On Sunday (the 29th of May), I spoke at Amsterdam50's weekly worship gathering on the topic of Marriage and Sex, applying wisdom from the Proverbs of Solomon to 21st Century life. On Monday (the 30th of May), my wife and I celebrated our thirteenth wedding anniversary. Consequently, I thought it might be interesting to adapt (and improve) some of my material on "The Goodness of Marriage" for use here on my blog, in serial form. Below is my introduction to the topic:

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Proverbs 18:22 says, “He who finds a wife finds what is good and receives favor from the LORD." Or, I think it would also be safe to say that “She who finds a husband finds what is good and receives favor from the LORD.” In any event, here the Bible clearly makes a case that marriage is good. But it seems to me that this notion is not as widely accepted in our culture today as it may have been, previously. Has anyone else noticed this cultural trend, too -- moving away from the institution of marriage, or at least redefining the concept of marriage?

To a certain extent, our culture has drifted towards an acceptance of sexual promiscuity and multiple partners... But actually, I think a lot of people in our culture and our generation still really value the idea of a loving, committed, monogamous relationship, but they’re just not so quick to formalize that relationship as “marriage.”

This seems to be true even among Christians here in the Netherlands. I’ve had an increasing number of conversations with people who follow Jesus but just aren’t convinced that marriage is really all that important or all that good. In essence, the argument that I’m hearing is, “What’s the big deal with marriage? Do I really need some piece of paper from the government or the blessing of some religious leader in order to stay committed to the person of my choice?!?” Does a marriage really have to start with a big white wedding ceremony in a church? Or does a marriage start at the moment when two people commit, in their hearts, that they're going to stay together forever -- and, presumably, unite themselves in the act of sex? I’ve heard some very compelling arguments in this direction -- even drawing from the Bible for their support... But even though I can totally understand where these questions are coming from, I start to worry when we stray away from this simple, basic, biblical conviction that marriage is good.

So over the next few days, I want to briefly make a case for why marriage is good, drawing support mainly from the Proverbs. You’ve probably heard some of the classic arguments for waiting to have sex until after marriage -- things like protecting yourself from unplanned pregnancies or sexually-transmitted diseases. And while there’s necessarily nothing wrong with these particular arguments, I am going to suggest three primary reasons -- both practically- and philosophically-motivated -- for promoting marriage and saving sex for within that context. And the first one, which I'll outline tomorrow, is all about integrity...

Thirteen years ago, it was a warm and muggy day in Mansfield, Ohio. Our families were busy with last-minute preparations for our wedding. We had friends and relatives in from exotic locations like Bowling Green, Ohio... and Peoria, Illinois... and Jamestown, North Dakota... We had been planning and preparing for months to have special clothing, special decorations, special music, and special food to celebrate our wedding... And it really did end up being a special, beautiful day!

I still remember watching Marci come down the aisle of the church, wearing a beautiful white dress and holding a bouquet of white flowers. I remember my brother elbowing me, in that moment, as we watched the bride -- my bride -- come towards us. It was quite the moment.

We said our vows. We ate a lovely dinner. We danced with our friends. And then we drove off to a hotel just down the highway where we stayed for the night and enjoyed another special element of the wedding celebration, just prior to honeymooning on Florida's Siesta Key.

May 30, 1998 was a very special day for me and Marci.

But of course, that day was really just the beginning. I’m so grateful for the role that my wife has played in my life. I have personally experienced the truth of Proverbs 18:22, which says that, “He who finds a wife finds what is good and receives favor from the LORD." I have found what is good, and I am glad. Even though we've had our share of difficulties along the way, our general experience over the last 4,745 days is that the good keeps getting better.

We’ve come a long way in the last 13 years, and we still have a long way to go in the future as well... But I’m honored to be able to walk this road with this woman.

Elliot's first season of semi-organized basketball (with Amsterdam's Basketball 's Cool Oost) ended today. It was a really good experience for him. He had a lot of fun. He learned a lot of new skills. And he made a bunch of new friends. In short, the experience provided everything that I would hope my children could learn through involvement in sports.

