Justice is 'being delivered', say Iranian Christians.
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A global network of Iranian Christians has welcomed targeted strikes against Iran’s leadership by the US and Israel. CT.
Monday, March 09, 2026
Justice.
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Support Marriage!
Churches need to support marriage, says Les Isaac.
(Photo: Getty/iStock)Street Pastors founder Rev Les Isaac and his wife Louise have been married for 45 years, and have what he would describe as a “good” marriage”, even if it’s “not perfect”.
Speaking at an online event hosted by Keep the Faith magazine, he recalled how “tough” the first three years of marriage were, but says they have learnt a lot over the years and are passionate to support and encourage other married couples with their own wisdom and insight, describing this as their “motivation and ministry”.
Furthermore, they are passionate about encouraging and equipping churches to strengthen marriages, noting that even Christian couples struggle.
“Some years ago Louise coined this phrase: ‘The length of a marriage is not evidence of the health of the marriage,’” he said.
He continued, “Lots of marriages in the church and Christian marriage behind closed doors need some serious help and repair, which the Church is not responding to.”
Louise Isaac touched on how important it was to recognise the “spiritual context of marriage”, highlighting the enemy’s tendency to target anything God has labelled ‘good’.
She recalled an interesting conversation with a non-Christian friend: “A friend of mine some years ago said to me I love my partner but I will never marry him. As I asked why, she said her observation is that when her friends are living with their partners, they’re fine. The minute they get married something changes and there is friction and conflict at a far greater degree than there was before.”
She continued: “I think what this non-Christian woman was identifying was a spiritual dynamic that affects marriage.”
Louise Isaac said that the Church’s first response must be prayer and she asked the online audience if prayer for marriage was “consistently on their church’s agenda”.
Continuing on, she said that the Church needs to be “intentional” in how it supports relationships and invests in couples through marriage ministry.
In support of this, Rev Isaac, who received an OBE in 2012, urged church leaders to be honest with their congregations when talking about relationships, and take time to check in with married couples before it’s too late.
“Sometimes we're struggling in our communication, struggling sexually, struggling financially. All these things are part of the journey. I often say to ministers that we only get to know there are problems in the marriage when they have gone to the solicitors to file for divorce,” he said.
He went on to observe that there is a tendency for congregations to believe that pastors and church leaders do not face obstacles within their own marriages, fostered by a “culture of silence” within the Church. Honesty from leaders about relationship issues will encourage church members to confide in them about their marital struggles, he believes.
“I believe there should be a relationship teaching series on a Sunday morning for everyone. I think the Church should have a series on family relationships and really bring up that biblical perspective of what a good relationship looks like,” he said.
Louise Isaac said while the Church has “a lot to do” and “a lot of challenges”, “God's help can actually make journeying easier if we tap into what God is saying but also tap into where people are at and where they need to be.”
Rev Isaac was enthusiastic about how the Church can support marriages, especially if pastors learn to tap into the resources at their fingertips - the very people in their congregations.
“We are not suggesting that the pastors or the leadership has to do everything. We have a lot of skilled, gifted, and educated people within the church,” he said.
He added: “One of the things that we constantly encourage the Church to do is to find these people, empower them [and] set the framework so that they can function and be a source of encouragement to people.” CT.
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It Appears That The Deputy Leader Of The Greens Attended A Remembrance Service To Khameini The Butcher!
Please pass this info on to EVERY person you know who says that they are intending to vote Green.
Emphasise the point extremely strongly because, obviously, they have to be struggling with reality.
Obituary.
Watson: developed a diocesan mission strategy called ‘Transforming Church’
The Rt Rev Andrew Watson, who has died of cancer aged 64, was, from 2015, a popular Bishop of Guildford with an evangelical missionary outlook befitting the grandson of medical missionaries in China; before that he spent seven years as Suffragan Bishop of Aston in the diocese of Birmingham.
Sunday, March 08, 2026
Throughout Time, History Has Clearly Proven That Military Peace Cannot Be Achieved By Being Inadequately Armed.
This Blogger repeats:
"There ain't no such animal as a peace dividend!'
