March 22, 2025
When global developments or personal difficulties cloud our perspectives, it helps to step back and reflect on our wondrous existence and God’s sustaining grace. We can easily lose sight of how much we are surrounded by wonders and improbabilites, and of how we are being constantly upheld by God’s sustaining grace. The beauty of flowers, […]
March 15, 2025
One of Amsterdam’s best kept secrets is how the city was first put on the European map in the 14th century through a miracle. While many Amsterdammers know nothing about this event, for Dutch Catholics it is no secret. In fact, tonight, after midnight, 7000 of them from all over the Netherlands will be walking […]
March 8, 2025
In twenty-four years of writing Weekly Word, this week’s edition is for me the saddest. The events of the past days and weeks are forcing us to face new realities. The America with which all post-war generations have grown up – symbolised by the Statue of Liberty welcoming the world’s ‘tired, poor, homeless, huddled masses […]
March 1, 2025
History really does matter. History gives us perspective and understanding on where we have come from, who we are and where we are going. History puts wise heads on young shoulders. The Bible takes history very seriously – unlike all other sacred writings. In fact, the Bible is the source of our western understanding of […]
February 22, 2025
Neville Chamberlain looked ominously down on us from his larger-than-life portrait above the mantelpiece in a posh London gentlemen’s club last Saturday. Chamberlain??!! Frankly I was already out of my comfort zone in the elite neighbourhood of Buckingham Palace. But I had agreed to attend a gathering of invited leaders from all continents discussing strategy […]
February 15, 2025
On behalf of the Polish Christian Forum and the European Evangelical Alliance prayer network, the Schuman Centre invites you participate in Warsaw with others from various backgrounds and disciplines across Europe in the STATE OF EUROPE FORUM on May 9th and 10th this year. Daily headlines declare unprecedented and alarming developments in world affairs so […]
February 8, 2025
How historians will view these last two weeks of chaos and turbulence following the inauguration of the new presidential regime in America is too early to say. What is already clear is that something unprecedented in US history is happening. What is not yet clear is if American institutions of democracy and law, and the […]
February 1, 2025
The list is long of prophets and spiritual leaders who dared to speak the truth to rulers who crossed God-ordained thresholds – often at great cost. Their examples should embolden us today to be ready to speak out, and not to bow to power like compliant chaplains, especially when those leaders claim to be defending […]
January 25, 2025
‘Catholic Austria’ was long considered to be the graveyard of missionaries by evangelicals attempting to woo ‘baptised pagans’ into the Protestant fold. Bruce Clewett, pioneer YWAM missionary in Austria, believed praying and working for spiritual renewal within Roman Catholic groups was a more fruitful approach. Last Sunday that fruit was overwhelmingly obvious to the thousands who thronged […]
January 18, 2025
News of a ceasefire breakthrough in Gaza was greeted with celebrations in the streets this week, yet tempered by awareness that lasting peace between Israel and Palestine was still far off. Also this week, the incoming administration in Washington had to admit that boasts of ending Russian aggression in Ukraine on the new president’s first […]
January 11, 2025
Let’s face it folks. We are in for a bumpy ride this year. But you already knew that. Pundits warn that we are heading back to the law of the jungle, a world where might is right and money manipulates. In the first week of this new year, the US president-elect, not yet even sworn […]
January 9, 2025
Tonight, Thursday January 9, at 6pm CET, I talk with Rev Dr Helen Paynter, co-editor of ‘The Church, the far-right and the claim to Christianity’, about the how the political far-right use Christian-sounding themes often disguising values contrary to Christianity. Helen’s focus is Britain, but there is an obvious parallel to Europe as a whole, and […]
