We join up the dots of life around us to create our own narratives, to explain the realities that we perceive.

Europe and European culture had been shaped overwhelmingly by the gospel story.

Zwolle has never rivalled Rome or Athens, Jerusalem or Constantinople, Paris or London. Yet for over five centuries, millions have been spiritually nourished from this book’s five thousand editions and translations in over fifty languages.

The year 1880 was indeed a pivotal year in Van Gogh’s life, when he rejected institutional Christianity and what he saw as the hypocrisy of the clergy.

Three simple questions on a Sunday morning for anybody working on Monday morning.

While AI does not pose an existential threat to humanity, we must be aware of the concerning ways it is shaping our understandings of God, ourselves, and the world around us.

The Lausanne 4 congress deploys the term ‘polycentric Christianity’ to describe the shift from being solely a ‘EuroAmerican religion’ to a global one.

My pilgrimage started on the other side of the world and has taken me from place to place before eventually starting a new Fountain tribe in the Netherlands. 

‘YWAM Together 2024’ convened 4,500 folk from 110 nations in Manila. Missionaries from countries closed to the gospel 75 years ago today, are going to the least, the last and the lost in every corner of the world. 

What amazing growth has happened both in YWAM and the majority world church in these past fifty-plus years! 

Paralympics are declaring to the world that social value and human dignity are not rooted in physical perfection. 

While some worldviews may be closer to a biblical understanding of reality than others, they are still the wrong map.

Herrnhut, recognised as a World Heritage Site, was established by refugees fleeing from the Catholic Counter-Reformation in Bohemia and Moravia.

Throughout the centuries, Christianity and the Olympic Games have had an ambivalent relationship. For good reasons. But today  Christians have come to see major sports gatherings as God-given opportunities for evangelism.

July 17, 2014, was the Dutch 9/11. More Dutch were killed on that day per head of population than Americans on 9/11.

The instinct to withdraw into isolationism and nationalism is understandable, yet it plays into the hands of authoritarian, anti-democratic forces.

Keir Starmer’s parents reportedly named him after Keir Hardie, the radical Christian co-founder of the Labour Party. Unlike Hardie, the new UK prime minister belongs to the 37% of Brits who tick the ‘no religion’ box.

For those of us who have grown up so familiar with stories and images of the cross, we are not shocked, horrified and repulsed by the reality it represented.

Russian propaganda that Vladimir Putin is ‘protecting Christianity’ against Satanism flies in the face of reliable reports from numerous sources of the ruthless persecution of Christians.

Only in relatively recent times has much of education become secularised. Compulsory and universal education is simply taken for granted. But how did we get there?

As we go to the voting booths this week to decide who will represent us in the European Parliament, we need to vote for candidates who understand both the calling and responsibility of Christians to be light, salt and leaven in society.

May our votes in the upcoming elections go to those whose worldview promotes long-term sustainability. 

We live in a fallen world. All of us – our politicians, our leaders, ourselves – are tainted by sinful tendencies. Which is why we need institutions to keep power in check.

The workings of the EU institutions can seem distant, foreign and boring. Yet so much happens there that shapes our European way of life, whether we realise it or not.

Few Europeans today could tell you what these days stand for. Fewer still would have ever thought about the link between the two.