I had a lot of fun being a part of things, too. Parental involvement here in the Netherlands seems to be a lot more low-key than what I've heard about with kids in the United States. There's none of the über-competitive types, angling for their kids' college scholarship opportunities or professional career. There's none of the "basketball-had-better-be-your-life-or-else" types of coaches or trainers. And there's a pleasant blurring of the lines between kids, parents, and coaches -- where everyone jokes around with each other and shoots warm-ups together and travels to tournaments together. I guess I don't really know what it's like in American basketball culture for 8-12 year olds, but I have the feeling that this particular Dutch basketball school we've fallen in with is particularly relaxed... And that suits me just fine.

Looking forward to next year already...

I'm becoming more and more convinced that Amsterdam50 needs to be a two-winged church, if we're ever going to fly straight.

Way back when our ministry in Amsterdam first got started, we focused primarily on developing a magnetic ministry presence in the city: bringing together an All-Star team of communicators, musicians, and technicians (my original role on the team was actually to be the "video guy") in order to establish ourselves in a premium location that would allow people from all over the city to find us and follow God with us. It was a great plan that worked beautifully (at least on certain levels). However, I remember feeling challenged at that time that small group ministry was an afterthought, an incidental. So in our team discussions, I tended to think and talk a lot about investing in our small groups and bringing this aspect of ministry into balance with the strength of our Sunday gatherings.

But then, after the founding pastor of our church left (suddenly and unexpectedly), I was put in a position where I needed to figure out the church leadership thing as I did it (together with Todd, my fellow pastor-in-training). Ironically, during that time, we quickly found ourselves grappling to keep the corporate worship gathering as a significant part of what we were doing. Some others in the church were calling for a more radical retooling of the church structure, wherein the small groups would have become even more central to the ministry of the church, with the corporate worship gathering being more of the afterthought (if any thought at all). Todd and I resisted the total overhaul at the time because (1) There was still a good deal of "spiritual fruit" being produced through our worship gatherings, and (2) The restructuring requests had some subtle flavors of a power struggle within them. So during that period, I leaned a lot more of my weight into advocating for the Sunday worship gathering and de-emphasizing the small group stuff (even though that was still something of my first love in ministry).

Somewhere around this time -- I don't remember exactly where it came from or how it ended up in my hands at the time -- but somehow I got a photocopied version of an article that had been written by an Anglican minister on the subject of God's design for a "Two-Winged Church." It cited the Book of Acts as showing the First Century Church meeting both house-to-house and in the Temple courts. Intimate and en masse. It felt like such a simple and refreshing perspective. I loved it and embraced it at the time.

But I confess that I got worn down a bit over time. When others from within our church tried to advocate for a radical shift in ministry paradigms -- specifically, more of a move toward the house church movement -- Todd and I continued to resist because (1) We were still experiencing some fruit from the corporate worship gatherings, and (2) There were still some unhealthy dynamics of escapism and power struggles that seemed to be linked with the conversations at the time. We continued to lean towards the Two-Winged Church in the face of internal pressures. Still, at the same time, there were a number of external pressures that started to shape my thinking more and more. "Organic" and "missional" and "anti-hierarchical" started to become popular adjectives among church planters in the West. The European Church Planters Network (an international, inter-denominational association with which we were loosely affiliated at the time) definitely seemed to have a heavy bias towards "missional ministry," and Great Commission Europe (our more immediate association of churches across the Continent) clearly started to echo these preferences. Simultaneously, we were having a lot of discussions about longevity and sustainability within our church in Amsterdam (conversations which continue to this day). And it all started to seem that maybe the decentralized, distributed, diffused "low control / high accountability" model for ministry was the way to go.

