In the 1970s Stanford Experiment, children were driven by tangible, temporal reward if they waited before taking a marshmallow. In real life, for the believer, patience is attached to spiritual and eternal hope and truth, even when the waiting is hard. Patience is a work God does rather than a virtue we must apply.
If Christians simply act out of a felt need to “do something,” their resulting actions could be unhelpful or even counterproductive, like Simon Peter’s pointless, rash aggression in removing the ear of a servant. Wes Granberg-Michaelson's Soulwork of Justice provides much wisdom for Christian social activists. Lent is a perfect time to contemplate it.
Lent can sound sombre, restrictive, even joyless. And yet, year after year, I return to it with fresh gratitude. Lent is God, in his kindness, giving us time. Lent can sound sombre, restrictive, even joyless. And yet, year after year, I return to it with fresh gratitude. Lent is God, in his kindness, giving us time. Here are four reasons why it remains one of the most life-giving seasons of the Christian year.
Helping people explore things like fasting, gratitude, and silence is an evangelistic opportunity we often overlook. As Lent approaches for 2026, here's some fresh thinking about how this can be a prime evangelistic opportunity for the Church.
A few weeks ago, an open-source project was released—an AI personal assistant that is now called OpenClaw. It is a tool to tie together disparate AI systems into a cohesive whole. You need technical expertise to set it up but it very quickly starts to feel icky.
Valentine’s Day arrives every year with remarkable self-confidence. It assumes love should be obvious, effortless, and permanently exciting. Real love, actually, is nothing like that.
Hong Kong businessman and prominent pro-democracy activist Jimmy Lai was sentenced to a horrendous twenty years in jail on Monday February 9th, 2026. For political reasons he is unlikely to die in prison. When released, we will do well to listen to what he has to say about his experience of sweet joy and love in a most unlikely place.
Loud voices still proclaim that Europe’s decline is demographic and religious, driven by migration and the erosion of a once-Christian civilization. But the evidence simply does not support this narrative. Secularism and nationalism pose the far greater threat. The Church must stand against it and seek the common good of all.
What we have seen recently within Iran is a symptom of a deep desire for change, yet change is already happening. The Spirit of God is moving and Iranians are responding. 50,000 of Iran's 75,000 mosques have closed, reportedly as a result of Christian influence. As change continues, may Iranians coming to Christ become a blessing to all nations.
NGO professionals can find themselves traveling from conference to conference, only to encounter the same people and organizations time after time, listen to the same first-year university level talks, and have the same conversations that sound good but effectively go nowhere. Questioning the conference industrial complex.
A recent statement issued by the Heads of Churches of Jerusalem is a timely and necessary intervention that addresses a growing and deeply troubling phenomenon: groups that claim to represent “Christians from the Holy Land” while speaking instead for biblically unfaithful political ideologies, foreign interests, and theological distortions that have little to do with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
A tribute to Martin Goldsmith, a Jewish Christian who with his wife Elizabeth spent ten years as missionaries in South East Asia and were involved from the start with All Nations Christian College. A fluent Russian speaker, and educated in both Russian political thought and theology, Martin pioneered missiology and non-Western theology at All Nations Christian College. His influence spread far internationally.
