It has often been on the margins in history, outside established power centers, that fresh social and religious movements have begun. This may be true again today globally as a world stricken by plague faces the shifting winds of sudden change. It was true in the fifth and sixth century onwards, as on the Western… Read More New life on the fringes/margins of Empire
How does the future look to you? In parts of the world like where I am at present, covid is retreating and life begins to return to ‘normal’. You may be reading this in a nation or region where life is anything but normal, instead perhaps in lockdown or curfew of some kind. In just… Read More The Future is as Bright as the Promises of God
Last week, on July 8, was the 40th year anniversary of one of the greatest hope-crushing days of my life. I had just completed my first year serving with the mission group, YWAM, that I am still with. On that day in July, 1980, I was to have departed from Sea-tac airport in Seattle with… Read More Ever feel your hopes have been crushed?
Most of us stay in our little boxes, sometimes for a lifetime. That box may be a way of thinking, a way of approaching faith, a political party, you fill in the blank. But now more than ever in these divided times and fractured communities we need boundary crossers. People who will leave their comfortable… Read More We need more ‘boundary crossers’
Historical events of injustice, whether personal or national, leave scars. Sometimes the scars are memories, sometimes so traumatic it seems the future will be forever dark. One of the saddest things of history, however well events are remembered, is that it often does not inform our future behavior. On Nov. 3, 1885, in the city… Read More Chinese Expulsion of 1885: the “Tacoma Method”
The title of this post, of course, is a bit misleading. There is really nothing anyone can do to ‘make Asia great again’, or indeed to stop it becoming great. Over five billion people, the majority of the earth’s population, live from the shores of the Mediterranean in West Asia all the way to Japan’s… Read More Make Asia Great Again
We have finished the first week of another School of Redemptive History. There have been many highlights as we look deeply into history and ponder the mysteries and challenges of what has gone before. But one statement of our first week speaker has struck me very hard: If you love people you will love pain.… Read More ‘If you love people you will love pain’
If you have read my blog before, you have seen posts on Asian history and its often surprising (to some) place of having the first universities, a strong Christian faith until the 14th century, having the first hospitals and much more. Asia was also very inter-connected through the silk roads and its many branches, both… Read More The Future is Asian
Many words have already been written about the death this week of John Allen Chau, a 27 year old American from my home state of Washington. Chau was killed in the North Sentinel Island, part of the Andaman and Nicobar Island chain and a Union Territory of India. Desiring to share the love of Christ… Read More When Love Trumps All
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Encounters of Faith in Asia: Past, Present and Future 