CNE's Newsround Europe

In the final CNE podcast of 2025, host Evert van Vlastuin brings together Jeff Fountain (Schuman Centre of European Studies, based in the Netherlands) and Kevin Swanson (pastor and podcast host from Denver, Colorado) for a frank cross‑Atlantic conversation. The big question: are America and Europe simply in decline, or is God quietly at work in ways the headlines miss? Swanson arrived with strong...

Organising a brothel was easier than having a Tupperware party, Frank Heinrich says. Before Germany introduced its new prostitution law, in 2017, regulations on brothels were shockingly loose. Even a Tupperware party was scrutinised more critically than the sex industry.  In the CNE podcast, he explains why more than 99 per cent of all stakeholders in this slavery system are men, why nobody knows...

Many pastors in Europe became aware that God was calling them to the ministry after reading or listening MacArthur. That says Paul Mitchell, the European director of Grace to You. Grace to You (GTY) is the organisation that coordinated much of MacArthur’s activities in California, US. The renowned American pastor passed away this July at the age of 86. But he was never a celebrity, Paul says. MacA...

Every day, Anja Tang and her colleagues search newspapers from all corners of Europe to look for incidents of intolerance against Christians. And sometimes, the breaches of religious freedom come even from the governments.  Anja Tang tells all about that in the CNE podcast.   At the office of OIDAC (Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians), they search in all languages. Bu...

That is the concern from the Norwegian lawyer Anders Ryssdal. He represents the Jehovah’s Witnesses in a court case regarding state grants for this religious group and certain Christian schools.  In the talk with CNE’s podcast host Evert van Vlastuin, Anders Ryssdal explains the tensions between faith, state and society in one of Europe’s most secular countries. Anders has dealt with more cases re...

But is this truly about abortion — or is it a calculated distraction from corruption scandals shaking his party? With Sánchez’s party facing corruption scandals, the timing of the proposal has raised eyebrows. “It feels like a strategy to shift public attention”, Godden explains to CNE podcast host Evert van Vlastuin. “He wants to appear progressive and pro-women, but the reality is more complex.”...

Most countries stay silent when babies are traded as goods, says a UN expert in the CNE podcast. Children are sold around the world as if they were commodities.  The UN Human Rights Commission appointed Reem Alsalem as special rapporteur on violence against women and girls. She has already written reports about the degrading character of prostitution and the danger in which female sports are at th...

Just one more week, and then attorney Matti Sankamo will plead before the highest court ever in his career: Finland’s Supreme Court. Christians from all over the world will follow the case, but this does not give him stress. “I sleep well”, he says in the CNE podcast. Sankamo is the lawyer for the Finnish Member of Parliament, Päivi Räsanen. On October 30th, she will appear in an oral hearing at t...

The very existence of Israel is an “annoying reminder” that there is a God. That is what Tomas Sandell has learned from the rise of antisemitism in recent years.  Tomas is the director of the European Coalition for Israel (EC4I). He usually travels between Brussels, New York, and Geneva. But he joins CNE from his home country, Finland, to discuss faith, politics, and the spiritual meaning behind t...

Branislav Skripek in CNE podcast: How a ‘miracle’ vote changed the Slovak constitution   When Slovakia’s parliament passed six constitutional amendments in late September, Branislav Skripek called it a “miracle.” The Christian Democratic politician explains why in the latest CNE podcast.  The changes, passed with exactly 90 of the 150 required votes, strengthen legal protections for children and f...

Does demonising turn me into an enemy of my neighbour? Olof Edsinger warns it can. In this week’s CNE podcast, he offers a Christian response. When people stop listening to others in a society, they will become strangers to each other. This can get dangerous, as Edsinger says in the podcast.   Olof is not only a Christian Swedish opinion maker but also the general secretary of the Evangelical Alli...

Addicts can be loyal friends, says Andy Constable in the CNE podcast In Niddrie, you find a drug dealer every 100 feet. Yet pastor Andy Constable believes that addicts have something to teach to the church. In the CNE podcast, he says that drunkards and junkies are much more open about their lives than ordinary churchgoers. “The key is to come to them with humility”, says Andy Constable after 17 y...

