How Not to Pray

Thoughts and Encouragements: From Scripture, we can learn a lot about how to pray, but we can also find examples of how we should not pray. Jesus speaks in the Gospel of Matthew: “When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites who love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men” (Matthew 6:5). At the time when the New Testament was written, religious leaders were highly regarded people in high positions within society. Jesus refers to them as those who love for society to treat them […]

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“The Church of Tomorrow” – Annual Conference of the Pentecostal European Fellowship (PEF) in Moldova

The morning plenary session on March 5, 2025, in Chișinău (Republic of Moldova) marked the beginning of the annual Conference of the Pentecostal European Fellowship (PEF) with a blessed time of worship, led by the local Elim Church, and the keynote message from Chairman Marek Kaminski on the conference theme, “The Church of Tomorrow.” In the afternoon, the PEF General Assembly took place, presenting reports and plans, as well as electing the new Presidium for the 2025-2028 term. Marek Kaminski was re-elected as Chairman, Friedhelm Holthuis as Vice-Chairman, Dirk Glaser as Treasurer, while Ishan Özbek […]

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God’s Breath

Reading: Psalm 104 Reflection: Our existence depends on God’s breath, and Psalm 104 best describes that joy on the day of Pentecost. In that psalm, it emphasizes how a creature breathes, comes to life, blossoms, progresses, and grows when God sends His breath. However, when He withdraws His breath, the creature dies. The Creator of the Universe sustains the life of His creation through His precise, reliable, and rhythmic breathing. God bestows His life-giving breath upon us from the moment of our birth when we take our first deep breath of earthly life. We rely […]

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Conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary

Reading: Conceived by the power of the holy spirit and born of the Virgin Mary (Apostle’s Creed) Reflection: The Christian faith is grounded in the historical event in time, of the man, Jesus of Nazareth. This article of the Creed points us to the beginning of that history, a beginning that the Church celebrated only a few days ago, on March 25, at the Feast of the Annunciation. Our Orthodox brothers and sisters will celebrate this feast on 7 April, so if you missed it you get a second chance! In the Evangelical (or Pentecostal / […]

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And in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord

(The text was previously published on 26.03.2020.) Reading: And in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord. (Apostles’ Creed) Reflection: Yesterday, Bill Rieflin passed away. You probably don’t know who he is. He played drums in some of my favorite bands like Lard, Ministry, and Swans. However, he will be remembered as the second drummer of R.E.M. This band, the flagship of American alternative rock, introduced us – Bosnians and Herzegovinians – to the terrible year of 1992 with the song ‘Losing My Religion’. Upon hearing this news, I remembered that time and the strange […]

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