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.
During my sixteen years as a missionary in Cambodia, I participated in a couple of short-term medical clinics and observed many. I would be the first to say that seeing a person in pain who is made well by the medicine and care I bring is fulfilling. And if that is all I am after, then it is also praiseworthy.
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.
I think missions influencers resort to militaristic tropes because, when it comes to the sharing of our faith, whether local or cross-cultural, we have a motivational problem. To get more believers ‘committed’ to evangelism, ministry, and missions, influencers too easily twist Scripture to promote a militant activism, casting the ‘great unwashed’, ‘pagan’, or ‘heathen’ as ignorant slaves of our enemy (sin, the powers of darkness, and the Devil) needing to be rescued (by force, if necessary, e.g.
Irrespective of its status or prestige, each language represents somebody’s mother tongue. By this, I mean the first language through which they have been exposed to the world. It informs their sense of identity and provides them with the cultural categories by which they view the world and engage in it.
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.
Africa is a deeply religious continent. So how African individuals and communities understand and express their religions and protect their religious spaces and doctrines from misuse or abuse has implications for wider African society, including the spheres of politics and civil governance. These significantly affect human well-being across the continent.
In his incisive Christianity Today article titled “Xi Jinping Is Not Trying to Make Christianity More Chinese,” Purdue University professor Fenggang Yang draws a distinction between Sinicization, or the cultural adaptation of religion to Chinese culture, and what he calls “Chinafication,” a more literal translation of the Chinese term Zhongguo hua (中国化) used in the current “Sinicization of religion” campaign.
The recent expose by the BBC on the late prophet T. B. Joshua is heart rending. The reports and eyewitness accounts point to what is without a doubt a massive tragedy on many levels. To witness someone in authority in a church be able to perpetuate so much abuse for so long with complete impunity makes your blood boil.
2024 is going to be messy – more crises, more elections and ongoing wars. There will also be incredible opportunities to speak truth and hope into some of the most controversial issues of our day. But will we as the UK church be distracted by division and bury our head in the sand? Or will we see the opportunity offered by the difficult questions of our day to extend wisdom, hospitality, and offer a hopeful way forward?
I love the way Peterson’s Message Bible renders the question and response: Joshua asks, “Whose side are you on—ours or our enemies’?” and the response was, “Neither. I’m commander of GOD’s army. I’ve just arrived.” I launched my 2023 World Evangelical Alliance Mission Commission Leader’s Missions Forecast from this passage. For my January 2024 post, I’ll repeat the introduction of that essay in the hope that it encourages you to take the time to read the rest.
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