So in time, we started to look more and more like a house church movement. We never fully abandoned the Sunday worship gathering, but it did become more of an afterthought in many ways. And besides, when Todd left in 2009, we just didn't have the personnel to pull off the worship gatherings in the same way that we used to do them. My personal passion for small group ministry started directing me again -- and since there were fewer ulterior motives (i.e. power struggles) muddying the waters at this point in the church's history, we started moving more in this direction. It just seemed like the responsible thing to do. Truth be told: I'm still trying to sort through the sustainability questions, and these remain the single biggest inhibitor to a full embrace of the Two-Winged Church today.

However, I've been thinking and praying about this a lot over the last year or so. Over the past winter, I listened to some of the people from my church, and I heard a lot of people saying that they missed the strength of our Sunday worship gatherings. They were saying that there is something unique about corporate worship that cannot be replicated in a small group setting: inspirational worship, powerful preaching, a feel of momentum and community and belonging. As I thought and prayed and processed this further on the personal level, I came to realize that I agreed with this assessment!

So I started leading our church down a path that would return us to an identity of being a "Two-Winged Church." I still worry, sometimes, about potential power dynamics at play. And there are definitely still the questions of sustainability, namely: Who's going to provide the powerful preaching that our people are asking for (outside of full-time American missionary workers)? Who's going to provide the oversight that would be necessary for maintaining an environment conducive to corporate worship (outside of full-time American missionary workers)? Where will we find these leaders -- again, assuming that we don't want to be entirely dependent on self-funded foreign missionaries for the long-term life of the church -- and how will they make their living? These questions still must be answered, one way or another. But principally-speaking, trying to live by faith, I feel genuinely compelled and inspired to endeavor towards this balanced "Two-Winged Church," as much as possible. To me, this feels like a perfect application of Ecclesiastes 7:18 (one of my favorite verses of all time): "It is good to grasp the one and not let go of the other. The man who fears God will avoid all extremes." Even so, it's easier said than done. Such balancing acts are never easy. In fact, in the last month or two, I've started to feel like we've invested so much time and energy into our Sunday worship gatherings that our small group ("community") system is starting to show signs of neglect! I am not a perfectly balanced person. Our church is not a perfectly balanced church. It would be naive for me to suggest that I've reached any kind of permanent landing point on the whole "Big Church / Attractional" -- "Litte Church / Missional" continuum... But from where I'm looking at things right now, I yearn to see us grow into a strong and healthy Two-Winged Church.

To mark the celebration of the Netherlands' Memorial Day / Liberation Day, the city of Amsterdam recently set up a website to illustrate the way that the Second World War affected the Jewish households of Amsterdam -- or Joodse Huizen. Included on this website is the map above, which shows the Jewish population of Amsterdam at the beginning of the Second World War.  You see that exceptionally-dark section of the map shaped like a train speeding southwest? That's our neighborhood. It's pretty crazy to consider the history of what's happened in Europe within the last 100 years, and this website really helps to bring some of the stories of Amsterdam to life.

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Amber van Schooneveld is an accomplished writer and editor who blogs at Clever Phrase Here. Her posts cover a wide range of topics -- everything from personal/family updates to social commentary -- but no matter what the subject material may be, I always find her thoughts to be clear and refreshing. This is particularly so in a recent post called Crashing the Dawn Treader and the Great Fallacy of Our Age, which was co-written with her husband, Mike. This post starts out as a film critique about "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" and snowballs into a critique of our society's broader trends towards "The Gospel of Self." It's a bit of a long piece, but I think it's so accurate and poignant that it's worth the read.

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I'm doing some spring cleaning here at EricAsp.com.

Among other items I've been working on (mostly behind the scenes), I noticed today that I hadn't updated the "Recommended" section of my website since January of 2010! Truth be told, I didn't find myself looking forward to updating the lists either. So I ultimately decided to just scrap that whole section of the website. If it was one of your favorite parts of the website (though I have a hard time believing that this would have been the case for anyone), please accept my apologies.

