✝ FAITH IN FOCUS

A Word From Pastor Duke

Friend, I have spent more than thirty years watching people declare the church tired, outdated, and on its way out. They are usually wrong. This week the headlines told the opposite story. In the Netherlands, one of the most secular nations on earth, tens of thousands of believers, many of them young, gathered in a field around an empty cross and worshiped a living God. In China, a congregation kept singing while police walked through their service. And in Britain, a member of the House of Lords stood up and told her nation that it cannot survive without the very faith so many had written off.

Put those three stories side by side and a pattern appears. The gospel is not retreating. It is advancing in the secular West, holding firm under pressure, and being recognized again as the foundation a civilization is built upon. None of this depends on our optimism. It depends on the One who promised that the gates of hell would not prevail against His church. Read these stories this week and let them lift your eyes. The Kingdom you belong to cannot be shaken.

— Pastor Duke Taber

Christian News This Week

🔥 Revival Erupts in Europe’s Most Secular Nation

More than 60,000 Christians poured into the Walibi event grounds in Biddinghuizen, Netherlands, this month for the 56th annual Opwekking Pentecost Conference, a four-day gathering whose Dutch name simply means “revival.” Organizers estimated that roughly 20,000 people packed the main Sunday worship service alone, with thousands more following from surrounding fields and outdoor screens. The 2026 theme, “I Am,” pointed back to the moment God revealed Himself to Moses at the burning bush.

What makes this remarkable is the soil it grew in. About 60 percent of Dutch citizens claim no religious affiliation at all, yet a growing share of those gathering are under thirty. Conference director Lourens du Plessis preached from Exodus 17, recalling how Moses held up his hands during Israel’s battle at Rephidim, and a large empty cross stood at the center of the grounds as believers from many backgrounds shared Communion together.

Even more striking were the testimonies of faith forged in suffering, and the worship that continued late into the night as young people sang and prayed on the field. European evangelist Jean-Luc Trachsel described the wind of revival blowing stronger than ever across the continent, with similar gatherings reported across more than twenty cities in France. The experts keep declaring European faith dead. God keeps proving them wrong.

Source: 60,000 Christians Rally for Jesus in One of the World’s Most Secular Countries — AnsweredFaith.com​

⛪ An Underground Church Keeps Praising Through a Raid

Reports out of China this week describe another confrontation between government authorities and believers worshiping outside state-approved churches. According to church accounts, more than fifty police officers and security personnel entered a hotel ballroom near Jiangyou around 11 a.m. on a Sunday, where members of the Early Rain Covenant Church had gathered for worship. More than thirty believers were reportedly detained for questioning, including leaders Yan Hong and Wu Wuqing.

Early Rain is one of China’s most recognized house churches. Founded in 2008, it drew international attention after a 2018 crackdown in which founding pastor Wang Yi was arrested and later imprisoned. Its members have continued to gather under constant scrutiny ever since, choosing to worship independently rather than under government oversight, and accepting the cost that decision carries.

The most powerful part of the story is not the raid but the response. Witnesses said that as officers conducted detentions, many believers refused to scatter. They kept singing hymns, kept praying, and kept encouraging one another. It is the same scene Scripture records when Paul and Silas sang at midnight in a Philippian jail. Walls and officers may disrupt a gathering, but they cannot silence a worshiping heart.

Source: Underground Church Raided During Sunday Service as Christians Continued Praising God — AnsweredFaith.com​

🏛️ A Baroness Calls the West Back to Its Foundation

In a Telegraph interview published June 21, 2026, Baroness Philippa Stroud offered a warning few British politicians are willing to voice so plainly: Western civilization will struggle to survive without a robust Christian foundation. Stroud is no fringe voice. She is a sitting member of the House of Lords, chair of the Social Metrics Commission, and a co-founder of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship.

Her argument is not that faith should be imposed on anyone. It is that a society needs a moral architecture to hold together, and that when that architecture crumbles, everything built on top of it eventually crumbles too. She points instead to what she calls “the better story” that Christianity has always told about human dignity, purpose, and community. Her February 2026 ARC Conference drew more than 4,000 leaders from over 80 countries around exactly that conviction.

Stroud has spent years studying poverty, family breakdown, and community fragmentation, and she notes that the decline of Christian influence does not produce a neutral society but a fractured one. She has also reminded Parliament that some 245 million Christians worldwide face severe risk simply for practicing their faith. Her words echo an ancient line of Scripture: “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.”

