September 30, 2002
Th√©r√®se sat across the table from me in the coffee corner at Heidebeek. Right here among us in Europe, she explained, lived a largely ignored people group with a population roughly equal to that of Germany. This people group, she said, was the poorest, least educated and least evangelized in Europe. Most Christians, leaders included, […]
September 23, 2002
Occasionally over the next few weeks, I plan to share some of the developments from the YWAM Global Leadership Team meeting in Nanning, China, held in August. We’ll talk about Project 4K (a global strategic framework to coordinate YWAM’s efforts in world evangelization), YWAM Affiliates (a potentially large category of enterprises linked to YWAM but […]
September 16, 2002
TIME magazine recently featured the popular American rapture-mentality book series called “Left Behind”. In this series, believers are raptured into glory leaving non-believers on a planet headed towards apocalyptic disaster. Personally, I think the far greater danger is that we, the people of God in Europe, are the ones being “left behind” right now, when […]
September 9, 2002
Loren Cunningham tells a story of two young men asleep on a barge tied to the banks of the river, upstream from the Niagara Falls. During the night, the moorings loosened and the barge began to drift downstream. The growing roar of the falls awakened the young men to the imminent danger facing them. But […]
September 2, 2002
We Europeans sometimes suffer from a Euro-centricism which can blind us to global realities. This is not new. When Marco Polo returned from his momentous Silk Road travels to China in the thirteenth century, people simply didn’t believe his reports of a sophisticated civilization outside of Europe. This blindness led to one of the great […]
August 26, 2002
Only the small sign, ‘Menno’s Fermanje’, distinguished the house from others in the street. Three simple windows and a door. Modest living quarters in the front, and a high roof over the rear section for the farm animals. A typical Friesian village farmhouse, just a few doors down from the towering pre-Reformation church around which […]
August 19, 2002
Millions of Europeans have just returned to the office after summer vacations spent somewhere close to ‘nature’. If that ‘somewhere’ was in Central Europe, that ‘nature’ got a wee bit out of hand last week. This in shrill contrast to the idyllic setting of the thatched-roof cottage where Romkje and I are spending a few […]
August 12, 2002
The Thirteenth of August is a special day in the Moravian calendar. On this date, exactly 275 years ago this year, the members of the Herrnhut community experienced a pentecostal outpouring in the small Lutheran church in the nearby village of Berthelsdorf, Germany. On that Wednesday in 1727, their leader and patron, Count von Zinzendorf, […]
August 5, 2002
Headlines in De Telegraaf last week screamed with bold, underlined letters: “Half city youth of foreign origin“. The opening paragraph explained that more than half of all children under the age of fifteen in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht and The Hague was from foreign extraction, and that the proportion would increase in the coming years. Fear […]
July 29, 2002
Britain last week was in the grip of ‘Big Brother’ television – judging from the tabloid headlines and opportunistic books I saw on sale in the railway stations and airports, passing through on a quick visit. Until recent years, the term ‘Big Brother’ conjured up George Orwell’s famous novel. ‘1984’ was a futuristic scenario of […]
July 22, 2002
Phrases such as ‘good and evil’, ‘moral standards’ and ‘norms and values’ are sprinkled throughout the financial pages of the newspapers these days. The headline in the economic section of one of Holland’s leading papers this weekend read: “Capitalism has gone beyond good and evil”. Bookkeeping scandals in big business have provoked a great discussion […]
July 15, 2002
I was leafing through a book on ‘chaos theory’ in a library once, and discovered one of those yellow ‘post-it’-stickers marking a page in the middle. Scribbled on the sticker was: “Come back later – mind is beginning to boggle”. (‘Chaos theory’ is about the interconnectedness of everything, so that when a butterfly flaps its […]
