It’s 5am and still dark as I lie listening to Lizzie’s peaceful breathing next to me. I went to bed last night knowing that a gun battle was taking place in a suburb of Bujumbura where maybe fifty of my colleagues and friends live (with their precious children), and as usual I’m impatient to find…

I wanted to share the below with you (with permission). It’s from one of my best buddies on the planet. He’s a key Burundian leader, very gifted, and willing to lay down his life for the cause. He gave up a very secure international job which guaranteed paying his children’s education to follow God’s call…

Choices are pretty stark these days in Burundi. Stay or flee? About 250,000 fled over the last few months, and you have to be pretty desperate to flee. Once fled, stay fled or return? About 180,000 have stayed away, whether in miserable refugee camps or eating away at fast-diminishing life-savings in rented accommodation in Rwanda…

Greetings from Burundi! I wanted you to be one of the first to know about my new app, the Choose Life 21 Challenge, now ready in the app stores. Wanted or Unwanted, Bitter or Better, Inclusive or Exclusive… there are, unsurprisingly, 21 challenges which you can now receive weekly over the coming few months.   People were…

A story from last week: “A young married woman had left her husband to move in with her mother-in-law. She was demon-possessed and all the regional witchdoctors they consulted couldn’t set her free. Our team showed up, prayed for her, and delivered her. She returned to her own home, and came back the next day…

My heart is thumping in my chest as I write this, and I’m asking you to pray urgently over what is going on in Burundi right now. I don’t want to be alarmist or sensationalistic – it’s hard to predict what is going to happen – but General Adolphe is dead, and the Twittersphere is…

It’s 1141pm, and I’ve just finished a Skype interview with the BBC discussing Burundi’s political situation. Twitter is telling me every few minutes of the shooting going on in different parts of Bujumbura. Tomorrow is election day, the climactic day that we have been building up to for many months. How will it go…?  I…

I’ve been preaching on the Isle of Lewis for the last few days, and having read in the past about the Hebridean revival of 1949-1952, I’ve been looking forward to coming for a long time. I also wanted to compare the dynamics of this revival, having heard from my Grandparents their stories about the East…

People are asking for an update on Burundi, so I’ll weave one into this reflection on what it’s like to be a rich refugee.  Sometimes I can’t understand why I am so blessed/fortunate/lucky (choose your terminology). I review how the family got out of Burundi and it has actually brought tears of gratitude on occasion,…

Burundians are waiting. We don’t know exactly what we’re waiting for – or maybe we do but dread to mention it because it’s too bleak to contemplate. I don’t even want to allow my mind to wander and consider the various potential scenarios because the consequences will be so grim for so many people if…

I’ve been back from Burundi a few days, and it’s been a chance to decompress a little away from the pressures there. A number of you have been asking for details on my movements this summer, so here goes with my speaking schedule. But if you come, there’ll be no guarantee on which man will show…

The MV-Liemba is the oldest ferry in the world. She was built by the Germans on the eve of World War One as a battleship to assure their dominance of Lake Tanganyika. Later she became famous through the book ‘The African Queen’, and then the film starring Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn. Through several sinkings…

John Piper writes: “I feel like I have to get saved every morning. I wake up and the devil is sitting on my face.” Very rarely will a blog make an immediate impact on my life, but this one did. I read it last night and already today my day was different. You can read…

I’m thinking of writing a book called ‘The Curse of Comfort’. Let me explain why by describing my visceral experience of worshipping God in community at church this morning. There were fifty of us adults, and thirty children. That’s under half of what we usually are, because many people have left the country due to…

On 7th May last month in Nyakabiga quartier, Jean, who was a member of the ruling party’s youth wing (Imbonerakure) was seized by a mob of supporters of the opposition, killed and burnt. It was definitely an own-goal by the opposition, who had been claiming the moral high ground in what was framed as a…