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 center. 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.
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
The stubborn myth that science and faith are diametrically opposed gets knocked about in the current exhibition on ‘the creation of science’ in the Catherijne Convent Museum I visited in Utrecht this week.
Easter, 2022, two months after the Russian invasion began, Volodymyr Zelensky led his nation in prayer for Ukraine from the St Sophia’s Cathedral in Kyiv in a pre-recorded video.
Few of us imagined that the Ukrainian resistance would last long against the feared might of the Russian army. Memories were stirred of the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940 when the vastly outnumbered Dutch army resisted for four days before surrendering on May 14, immediately after Hitler’s ruthless blitzkrieg destroyed the historic heart of Rotterdam.
While praying for Ukraine this week in a zoom connection with YWAM colleagues, I remembered a story once told by the late Argentinian-born evangelist Luis Palau.
A giant three-metre-high replica of an ordinary torsion spring clothespeg arrested my wife and me while walking through a sculpture garden in New Zealand some time ago.
Olga is a survivor. The first time she escaped death was before she was even born. She was a Chernobyl baby. That is, her mother gave birth to her soon after the world’s worst nuclear disaster occurred in Chernobyl in 1986, just 40 kilometres north of Kyiv, close to the Belarusian border. After the reactor of the nuclear power plant exploded, pregnant mothers in Ukraine were ordered to abort their babies. They were told the babies would all be deformed. But Olga’s mother, who lived 400 kilometre
