In publishing a few of his books, and in welcoming Cliff as a speaker at Carberry Tower, and indeed much earlier in Dundee, our friendship with Cliff and Monica goes back quite a long way! Both were greatly appreciated. I also had a link with Monica and the British Church Growth Association - I think we published a booklet by Peter Bisset for the BCGA, but my memory is hazy. We were in Israel with him in the seminal year of 1986, very exciting it was at that time, and later when Chernobyl and everything else came to pass. Later, I recall writing a foreword to 'Today with Isaiah vol. 3' in 2002.
With Cliff himself, it was so good to be working with someone who had a track record in caring for the poor, but was also conservative in theology; and someone who had a serious biblical attitude to prophecy. He makes me think of the OT scholar Walter Brueggemann, who has written books such as 'The Prophetic Imagination'. Brueggemann takes prophecy seriously and presents it in terms of a vision which would do two things (a) help people to understand and critique current events, and (b) energise them to change things for the better. Brueggemann was facing in USA the same issue as Cliff in Britain. Namely conservatives who saw prophecy only as forecasting future events, and liberals who would simply 'jump from issue to issue'.