Source: Baroness Stroud: Christianity Essential for Civilization’s Survival in June 2026 — AnsweredFaith.com​

Weekly Devotion: A Kingdom That Cannot Be Shaken

Read the news long enough and it is easy to conclude that faith is a fading thing, a candle guttering in a strong wind. This week tells a different story. A revival in a nation everyone had written off. A church that would not stop singing when the police arrived. A public servant insisting that the West cannot stand without the very faith it has been quietly abandoning. Three very different scenes, one quiet thread running through them all: there is a Kingdom in this world that cannot be shaken.

Notice where it shows up. Not only in the comfortable places, but in the hard ones. The same Spirit drawing tens of thousands of young Europeans to an empty cross in a Dutch field is the Spirit steadying the hands of believers in a Chinese ballroom as their leaders are led away. Revival and persecution are not opposites. They are two sides of the same advancing Kingdom, and both reveal a God who is utterly unbothered by our statistics and our low expectations.

That is why the writer of Hebrews tells us we are “receiving” this Kingdom, present tense, even now. It is not a possession we manufacture by our own optimism. It is a gift we are being handed, day by day, by the One who holds it. Everything else can be shaken, governments, cultures, the spirit of an age, but the Kingdom we belong to will still be standing when all of it has passed away.

And here is the comfort in that. You do not have to hold the Kingdom together. You only have to belong to it. The Dutch worshipers did not engineer a revival; they simply drew near, and God drew near to them. The Chinese believers did not overpower their circumstances; they simply kept their eyes on Jesus and kept singing. Faithfulness, not force, is what the unshakable Kingdom asks of us.

So wherever this week finds you, in a season of breakthrough or a season of pressure, anchor yourself to what cannot be moved. Draw near to God and let Him draw near to you. Keep singing, even if the room around you is shaking. The cross is still standing, the Spirit is still moving, and the Kingdom you serve has no end.

A Prayer for This Week:

Recommended Reading from AnsweredFaith.com

If this week’s stories stirred something in you, here are three studies to take you deeper into the themes behind the headlines.

​How Worship Fuels Revival: Lessons from Church History and Scripture​

The gathering in the Netherlands was, at its heart, a worship gathering, and that is no accident. This study traces how genuine revival has so often risen out of wholehearted praise, and why worship remains the soil that awakening grows in.

​Worship as a Weapon: The Battle Strategy Most Christians Miss​

When the believers in China kept singing through a police raid, they were doing something deeply biblical. This article unpacks how praise becomes an act of spiritual resistance, the same strategy that won the day for Jehoshaphat in 2 Chronicles 20.

​The Hebrews 11 Hall of Faith: A Deep Dive​

From a Dutch field to a Chinese ballroom to the floor of the House of Lords, this week was full of ordinary people trusting God against the odds. Walk through Scripture’s own roll call of the faithful and see the family you have joined.

This Week’s Resources

📥 Digital Bible Study | AnsweredFaith.com

​13 Bible Study Lessons: Worship A 13-week small group series by Pastor Duke Taber

Two of this week’s three stories turned on worship: revival breaking out in a worship gathering, and a persecuted church refusing to stop praising. If those scenes stirred a hunger in you, this is the study to feed it. Across thirteen lessons it moves past worship as music alone and into worship as a whole-life response to God, drawing on Scripture, church history, and the prophetic and spiritual-warfare dimensions of praise.

Designed for small groups, home gatherings, and personal study, each session is built to spark real conversation and real change in how your people approach the presence of God. If your group has been praying for revival, this is a practical place to begin preparing the soil for it.

​→ Download the Worship Bible Study​

📚 Book Recommendation | Available on Amazon

​God’s Smuggler by Brother Andrew, with John and Elizabeth Sherrill (Chosen Books)

No book fits this week better. Brother Andrew was a young Dutchman, from the very nation now seeing revival, who smuggled Bibles past the guards and into the closed countries of the Iron Curtain, and who went on to found Open Doors, the ministry that still serves persecuted believers like those raided in China this week. His true story ties together every headline in this issue: a secular homeland, an underground church, and a God who simply will not be locked out.

A beloved classic with thousands of glowing reviews across Amazon and Goodreads, it reads like a thriller and prays like a devotional. Readers across generations call it one of the most faith-strengthening books they have ever picked up. If you want your trust in God’s provision stretched, start with Andrew’s simple border-crossing prayer: “Lord, make seeing eyes blind.”

​→ Find God’s Smuggler on Amazon​

**Weekly Christian NewsletterWeek of June 16–22, 2026***Faith in FocusWeek of June 16–22, 2026Serving the Body of Christ*