Instead of maintaining a separate section of the website for personal recommendations, I've decided (at least for the time being) to incorporate any further recommendations in smaller doses (i.e. one to five items at a time, instead of a listing of ten) within the general blogging activity of the website. As such, you can now find four new categories of blog entries:

• Recommended Browsing
• Recommended Listening
• Recommended Reading
• Recommended Viewing

Just in case any of the old lists from the old "Recommended" section of the website happened to be important reference points for you, you will be happy to know that they've all been added to the blogging archives, back-dated to January of 2010 -- and they can be accessed by clicking on the appropriate category links, either above or on the website's right side-bar.

In the future, I hope to post recommendations that are less substantial but more frequent... So we'll see how that works out...

"So you're kind of an international church, then?" a friend asks.

"Mmm, kind of. But not really," I say.

"Well, didn't you just say that you have people from all different parts of the world that are involved with your church?"

"That's right. But you know, we're not an 'international church.' We're a... well, umm... I don't know how to describe it... You know, we've got people from all different parts of the world and all different kinds of backgrounds who worship God together... But, you know, we're more of an Amsterdamse church, with like 50 percent of the people Dutch and 50 percent everything else... You know what I mean?"

"Umm... Sounds to me like you're an international church."

I don't know what else to say. It seems ludicrous to deny the obvious use of such an appropriate adjective for our church. But for years now, I've avoided the phrase "international church" as a way of describing Amsterdam50. I never really sat down to figure out the reason behind this semantic aversion -- but I think it had something to do with "sustainability" and "indigenous development" (which are regular subjects of discourse in the fields of international missions and church-planting). In having this conversation with my friend, however, it dawns on me that my avoidance of the phrase "international church" has a specific association in my mind which is not just about sustainability and indigenous development. It's about inclusion and accessibility.

In my mind, "international church" feels like it's strongly associated with the expatriate community: people who are largely Anglo-Saxon, highly educated, fairly affluent, and decidedly short-term. They work for large companies and rent large, furnished apartments in the southern neighborhoods of Amsterdam. They're great people -- and I have absolutely nothing against developing relationships with expatriates, and even contextualizing the Gospel for the expatriate community. As a matter of fact, I often feel that I fit in better with Amsterdam's expatriate crowd than many of the other kinds of "international" people living in Amsterdam! However, the trick with the expatriate community in Amsterdam is that it's a relatively closed community. Their socio-economic status, their linguistic preferences, and their unique trans-continental lifestyles don't usually allow for expatriates to relate particularly well with the local population, or with other sorts of international people in the city (i.e. ethnic minorities, long-term first- and second-generation immigrants, refugees, illegal immigrants, etc.). And honestly, an intentional focus on the expatriate-international demographic -- which is what automatically pops into mind if we would be consciously identifying ourselves as an "international church" -- has never felt like a group to which God has called me.

But then again, I remember that a signficant part of the reason I moved to Amsterdam -- out of all the other possible places to live and minister -- was to be in a strategic, international location which served as a point of connection to all different cultures and countries around the world.

So in a sense, I did come to Amsterdam to help establish an international church -- but hopefully a more inclusive kind of "international," with people from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe -- as well as the "expatriate-international" people from North America and Australia and other parts of Western Europe. We deliberately focus on Amsterdam's city center because that's where the various subcultures of Amsterdam intermingle. We try to live and minister in such a way that we can constantly be "sowing seeds" -- in a dandelion kind of way -- whether people are involved with our church community for years, months, or just days. We conduct our Sunday worship gatherings in English, because English has a broader global reach than Dutch. But we also encourage people to interact with their various subcultures in their own unique ways as well... And in so doing, we try to keep ourselves multi-layered and mindful of all the different kinds of "internationals" in the city of Amsterdam. In so doing, we hope to contextualize the way that Jesus conducted his ministry among varying strata of society (as we can see in Matthew 9:9-13 or Matthew 25:31-46).

