October 12, 2009
Paul’s landing on Malta nearly two thousand years ago was a great deal rougher and wetter than mine was last week. But our separate visits to the island had something in common: we both experienced the ‘unusual kindness’ from the ‘islanders’ referred to by Luke in his detailed account of the famous shipwreck. My three-day […]
October 5, 2009
A month from now, the world’s press will be reminding us of those exciting and heady days twenty years ago, when the Berlin Wall was torn down by sledgehammers and bare hands, and communist regimes across Eastern Europe came tumbling after. These same momentous twenty years have defined my term of office as director of […]
April 27, 2009
A dramatic revolution has been taking place in Britain’s churches over the past decade, encouraging experimentation and innovation outside of a traditional parish structure dating back to the seventh century. The consequences for Europe could be far-reaching, if continental leadership could learn from this model. On the eve of the new millennium, church leaders began […]
March 30, 2009
Twenty years ago, a revolution was about to burst upon the world. An obsolete and inhumane Communist system began to crumble under the weight of its own lies. A generation is now coming into adulthood too young to remember the tense buildup to the euphoric scenes surrounding the breaching of the Berlin Wall, or the […]
March 23, 2009
As the train carried him homewards, the young Greek doctor thought back on the words of the veteran missionary speaker from South Africa: ‘Healthy people walk vertically and look horizontally, but sick people lie horizontally and look vertically.’ Francis Grimm, founder of Hospital Christian Fellowship, had been challenging his audience to see why sick people were […]
March 16, 2009
Ten suspected human traffickers went on trial today in Zwolle, near where I live, as a result of an African pastor friend of mine breaking voodoo curses over young Nigerian girls forced into prostitution.
March 9, 2009
Winston Churchill put it this way: The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see. I like to say it as follows: Short memories breed short-sightedness. Or it’s corollary: Long memories breed far-sightedness. Both these quotes express the reason why my wife and I, each summer, jump in a van, […]
March 2, 2009
The tram arrived at our stop in East Berlin. All seventy of us poured out (it was a long tram). We followed our young guide across the tracks and entered a forest of apartment blocks. And ‘blocks’ they were. Like up-ended egg-cartons. Stalinist baroque, that style was called, all across the old Communist world. This […]
February 23, 2009
Whistleblowing is a thankless job. Ask Paul van Buitenen, now sitting in the European Parliament as a one-man party, Europa Transparant. Shortly before I first met him in Brussels ten years ago, his exposure of corruption and cronyism involving Former French Premier, Edith Cresson, had caused the resignation of the whole of Jacques Santer’s European […]
February 16, 2009
It happened again last week in Berlin. When I asked a German congregation to think of a prominent European personality who had converted to Islam, immediately the name ‘Cat Stevens’ was called out. Now, how long ago was that? It was in 1977-over thirty years ago!-that singer Cat Stevens converted to Islam at the height […]
February 9, 2009
Nobody quite knows which saint gave his name to February 14, the day on which lovers traditionally send each other Valentine’s cards. Biographies of two Valentines honoured on this date, from the second and third centuries, offer no romantic connections. Geoffrey chaucer, author of Canterbury Tales, may have created the Love-factor in the 14th century […]
February 2, 2009
As we drove through the narrow paved streets of the Old City of Riga, Latvia’s capital, we passed shops where angry protestors had smashed windows and looted just two weeks ago. My host’s apartment was just off the Cathedral square, where 10,000 demonstrators had protested peacefully against economic mismanagement and demanded new elections. Most of […]
