September 23, 2023
Getting older confronts us with questions we tend to ignore when young, healthy and active. Questions about how God can allow us and our loved ones to suffer; about why he doesn’t always answer our prayers for healing; about why, if he is all-loving and all-knowing and all-powerful, he doesn’t just step in to clean […]
September 16, 2023
Early this week I tagged along with a group of thirty Dutch visitors to Brussels on a walking tour of the European sector led by two experienced Dutch journalists, Bert and Tijn. For most of those I talked with in the group, Brussels was a fairly unfamiliar city. For widely different reasons, they had responded […]
September 10, 2023
Remember how it was just three short years ago, as globally we were reeling from the shock of a pandemic unlike anything in living memory? Remember the deserted streets and squares, when you could sneak an early morning walk through surreal cityscapes (see my photo of an empty Amsterdam central above)? Or the queues where […]
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 […]
