Give thanks for the hundreds of churches and thousands of folk who have taken part in the forty days of prayer during Lent, and for the positive testimonies starting to come in from folk responding to the Trypraying adverts on buses all over Scotland and the Trypraying booklet. John Wesley said, ‘God does nothing redemptively except through prayer.’ One of Jesus’ last recorded acts was to pray for all those who would believe in Him, and that all those believers would be united in relationship ‘as one’; not as identical clones, but as one loving family with all the diverse variety and richness of character, personality, gifting and purpose you see in any family - all given by our Father, the ultimate Creator, to fulfil His plans on earth. God’s plan is nothing less than the complete transformation of society: turning from darkness to light, from sinful independence from God to complete dependence on Him, bringing in the rule and reign of His Kingdom.

In Spain hundreds of processions take place at Easter. Some local processions of penitents can be very serious with people wearing white cloaks and burka-type hoods. In Greece, people hurl clay pots from windows and balconies onto the streets. It’s not clear what the origin of this custom is. Norwegians have recently begun having an Easter Crime Genre (Påskekrim) when they read crime novels over the Easter weekend! Portuguese celebrations include many locals dressing up to recreate scenes of the story of Christ’s resurrection and collecting donations for widows and widowers. Polish artists follow an egg-painting tradition and transform thousands of eggs into beautiful paintings. In Germany on Good Friday, dancing and loud music are banned. The sixty-year-old law has become increasingly controversial: Germany is home to millions of Muslim, atheist and Jewish citizens who are also affected by the ban.

Shortly after the attacks in Brussels were carried out, a wave of anti-Muslim sentiment began hitting social media, with people using the hashtag #StopIslam. Hundreds of thousands of messages with that hashtag have been posted across the world on Twitter, according to Dataminr, a monitoring service. By Wednesday morning Twitter users were using the social media platform in a war of words, and some believed that comments on the #StopIslam hashtag platform were beginning to be censored due to its trending so powerfully. Initially users tweeted with the tag to express their frustration with another terrorist attack as well as the politicians who refuse to link the extremism with Islam. As the tag spawned a huge wave of tweets from around the world, people began using it to argue against condemning an entire religious group for the attacks. Other messages posted were ‘Christianity must be disempowered and demonised’, ‘Islam must be empowered and promoted’, and ‘#StopIslam is trending worldwide. There will never be peace in the Western world until Islam is gone’. See also:

A series of deadly explosions rocked Brussels on Tuesday, targeting the Belgian capital's main airport and metro system. Christians across Brussels have called for prayer. The coordinated attacks came as the city was on a high level of alert following the arrest of Paris atrocity suspect Salah Abdeslam last week. The Archbishop of Canterbury said: ‘In the great Holy Week of Christian prayer and mercy, the Brussels attacks shock all those who seek peace and justice through the terrible cruelty and utter separation from all that is of God. Once again we see the contrast between the vain efforts to terrify through indiscriminate murder and the call of God to us to show mercy, seek peace and pursue it. Let us at every service this week pray for those caught up in the traumatic events at the airport and in the city of Brussels.’