In observance of the five year anniversary of Zolder50's inception in Amsterdam, I helped to put together a video slide-show representing a visual history of our first five years as a church community. It was pretty challenging to sum up so many lives, so many stories, and so many years in a fifteen-and-a-half minute video presentation -- but I'm pretty pleased with the results.

Because of YouTube restrictions on length, I had to post the slideshow in two pieces (rather crudely hacked off between songs). But the show starts with the window above and continues with the window below.

The pictures in the slide-show are arranged chronologically, starting with the initial exploratory trip to Amsterdam in May of 2001 and proceding all the way up until March of 2008. It is far from a complete history of Zolder50 (I'm really, really sorry if your picture did not make it into the show) -- but it's still a fun monument to the last five years. It includes images from every single baptism for which I was able to find a photographic record (which, unfortunately, does not encompass the entire lot of baptisms) -- but I did this because I really wanted to emphasize the work that God has been doing in individual lives throughout the last five years. You may notice that the slide-show is somewhat heavy on pictures of the staff team and my home group... This is partially practical (approximately 80 to 85 percent of the images were from my own personal collection) and partially philosophical (as I considered that I am, after all, really only capable of telling one man's story of Zolder50, and taking this vantage point also helps to provide a kind of "control group" that demonstrates how people have aged, as well as how families and groups have grown and changed).  Again, it's not a perfect slide-show.  But it's something fun to see.

One extra thing that's really cool about the presentation is that all of the musical accompaniment for the slide-show is done by people from Zolder50. Also arranged more-or-less chronologically, the music from Chris Smith, Danny Stimac, Leslie Phillips, and Claire Buswell shares beautiful stories about our community, in their own ways.

I hope you enjoy the slide-show.  Thanks to all of you who have been involved in this church community in some way, or who have prayed for us.  We look forward to seeing what God will do in the next five years!