August 5, 2019
How can we nourish our own spiritual lives through drawing from historical wells? This was the focus of our daily meditations during the Masterclass in European Studies last week in Amsterdam. With a dozen participants from five European countries, we explored some of the many rich resources often neglected in free church circles, some from […]
July 8, 2019
Three Dutch words, ‘God roept u’, shine out in blue neon lights on the roofline of the Samaritan’s Inn, next to the words ‘Jesus loves you’ we wrote about last week. Meaning ’God calls you’, these words have been visible to all entering and leaving Amsterdam Central Station since the Second World War, formerly painted […]
July 1, 2019
When visitors to Amsterdam step out of the Central Railway Station, they may be surprised to be greeted with the words, ‘Jesus loves you’, lit up in blue neon lights on top of one of the most prominent buildings in the immediate vicinity. After all, in most people’s minds, Amsterdam is not associated with spirituality of […]
June 25, 2019
Forty years ago this summer, my wife Romkje and I and our eight-month-old baby boy moved into the house next to our newly-purchased laundry building, close to the Heidebeek training centre in the Dutch countryside. What we were supposed to use the building for, we were not sure at the time. Maybe we were just […]
June 17, 2019
On June 17 in 1722, a Bohemian refugee named Christian David felled the first tree to start building a village that would become known as Herrnhut. David had led a bunch of fugitives from their home country across the border from German Saxony in search of safety from religious persecution. Since the Thirty Years’ War, […]
June 10, 2019
Pentecost is a good moment to take a reality check concerning any lurking idolatry of nationalism in our hearts. The events described by Luke in the opening chapters of The Acts of the Apostles remind us that the end goal of God’s purposes in human history is the ingathering of a multi-ethnic global church: ‘from […]
June 3, 2019
When was the last time you held a banknote to the light to check the watermark? Maybe if you happen to be a bank clerk or a cashier at the check-out counter, you do that daily. But for the vast majority of us, we rarely think about it. The Euro notes, for example, show a […]
May 27, 2019
What would Victor Hugo have made of this weekend’s European elections? The great French author of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Miserables belonged to a long line of thinkers and visionaries stretching back to William Penn (who proposed a European Parliament as early as 1693), who foresaw the day when the nations of […]
May 22, 2019
What if the European Parliament got bogged down with the same kind of impasse we have seen recently in Westminster? This could be the outcome of this week’s European parliament elections, probably the most crucial in the forty years of the parliament’s existence. Much is at stake in this decisive phase of Europe’s future. Brexit […]
May 13, 2019
“Without its Christian identity, the European Union represents nothing more than a supranational bureaucratic framework from which an increasingly large number of European nation-states feel estranged.” In clear, direct language, the audience in the imposing Patriarchal Palace in Bucharest heard the former Romanian ambassador to the Vatican, Paris and Lisbon open this year’s State of […]
May 6, 2019
Thursday this week is Europe Day, May 9, a day to celebrate our belonging to a family of peoples which have lived together in peace for an unprecedented 74 years. With our Schuman Centre colleagues in Romania, we will hold a Europe Day Celebration in the Patriarchal Palace, Bucharest, on Thursday at 19.30. Dr Teodor […]
April 30, 2019
This last weekend was Easter, again – at least in Orthodox Europe and other Eastern Churches. And the Orthodox really know how to celebrate Easter in grand style. In Romania last week, I happened to be passing the Patriarchal Cathedral in Bucharest after talking through logistics at the Patriarchal Palace where we will hold next […]