Two small examples of this have been WW1 and WW2. Both ignored aggressive forces being built up - and spent nations' monies on anything other than weaponry. At What Ultimate Cost?
Again - had Iran been fettled by an international force 47 years ago - all of the current mess would have been avoided!
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The Price of Faith - Indonesia.
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Saturday, March 07, 2026
Super Stuff, Gafcon!
Orthodox Anglicans pursue path of 'principled disengagement' from Canterbury-led Communion
The Gafcon movement has declared itself to be the true Anglican Communion as it continues its shift away from the historic instruments of communion under the spiritual leadership of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
What Is The War Really About?
Everyone's missing what the Iran war is REALLY about - and it's not Israel. This is the real reason America has chosen to strike now. But as HAVIV RETTIG GUR writes, once you understand, everything else makes sense...
By HAVIV RETTIG GUR
The war in Iran is threatening to split the conservative movement, dividing it between those who see it as Donald Trump’s breaking of a promise against new wars and those who see it as a necessary confrontation long overdue.
Progressives, predictably, frame it as another Middle Eastern adventure driven by Israel. Anti-war libertarians call it regime change in a new dress.
And across the world, from Brazil to Beijing, London to Karachi, the argument is the same: America is fighting Israel’s war.
But this isn’t true. And the confusion matters, because if you misread what this war is actually about, you will misread everything that follows.
This is not a war about Israel. This is not a war for Israel’s sake. Israel is a beneficiary, a capable and willing local partner, but it is not the reason America is in this fight. America is playing a much bigger game, about more than what happens in the Middle East. The subtext, that Israel exercises outsize influence or ‘drags Americans into wars they don’t want’ borders on the conspiratorial.
This isn’t one war, but two. There is a regional chessboard, on which Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the other Gulf states all play. Iran’s proxies, its drones and ballistic missiles, its nuclear ambitions, its funding of Hezbollah and the Houthis. All of that belongs primarily to this smaller game. Israel has always understood this board. So have the Saudis. So has everyone in the neighbourhood.
But there is a second chessboard, vastly larger, on which the United States and China are the primary players. On this board, the central question of the next 30 years is being worked out: whether the American-led global order survives, or whether China displaces it. Every American foreign policy decision, from the pivot to Asia to the tariff wars to the posture in the Pacific, is ultimately a move on this board.
America is in this fight because of China. Specifically, it is about dismantling the most significant Chinese forward base outside of East Asia.
America is in this fight because of China (pictured: President Donald Trump with Chinese president Xi Jinping in October 2025)
Haviv Rettig Gur, a top Middle East analyst, talks about the real reason America has chosen to strike now
Iran, for most of its history as an adversary of the United States, existed only on the smaller board. It was a headache. It was a regional destabiliser. It funded terrorism, harassed shipping, threatened America’s allies, and kept the Middle East expensive and unpredictable.
But it was not, in any direct sense, a threat to American primacy on the global stage. It was Israel’s problem, the Gulf states’ problem, and only tangentially Washington’s.
That changed when Iran made one of the most consequential strategic miscalculations of the century.
Squeezed by decades of American sanctions and increasingly isolated, Iran turned to China as its economic lifeline. The relationship deepened rapidly.
Today, roughly 90 per cent of Iran’s crude oil exports go to China, processed through Chinese refineries that operate beyond the reach of American sanctions enforcement. That oil revenue supplies around a quarter of Iran’s budget, a huge portion of which is spent on its military forces. Without Beijing, the regime cannot pay its security forces, cannot subsidise basic goods, and would soon face the kind of internal collapse that its own ideology has spent 40 years trying to prevent.
In other words, Iran has become – has made itself – utterly dependent on China.
China, for its part, was not being charitable. It was being strategic. Iranian oil, sold cheaply because Tehran has no other buyers, has helped Beijing build a strategic petroleum reserve exceeding a billion barrels, enough to sustain the Chinese economy for roughly 100 days in the event of a naval blockade.
