December 2, 2023
Advent was never part of the unadorned worship of my evangelical Baptist upbringing which eschewed religious ritual and liturgy. Yet it has been an essential season in the calendar of much of the Church, enriching worship throughout the centuries. Nobody quite knows how or when Advent became part of that calendar. While the dating of […]
November 25, 2023
The good thing about democracy is that everybody gets a vote. The problem with democracy is that the far-sighted and the short-sighted get equal votes. On Thursday morning we woke up in Holland to the shocking news that the national elections had been won overwhelmingly by the blond extreme-right populist politician, Geert Wilders. Many of […]
November 17, 2023
Russia’s efforts to destroy Ukraine’s distinct identity and absorb it into Putin’s vision of Russky mir includes an all-out assault on the culture, the language, the historical records and artistic expressions of Ukrainian national identity. Missile attacks deliberately target galleries, libraries, museums and churches. Some seven hundred churches have been partially or totally destroyed so […]
November 11, 2023
(Apologies for this delayed posting due to technical issues with the website) As our plane winged its way towards Malta, the EU’s southernmost member-state, fond memories of past sojourns stirred a mounting sense of anticipation. Six years have passed since Romkje and I last visited Malta for the 2017 State of Europe Forum. We are […]
November 4, 2023
The story of Martin Luther hammering his 95 theses on the Wittenberg Door – as I referred to last week – is an unconstructive myth. It promotes a wrong picture of the monk as a rebel and is unhelpful for the cause of reconciliation and unity between Protestants & Catholics. This was the thoughtful response by […]
October 28, 2023
So the clocks go back an hour in Europe this weekend. Halloween parties start this weekend and will spill over through the coming week. On Halloween itself, this Tuesday, the last day of October, Protestants will commemorate Martin Luther’s dramatic start to the Reformation. The next day, faithful Catholics will light candles and pray for […]
October 21, 2023
Legendary kiwi singer Steve Apirana is in Amsterdam this weekend to participate in a canal boat tour focusing on the spiritual history of the city. This event commemorates the 400-year anniversary of the Noorderkerk, a Protestant Reformed church built soon after the city embraced the Reformation and began to explode in wealth, population and urban […]
October 14, 2023
The horrific outburst of violence between the Hamas and Israel this week is a challenge to all followers of Jesus not to resort to knee-jerk responses: on the one hand, of blind support for everything Israel does and, on the other, blanket condemnation and fear of all Muslims in general. Much of the world rightly […]
October 7, 2023
Alex was killed in action on the eastern frontline this week in Ukraine. He had attended the last Discipleship Training School in Kyiv before the Russian invasion. Alex was engaged to marry YWAM staff member Milana and planned to join staff himself after his military service. News of his death came during a staff retreat […]
September 30, 2023
Politicians, diplomats and intercessors from the Nordic and Baltic nations gathered in Helsinki for a prayer breakfast near the Finnish parliament on Friday morning this week. They were following in a tradition linking prayer and politics which dates back seventy years to the inaugural Presidential Prayer Breakfast with President Eisenhower in Washington, DC, and […]
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 […]
