Despite a most complicated year for all of us due to COVID-19, we do thank the Lord for so many blessings, including the fact that we now have…

A new graduate in our family!

calvintours.com

My new website!


Screen shot one minute before the launch! 
 

In our last newsletter I told you about the publishing of my new book A Walking Guide to John Calvin’s Geneva, a project that took me 11 years to accomplish. Well, last week, my new website www.calvintours.com was launched, thanks to John Martin in Los Angeles, who knows Geneva well and was able to perfectly capture the Calvin Tours aura in this website! 

 

The purpose of Calvin Tours is to give visitors a compact yet thorough, exciting, and historical Reformation tour of the old town of Geneva, highlighting the life, times, history, preaching, theology, surroundings, buildings, and ministry of John Calvin. Calvin Tours will seek to impress upon the visitor the extent to which John Calvin – a verse-by-verse preacher of the Word of God - impacted the entire world in key domains of everyday life, including government, democracy, education, industry, refugees, music and much more, the formidable repercussions of which are still being felt today, over 500 years later, not only in Geneva, but in Switzerland, Europe, and in the entire world!

 

My desire is to train and remunerate Christian tour guides to enable them to give historically accurate, energetic, and Gospel-centered Reformation tours, with tour fees quite a bit lower than those charged by Geneva Tourist Bureau for other types of Geneva tours, as our specialty is strictly Reformation Tours.  

 

Thank you for praying that Calvin Tours will help Geneva regain a grasp of its thrilling and often misunderstood Gospel-centered history. 

The Hair Bible
 

 

As we celebrate the birth of Christ at Christmas this year, it is good to pause and consider what worshiping Jesus has meant for so many in history and even up to this day. For some, worshiping Jesus has meant persecution and death. The photo above is of a Hair Bible displayed at the Reformation Museum in Geneva. It is called a Hair Bible because of its tiny size, which allowed it to easily be hidden in a hair bun. In 1685, for example, Protestantism was declared illegal in France by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by King Louis XIV. However, some Protestants continued to practice in the secrecy of their own homes in “underground” meetings, despite the penalties they might incur (death, the galleys, prison). In order to limit these risks, the size of Bibles and hymn books was reduced, or their appearance altered. The title page of Bibles, for example, was removed, to avoid discovery of the forbidden book by illiterate soldiers. Bibles, or extracts from the Bible, were printed very small so that they could be hidden in a woman’s bun or under her coif. The same applied to hymn books. 

 

Hence, this Christmas, Meg and I pause to thank the Lord that she does not have to hide a Bible in her hair, and that I am free to preach Christ in Europe where we live and minister. We also trust Him to prepare us in case things do change for us in our lifetime.

 

Merry Christmas to you, and thank you for your faithful support and prayers! Please let us know how we can pray for you.