China’s single greatest vulnerability is the American Navy’s ability to interdict its energy imports, especially at vulnerable choke points like the Malacca Straits. Iranian oil, flowing outside American oversight, was a direct hedge against that vulnerability. (So, by the way, was Venezuela’s, another US operation that was ultimately about containing China.)
'Iran has become – has made itself – utterly dependent on China,' Haviv writes (pictured: Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian, left, and Xi Jinping)
But the energy relationship was only part of the picture. China was also arming Iran with systems designed to threaten commercial and American military assets.
Reports emerged in February of a near-finalised deal to supply Iran with supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles capable of speeds exceeding Mach 3 and engineered to evade the Aegis defence systems deployed on American carrier strike groups.
China was replacing Iranian government and military software with closed Chinese systems, hardening Iran against CIA and Mossad cyber operations. Joint naval exercises between China, Russia, and Iran in the Strait of Hormuz were becoming regular events, building real-time operational familiarity between the three navies.
Iran had switched from the GPS system to the Chinese BeiDou system. And Iran was providing China with the port at Jask, as part of China’s ‘string of pearls’ base system in the Indian Ocean.
The picture that emerges from all of this is, as I have said, of a Chinese forward base, a lynchpin of the country’s naval architecture; cyber efforts; an economic Belt and Road influence programme – every element of Chinese power projection and empire-building – positioned at the throat of the global oil supply, armed with weapons designed to penetrate American defences and kill American sailors, and embedded in a strategic architecture whose explicit purpose is to constrain American military freedom in any future conflict over Taiwan.
When Iran began to look like that, it stopped being Israel’s problem and became America’s.
The administration itself has struggled to explain this, and it’s not clear why.
On March 2, Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained that the US had launched pre-emptive strikes against Iran because the administration knew an Israeli attack was imminent and wanted to prevent ‘automatic’ Iranian retaliation against American bases. He said intelligence showed Iran had pre-delegated orders to military commanders to strike US assets the moment the regime was attacked by any party.
United States
Six US service members killed
Eleven people killed, including nine in an Iranian
missile strike on Beit Shemesh on March 1
Israel
At least 77 people killed by Israeli attacks
since Monday
Lebanon
One person killed after a fire broke out in Bahrain’s
Salman Industrial City following a missile interception
Bahrain
Four people, including two Kuwaiti soldiers, killed
in Iranian attacks on the country
Kuwait
One person killed after a projectile hit a Marshall
Islands-flagged product tanker off its coast
Oman
Three people killed
UAE
At least 1,230 people killed
Iran
Reports emerged in February of a near-finalised deal to supply Iran with supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles capable of speeds exceeding Mach 3
Rubio emphasised that the US chose to destroy Iran’s offensive capabilities first rather than ‘sit there and absorb a blow’ that would have resulted in higher damage to American personnel.
It’s hard to take this explanation at face value. If the trigger was simply an Israeli strike, America could have told the Israelis to sit tight. It’s done it before, repeatedly and even recently.
And it doesn’t fit the nature of the war. For one thing, American media reports tell us that America, not Israel, chose the timing.
Reliable sources tell us the CIA, not Mossad, tracked Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to the Saturday meeting of Iranian military leaders struck by Israel, and Trump, not Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, pulled the trigger on the joint attack.
The Americans went to war together with the Israelis because that’s the best way to fight a war like this.
Having a capable and loyal local ally willing to deal damage and absorb blowback lowers the costs to America and increases the chances of success. If America ever finds itself in a kinetic fight with China, it presumably expects Japan and Taiwan and South Korea to play a similar role in the fighting.
But American forces have used this operation to target Iranian military positions and assets that have nothing to do with the Israeli-Iranian face-off.
In the first 24 hours of the war, American strikes, as confirmed by US Central Command (CENTCOM), focused on Iranian naval vessels, submarines, ports, and anti-ship missile positions along the southern coast.
It was the CIA that tracked Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei (R), and it was Trump who pulled the trigger on the joint attack
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The port of Bandar Abbas, headquarters of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy, was hit. So was Jask, which China had hoped would become a permanent naval foothold on the Indian Ocean. Isfahan and Tabriz, hubs of ballistic missile production and drone assembly, were struck.
