Jeff Fountain and his wife Romkje are the initiators of the Schuman Centre for European Studies. They moved to Amsterdam in December 2017 after living in the Dutch countryside for over 40 years engaged with the YWAM Heidebeek training centre. Romkje was founder of YWAM The Netherlands and chaired the national board until 2013. Jeff was YWAM Europe director for 20 years, until 2009. Jeff chaired the annual Hope for Europe Round Table until 2015, while Romkje chaired the Women in Leadership network until recently. Jeff is author of Living as People of Hope, Deeply Rooted and other titles, and also writes weekly word, a weekly column on issues relating to Europe.
The success of president-elect Donald Trump appears to have emboldened Russia to increase attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure and civilian population. While drones and missiles attack, the church continues to meet, worship, and pray in Ukraine.
The election of Donald Trump continues to reverberate around the world leaving many non-Americans in shock and disbelief, and concerned for our global future. The end of last week held several shocks for our regular columnist based in Amsterdam.
Halloween, Reformation Day, All Saints Day, and the Guy Fawkes commemorations all have roots back into European and English Church history. Here we are reminded of the Christian contexts within which these now highly commercialized occasions came about.
A simple focus on workplace involvement into a Sunday service liturgy has the potential to activate more effective witness among church goers. It is being used effectively in Anglican churches in England and could add new life to congregations elsewhere too.
European delegates are right now arriving in Korea to join over 5000 Christian leaders from all over the world in the Fourth Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization, starting tomorrow (Sunday).
Superhuman efforts by the some of the world’s fittest and ablest bodies riveted our attention on the Paris Olympic Games in recent weeks. These coming days, the Paralympic Games will bring us more athletic feats, this time performed by the heroic efforts of those living with disabilities. They are declaring to the world that social value and human dignity are not rooted in physical perfection.
On July 26, in New Delhi, India, UNESCO announced that the small Saxon town of Herrnhut close to the German-Polish border has been recognized as a World Heritage Site, along with two other Moravian settlements planted from Herrnhut in the 18th century in Northern Ireland and Pennsylvania, USA.
The violence tolerated or even encouraged to please the crowds in Olympia followed naturally from worship of such a god. Deaths and injuries were extremely common. The pankration was a no-holds brawl mix of wrestling, boxing and street fighting in which kicks to the groin, deliberate dislocations of shoulders and ankles, chokeholds and breaking opponents’ fingers were all a part.
We Westerners, who have only known the seventy years of peace sustained by the international order ushered in after World War Two, know little of the anxiety and fear Ukrainians and others in war zones experience daily.
Russian propaganda that Vladimir Putin is ‘protecting Christianity’ against Satanism and neo-Nazism flies in the face of reliable reports from numerous sources of the brutal and ruthless persecution of Christians in the occupied Ukrainian territories.
In a secular society where ‘faith-based’ learning institutions are often viewed as fossils of a bygone age, education today is widely considered the rightful domain of secular governments. Should governments even allow ‘special’ religious-based education anymore? Hasn’t religion caused so many conflicts in the past? Shouldn’t education be based on scientific facts, not ‘superstitious’ beliefs? Even believers have to ask themselves, does Christian education matter anymore?
Freedom to do what we want – rather than what we ought – is deceptive. Yet we live in a society where the right to be free to do what you like is widely accepted. It’s called liberalism. We are autonomous individuals, we are told, free to pursue self-interest, free to discover our ‘authentic selves’. At the same time, freedom is a concept championed by Christian thinkers throughout history. Freedom of conscience, closely linked with freedom of worship, is the keystone of all freedoms. Luther’s i
