October 12, 2024
This week, while revisiting the Van Gogh Museum here in Amsterdam with friends, I was struck again by how much Vincent’s deep religious faith is ignored and misunderstood by the ‘experts’. Take van Gogh’s Still life with Bible, shown here above. The text displayed next to the painting explains that the picture supposedly ‘symbolizes the […]
October 5, 2024
A simple transferable idea is transforming the understanding of the gospel, church and witness in many churches across Britain. But as far as I know it hasn’t yet made the leap across the Channel (I’d be glad to hear I’m wrong). It’s called This Time Tomorrow, or simply, TTT. Briefly, it involves a short slot […]
September 28, 2024
From the opening plenary to today’s closing deliberations, the Lausanne 4 Congress on World Evangelisation held this past week in Seoul, Korea, addressed some of most pressing issues facing humanity today. Daily reports can be viewed here: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5. The implications for missions of sexuality, creation care, […]
September 21, 2024
European delegates are right now arriving in Korea to join over 5000 Christian leaders from all over the world in the Fourth Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization, starting tomorrow (Sunday). Fifty years after the landmark Lausanne Congress in Switzerland, guided by Billy Graham and John Stott, the process of listening, consulting and collaborating through congresses, […]
September 14, 2024
Today I am celebrating my 75 years of pilgrimage on this planet with my family on a sailing outing. Our vessel is the 125-year old tjalk, or sailing barge, appropriately-named Jacobsschelp. For the ‘St James shell’ or scallop is the symbol of the popular Camino pilgrimage converging on the tomb of the Apostle James […]
September 8, 2024
September 7, 2024
We are privileged to be witnessing the greatest transition in world mission ever in history. The gospel is exploding in the Majority World. Missionaries from countries closed to the gospel when I was born, exactly 75 years ago today, are going to the least, the last and the lost in every corner of the world. […]
August 31, 2024
‘By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; he went out, not knowing where he was to go.’ This verse from Hebrews 11:8 was foremost in my mind half a century ago as I left New Zealand for the first time. […]
August 24, 2024
Superhuman efforts by the some of the world’s fittest and ablest bodies riveted our attention on the Paris Olympic Games in recent weeks. These coming days, the Paralympic Games will bring us more athletic feats, this time performed by the heroic efforts of those overcoming disabilities. They are declaring to the world that social value and […]
August 17, 2024
My first encounter with Amsterdam, fifty years ago this week, was shrouded in confusion. I was on my way to the first of several concerts in the city with the Shekinah Company of some sixty singers, dancers and musicians, of which I was manager. We had just completed a concert tour in England from York […]
August 10, 2024
Competing at the Olympics is like experiencing ten funerals for every wedding. Every one person’s victory is at the expense of many others’ agony of defeat. So writes Ashley Null, chaplain to elite athletes and coaches, who also is an Anglican priest and an academic. The following letter to the Olympians is taken from his […]
August 3, 2024
The small Saxon town of Herrnhut close to the German-Polish border has been recognised as a World Heritage Site, along with two other Moravian settlements planted from Herrnhut in the 18th century in Northern Ireland and Pennsylvania, USA. This was announced a few days ago at the meeting of the UN Educational, Scientific, Cultural and […]
