Latest Updates

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  How Long, O Lord?

  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.

  5 min read

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  Pain of a different sort: unintended side-effects of short-term medical missions

  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. 

  7 min read

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  The sledgehammer of truth

  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. 

  5 min read

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  Nil by force: a word on militaristic tropes in missions

  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.

  9 min read

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  Language: a barrier or a bridge to people flourishing

  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.

  7 min read