When Klementina Shahini was a child, nobody would have guessed that she would start the only Protestant Christian school in Albania. She was raised in a Muslim family. Together with her husband, she came to faith in Jesus shortly after the fall of Communism. Lezha Academic Center is now the best-performing school in the region around Lezha. Klementina has worked on this for 14 years. The Albanian...

Why are there not more children born? Gudrun Kugler (MP from Austria) does not know everything about this but she has done some research for the Parliamentary Assembly of the OSCE.  One of the problems she has found is the phenomenon of "delayed parenthood". Young people are expected to study and work for some years before they start to think about a family. Kugler suggests that this could be diff...

Christian schools in Norway might face bad weather. The government's schools' inspection has criticised one of the schools for teaching the classical Biblical view on marriage. The schools organisation KFF has helped to protest against the inspection, says secretary general Audun Raen in this episode. The schools are waiting for the government to decide and to give direction.  Other sources of con...

Johann Matthies has been installed as the political commissioner for the Evangelical Alliance in Germany. He will be the voice of the Christians in the German Parliament and the government. His role is there both "pastoral and prophetic", he says. His roots are in Soviet Kazakhstan, where he was born in a family of what's called Russian-Germans. As a missionary, he spent many years in Eastern Euro...

The United Kingdom parliament decided to decriminalise abortion. The practical effect of this is that abortion will be possible up to birth instead only 24 weeks. According to pro-life activist Ana del Pino, this is infanticide and barbarism, since the baby could survive outside the womb. It will also facilitate sex-selective abortion. For more, visit https://CNE.news or subscribe to our newslette...

European integration could be seen as a form of conversion therapy. The European Union tries to change human nature in itself by putting an unaccountable bureaucratic layer above the (former) sovereign member states. This might lead to tensions and even to conflict. This says the former US diplomat Todd Huizinga in the CNE podcast. He will work as a CNE columnist and is also a senior fellow for Eu...

Is there a spiritual revival in Europe? Generation Z comes to faith. Andreas Nordli (Youth with a Mission Norway) says that he sees that more people come to faith in the past few years than he has seen in all the years before that together. Secularisation is dead, he concludes. For the traditional church, here are challenges. Also for individual Chrsitians. Nordli advices to listen to young people...

Organisation Christian Vision branded as extremist by Lukashenko regime in Belarus. What does this mean? Natallia Vasilevich explains. Christian Vision started spontaneously in 2020, around the time of the protests against the fraudulent elections. For more, visit https://CNE.news or subscribe to our newsletters at https://cne.news/subscribe    

When Igor Bandura (born 1970) was a young boy, he had moral objections against the godless Soviet Union and did not want to go in the army in 1989. But he had no choice, and so he was there during the coup in Moscow in August 1990. But now, Bandura is no pacifist anymore. And that is the same for most of his Baptist brothers.   For more, visit https://CNE.news or subscribe to our newsletters at ht...

The donor-conceived Menno Hofman and the Christian ethics professor Henk Jochemsen debate about sperm donation. Hofman himself was conceived from donor sperm, too. And he has "roughly 25" donor children apart from the direct three in his own family. Hofman is a Christian theologian. His ethical motive is in helping other people, especially intended parents who long for a child. Henk Jochemsen is v...

Can a Christian believe in both God and evolution? According to Bart van den Dikkenberg, the answer is no, as the two beliefs are contradictory to the Christian faith.   Van den Dikkenberg, a science and technology editor for the Dutch Reformed newspaper Reformatorisch Dagblad (RD), says that his primary concern today is seeing scientists who are embracing a form of theistic evolution in their pro...

Sweden is a free and democratic country that gives space to Christian education. But Christian schools usually experience that they are in the midst of a worldview battle. The public is sympathetic. The political atmosphere is critical and follows the secularist religion. The school's inspection is visiting the 137 schools regularly. And although the inspection sees that the schools that belong to...

Interview with Grégor Puppinck (ECLJ, European Centre for Law and Justice) about the European Citizen's Initiative My Voice My Choice about abortion. According to Puppinck, the nature of My Choice My Voice is to make national legislation about abortion ineffective, since the aim of the initiative is to facilitate abortion travelling.   For more, visit https://CNE.news or subscribe to our newslette...