Scandals regarding racism, antisemitism and anti-Muslim rhetoric flood social media and column inches, as protests turn bloody and ripples of war reach our shores. As a result the challenge of protecting UK citizens whilst safeguarding fundamental human rights like freedom of assembly, speech and belief intensifies.
In the broader public discourse, there is a prevalent tendency to focus on house churches or unregistered churches, which capture the limelight in media discussions. However, it is imperative to broaden our perspective and not disregard the significance of official churches or registered churches. According to official statistics, these churches command a substantial membership, exceeding 46 million individuals.
It reads like a horror story, and most of it is quite unbelievable that it can, let alone that it did, happen. The story of Paul Nthenge Mackenzie of the Good News International Church is a tragic event in Kenya’s recent history.
Estimates show that parents of over 70,000 children in Brazil have chosen to homeschool their children—a right that is protected and enshrined in international law. While the decision whether or not to homeschool should be left to the child’s parents, in Brazil, that is no longer the case.
I recently attended a screening of raw footage of the October 7th, 2023, attacks in Israel. It was a spontaneous decision – the queue to get in was long, and I quietly prayed that if I got in, God would help me use it to potentially contribute a meaningful voice to the highly polarized and emotionally charged global debates – including among Christians – on what could possibly bring an end to the war and suffering in the Holy Land.
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.
