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 […]
October 16, 2021
Just over a year ago, I wrote about a gathering of 800 European evangelical leaders originally to have been held in Wisla, Poland, under the umbrella of the Lausanne Movement. The event was to address the challenges of a continent facing crises: politically, economically, socially, environmentally, and spiritually. But yet another crisis, the COVID pandemic, […]
October 9, 2021
A ten-minute bike ride from our apartment in the centre of Amsterdam a few days ago brought my wife and me to an arresting new memorial in the former Jewish Quarter. We cycled past the still functioning 17th century Portuguese Synagogue, and the Jewish Historical Museum housed in four former synagogues. Two yellow triangles loomed […]
October 2, 2021
The Dutch are famous for their ‘polder model’ of consensus decision-making, overcoming differences to achieve a common goal. Ever since the process of land reclamation began in the Middle Ages, communities living in areas below sea-level needed to overlook differences to build and maintain dykes and pumping stations to prevent flooding. So, we are told, […]