The goal, explicitly stated by US officials, was not merely to degrade stockpiles but to destroy the industrial base from which those weapons are produced, so China cannot spend the next few years quietly rebuilding it.
President Trump announced the operation in terms that could not have been more direct, explicitly mentioning elements of Iranian power – the navy, the missile production sites – that would serve as that second front in a war with China.
One of the more revealing subplots of this war has been the behaviour of Iran’s supposed allies. Russia signed a comprehensive strategic partnership with Iran in January of last year. China has been Iran’s economic patron for years. And yet when the bombs started falling, neither moved.
Russian radar systems in Syria went dark, transponders reportedly switched off, apparently to avoid accidentally drawing American or Israeli fire. China issued statements. Neither fired a shot in Iran’s defence.
This matters beyond the immediate moment. The entire architecture of the alternative world order that China has been constructing – BRICS (the Belt and Road Initiative) the network of partnerships meant to demonstrate there is a credible alternative to American-led institutions – rests on the assumption that China is a reliable partner.
Every government, from Central Asia to sub-Saharan Africa to Latin America, is now watching China leave its closest Middle Eastern ally to burn. That is a blow to Chinese soft power that no diplomatic offensive can easily repair. It is an American success that will be felt for years, irrespective of how the Iran operation turns out.
America, meanwhile, has demonstrated something important: that it retains both the will and the capability to act decisively when its core interests are genuinely threatened. Not Israel’s interests. Not abstract liberal internationalist ideals. American interests, defined coldly and specifically.
None of this means the war is without risk. Strikes on Saudi oil infrastructure, Houthi threats to close the Bab el Mandeb Straits, the escalation in Lebanon: these are real dangers, and the costs of miscalculation are enormous.
Iran, aware that it is facing an existential moment, is doing what cornered regimes do, setting as many fires as possible in the hope that the pain forces a negotiated exit. And we cannot forget the risk shouldered by Israeli civilians.
But the logic of the American position is not difficult to follow once you’re looking at the right chessboard. Iran embedded itself so deeply in China’s strategic architecture over the past couple of years that removing it became a prerequisite for American freedom of action in East Asia.
This is also why President Trump seems to be pursuing a strange sort of regime change – something very different from what George W. Bush or the neocons meant by the term.
Trump doesn’t care one whit about democratisation, or, as Venezuela showed us, about changing any element of a regime that doesn’t stand in America’s way.
He’s interested in regime change in Iran only because it is, in its founding theology, unswervingly anti-American. It is thus not swayable from the Chinese orbit by any other means. He doesn’t need a democratic Iran, he just needs a not-anti-American Iran.
It must be said: Israel is also at war with Iran, and has focused its strikes on Iranian targets that specifically threaten Israel, such as the ballistic missile launchers.
But there are nevertheless two different wars underway in Iran, each taking place on very different strategic scales.
The best-case scenario that could emerge from this war is a stable, democratic-leaning, US-orientated Iran, a more secure Gulf, a weakened Hezbollah and thus a more stable and successful Lebanon, a more secure Israel – and above all, a China less able to threaten America’s Pacific allies.
None of that is nation-building. There is no Marshall Plan in the wings, no democratic project, no idealism of the kind that animated the adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is colder and more coherent. So why can’t Secretary Rubio say it? Why hem and haw?
One obvious answer: they don’t want to push the Chinese to more overt responses. One should always give one’s enemy an excuse not to respond in kind. It’s a sensible ambiguity on the world stage, but it’s causing damage at home. It may be time for the administration to speak clearly on its strategy – in articulated statements that answer the good-faith questions of many Americans.
Once you understand the real reasons for America to strike now, everything else about this conflict clicks into place. The loudest voices in the debate are still arguing about the smaller chessboard. The war is being fought on the larger one.
Haviv Rettig Gur is The Free Press Middle East Analyst and host of the Ask Haviv Anything podcast. A version of this article appeared in The Free Press.
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... visited this site in November.
