Fortunately, success doesn't depend on gung-ho acts of individual heroism. Rather, it's based on teamwork and trust. Your mates look out for you, and you for them. What's more, such life-saving interdependence creates the safe space in which your individual gifts and skills can flourish. 

Switch the context from battlefield to Britain's local churches today - how does the '3M' maxim apply?

'Our experience of working with churches is that people feel liberated when they see how their daily lives can be wrapped up into God's mission,' comments the director of the London Institute of Contemporary Christianity's (LICC) Imagine Project Neil Hudson.

'They want to grow and be fruitful.  But it's hard to keep going on your own. So our 'mates' matter. And this is the starting point for our new course Life on the Frontline.'

The reality is that we all have a 'frontline' where we connect to people who don't know Jesus. So Life on the Frontline is designed to help people in small groups recognise one another's frontlines, see how God may be using them there, pray with real purpose for one another and experience how the Bible helps us respond to God on our frontlines.

Each session begins with a short, documentary-style DVD film featuring real-life stories that help people discover the potential in their own contexts.

Take stores employee Ed, for example. Convinced that he was called to service anywhere but in his workplace, Ed was frustrated by God's seeming refusal to move him out of the warehouse. It was then that he made his life-changing decision: to arrive ten minutes earlier every morning.

This gave him time to chat to his co-workers and slowly forge better relationships with them. Ed didn't 'push' his faith on to them, but nor did he make a secret of it.

And he felt a new motivation to pray for his colleagues ? and, in whatever way he could, to be a blessing to them. So, not surprisingly, he was prepared when one of them began to share a personal problem with him...

'Unspectacular, perhaps. But definitely transformational,' says Neil.

Life on the Frontline builds on the films, using selected Bible passages and inter-active exercises to explore Christ's call and commission, and how the small group and the wider church can really work to equip and support one another.

The Revd Ian Bunce, BUGB's head of Mission, commended it to all Baptist churches.

'This is an ideal resource for churches seeking to support the daily crossingplaces of their members - whether they're 18 or 80,' he said. 'It's brilliantly put together, accessible and understandable, but not patronising.'

Life on the Frontline is a 6 session DVD-based course. Disk contains videos, Leaders' and Participants' Guides. £8 for one pack; £5 for multipack purchases. Available online from www.licc.org.uk/shop or by phone 020 7399 9555.