September 2, 2023
A Catholic friend used to tell me how handy it was to be a Catholic because when you needed a parking place you could pray to St Christopher. Or when you had lost something you called on St Antony of Padua. In times of fear, St Michael the Archangel was the one to beseech, or […]
August 27, 2023
“A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.” One of the trends of change in European society today is that freedom of conscience, of expression and of religion is being trumped by laws against ‘hate speech’ and ‘discrimination’. Equality […]
August 12, 2023
Weekly Word resumes in two weeks, on Saturday 26 August, after the Summer School for European Studies.
August 5, 2023
Rembrandt’s dramatic painting of Jesus and his disciples caught in a storm on the Sea of Galilee in a Dutch fishing boat contextualised the gospel story for his seventeenth-century viewers. Still in his mid-twenties when he painted this, his only seascape, soon after moving to Amsterdam from Leiden, Rembrandt depicted fear and desperation in the […]
July 29, 2023
Winding its way through the streets of ‘the most liberal city in the world’, the rainbow-bedecked tram spreads its message in big letters along the roofline: ‘You are included’. Celebrating two weeks of street parades, canal processions, park festivities, concerts, dinners and open air cinemas, Queer and Pride Amsterdam 2023 this year is going to […]
July 22, 2023
A dinner-table conversation this week turned to the question of whether it is correct to talk about ‘the Ukraine’ or just ‘Ukraine’. That seemingly-innocent three-letter definite article – ‘the’ – upsets a lot of Ukrainians when Westerners unwittingly add it before the name of their country. For good reason. It represents a view of their […]
July 15, 2023
(The second of two WW’s on the emergence of the contemporary worship movement) The 1972 Munich Olympic Games brought young people from every continent to evangelise among athletes and spectators from the communist world, the Muslim world and the free world. A thousand young people converged on a castle in a Bavarian village called Hurlach. […]
July 8, 2023
Few worship leaders today are old enough to remember a time when ‘contemporary worship’ did not yet exist. A visit last week from Steve and Marie Goode, old colleagues whom I first met in 1974 before I joined YWAM, took me back to my own exposure to the pioneers of that new genre in a […]
July 1, 2023
Slowly and painfully, the unfinished business of the Dutch slavery heritage is forcing its way into the collective conscience of the Dutch population. Today the speech of King Willem-Alexander at the Keti Koti (broken chains) Festival in Amsterdam’s Oosterpark, celebrating the end of slavery in the Caribbean and Surinam, was awaited apprehensively by descendants of […]
June 24, 2023
Believers across Europe would affirm the statement that ‘Jesus is Lord of all’ with a hearty ‘Amen!’ Yet when it comes to spelling out what the lordship of Jesus looks like outside of church affairs, or personal discipleship, where do we begin? Where, for example, can we go to learn about what that lordship means […]
June 17, 2023
George Verwer truly lived a radical life. He met the radical Jesus at age sixteen and served him until his death aged 84 on April 14. Today, Saturday June 17, a thanksgiving celebration of his life will be live-streamed at 14:00 UK time (15:00 CET) from the centre of his adopted home city of London […]
June 11, 2023
Overshadowed by the catastrophic destruction of the Kakhovka dam in Ukraine, a huge step was taken this week by ministers of EU members towards agreement on how to handle the millions of those trying to find safety in Europe. While many of us may be happy to leave such matters up to the politicians, migration, […]
