Holy Ghost at work in all this turbulence .sx Hugh Montefiore .sx It should stay special .sx THE WIDESPREAD opening of retail shops on the Sundays before Christmas , in deliberate defiance of the law , has been a public scandal .sx But the law of the land about Sunday opening , with its absurd anomalies , is also a public scandal .sx Yet more scandalous has been the refusal of the Government to do anything about it since their Shops Bill fell in the House of Commons in 1985 .sx The Bill ( which involved total deregulation ) was first introduced in the House of Lords .sx Because of the 'Salisbury convention' whereby that chamber does not vote down the second reading of a Bill introduced by a popularly elected Government , I could only move 'a reasoned amendment' to the effect that the House agreed the Bill but regretted its introduction .sx The chamber was told that General Synod had disapproved the Bill by 427 votes to 6 .sx Lady Trumpington , in a speech hardly befitting a Government minister , seemed to think that the fact that Canterbury Cathedral illegally sold bibles on a Sunday meant that my amendment was hypocritical .sx As soon as lots of peers appeared , specially 'whipped' up from the shires , coming to vote after eight hours of debate without having listened to any of it , it was clear that we had lost .sx Their Lordships have no constituencies ; but MPs are different .sx The Jubilee Trust fought a splendid campaign , stirring up feelings in parishes and congregations .sx Thousands of letters were sent to MPs who , not wishing to lose all those supporters , successfully opposed the Bill .sx Fortunately for the Government , President Reagan's bomb attack on Colonel Gadaffi took place with British connivance that very night , and this diverted public attention away from the most crushing defeat Mrs Thatcher's Government ever suffered , largely instigated by the Churches .sx Her Government had insisted on total deregulation , and was not prepared to consider any kind of halfway house .sx