January 22, 2022
On a family visit last week, I was taken to the city which a thousand years ago was Europe’s (some say the world’s) largest and most cultured. Not Rome, nor London, nor Paris – but Cordoba, in southern Spain. With an estimated population of 450,000 at the turn of the millennium, the city boasted […]
January 15, 2022
When Henry Vyner-Brooks proposed a double biography about two ‘Fathers of Europe’, his publishers were not convinced it would work. Although they had previously published his Renaissance novels, they balked at his plan to present a ‘set of binoculars with which to observe the drama of western civilisation’. After all, the names and stories of […]
January 10, 2022
Reflections with family and friends on the highs and lows of the past year over the past days were enriched by a story shared in a friend’s Christmas newsletter. After a church service, a young lad was intrigued by the organ console with its maze of stops, pedals and keyboards. When the organist asked him […]
December 18, 2021
The story is irrepressible – despite all efforts to eradicate religion from the ‘winter holiday season’; undeterred by the shrill claims of the ‘New Atheists’ (remember them?) that religion was the root of all evil ; and regardless of the bastardisation of St Nicolas into the crassly commercial Santa Claus. Once again this December, the […]
December 11, 2021
Imagine a world without love: where might is right, money trumps justice, indifference cancels out compassion, and cruelty offers entertainment; a world shaped by the realpolitik of Machiavelli or the nihilism of Nietzsche. Some leading intellectuals fear we are headed towards such a world as the memory of Christian values fades. Public figures including Niall […]
December 4, 2021
Strange, isn’t it, that the death of an old man in southern Turkey nearly 1700 years ago should stir so much anticipation and excitement among European children in 2021? This Monday, December 6, is the Feast of St Nicolas, the day the saint died in Myra, Turkey, in AD 343. For Dutch children, the big […]
November 27, 2021
The COVID pandemic and climate change highlighted at COP26 are forcing global business leaders radically to rethink their key role in healing the world. At the Economics of Mutuality Forum held at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam this week, former Dutch premier Jan Peter Balkenende told business leaders and management experts present that only healed […]
November 20, 2021
Sometimes we need to risk sticking our heads out over the parapet to look beyond our own church, organisation, neighbourhood or nation – to catch a much bigger picture of what God is doing across Europe and in our world. Lausanne Europe 20/21 has been that kind of experience this week: engaging hundreds, and potentially […]
November 13, 2021
As government and NGO delegates travel home this weekend from COP26, the Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Christian leaders are preparing to connect online across Europe for the Lausanne Europe 20/21 Conversation and Gathering starting this Wednesday. Planned to be held in Poland, the event has been forced online by the COVID-19 crisis. How will […]
November 5, 2021
The British philosopher, John Stuart Mills, once said: Let not anyone pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. Are Evangelicals guilty of […]
October 30, 2021
So, what is your view on European integration? Maybe you have never thought about it. A leading pentecostal pastor in the Netherlands told me, with a certain amount of surprise about himself, that he had never ever thought about ‘Europe’. It just had never been on his radar. He’s not alone in his thoughts. If […]
October 23, 2021
“Could someone please explain to me what public theology is?’ The question came from a well-known evangelical author at a recent national gathering of church leaders in the Netherlands, after the term had been used from the platform. My wife, who has been living with the phrase for some time now, was surprised by the […]