I don't know why this felt like such an epiphany to me -- to realize these two different expressions of being "international" -- but somehow it has given me a fresh sense of what I'm here to do: going into the world, and making disciples of all nations... In essence, building an international church. But, you know, not an international church. :-)

Some friends of mine were recently visiting a nature reserve in Africa, and they got to witness a fresh kill on the savannah. Three cheetahs had taken down a zebra and were feasting, while a swarm of vultures circled around. Eventually, the cheetahs staggered away, their faces stained with blood and their overstuffed bellies swinging low over the ground. Instantly following the departure of the cheetahs, the vultures swooped in and completely covered the carcass, picking the bones clean. And as the vultures were feeding, a hyena, a jackal, and a stork came in and grabbed some of the carrion as well. Within minutes, there was nothing left of the zebra but bones. My friends caught the whole episode on video, and I got to see the footage for myself. It was pretty impressive.

Still I find that I am equally impressed with the way that the city of Amsterdam deals with its technological and industrial "carrion."

I'm thinking of this because I killed another bicycle yesterday. Giuseppe Crepuscolo is dead. I guess it's something about the way I ride the bicycles -- possibly leveraging my weight for maximum strength in climbing up hills -- but the last three or four bikes I've owned all died from a cracked frame. This particular bike it was both a cracked frame and a bent central crank. Yikes.

Anyway, I ended up getting a new bicycle this morning, and since I was the one to kill the bicycle (thus putting me in the place of the cheetah from Africa!), I was the first to the spoils. I took off the old wheel lock for use on my new bike. I transferred the saddle-bags and the long chain lock over to my new bike, too. I removed all the hardware for the child's seat that goes on the back of my bike. And then I just leaned the old bike up against a tree, unlocked, for the vultures of Amsterdam to do their work. Today, it's been kind of a rainy day -- so the old bike is lasting longer than it might under normal circumstances -- but I fully expect that within the next 24 hours or so, the chains, seat, tires, and wheels may be taken by other bicyclists who are missing a part. And eventually, the frame might get taken away for scrap-metal. And whatever is left after a couple of days will be disposed of by the city. It'll all be taken away in relatively short order, if past experience is any indication. Just another example of the Amsterdam "ecosystem," that has developed an elaborate-but-unspoken arrangement to take care of old electronics and cabinets, carpets and toys.

And now I have a new bicycle: my sixth since moving to Amsterdam.

I'm actually pretty excited about this new bicycle! It's a classic "Opafiets" (Grandpa-bike) style, with plain black frame and white-walled tires. It's made by a Dutch manufacturer: BSP. And it has an extra-strong reinforced frame that will hopefully hold up better under my bicycling mechanics. I'm still not completely decided on a name for the new bike yet, but the main contenders would probably be "The ASP BSP" or just plain "The Opafiets." Any other suggestions for names, though, would certainly be welcomed. And in any event, I hope that this bike will serve me well for a long time to come.

On the one hand, I think it's ridiculous to consider how many bikes I've gone through over the course of my eight-and-a-half years in the city -- but then again, I realize that the total that I've spent on all six bicycles has probably amounted to less than what a typical year's worth of fuel costs alone (not counting depreciation and repairs) would be for an automobile, either in America or (especially) in Amsterdam. So I guess I can live with that.

Last names are funny, aren't they? They usually seem quite nonsensical -- just a happenstance combination of random sounds, to make a distinct family identity. At least this is the way that I grew up thinking about last names in the United States of America. Sure, there's a subconscious recognition that the last names actually mean something. The last names Smith, Miller, and Baker, for instance, were common ones in the part of the world where I grew up -- and it makes sense that, ancestrally-speaking, Smiths were metal-workers; Millers worked in the grain mills; and Bakers worked in bakeries.  But the economic system has changed so much since the days of family trades and apprenticeships that these names have become disconnected from their original meaning. And the disconnect is further enhanced, I imagine, by all the different cultural and linguistic backgrounds (not just Anglo-Saxon families like Smith and Miller and Baker) that have settled in North America.

But moving to a different country -- with a different language -- helps to reconnect the dots in surprising and amusing ways. I often find myself reading the names of people like sentences -- subconsciously translating everything into English -- even though Dutch people themselves probably don't make the association, in the same way that I never did with Smith or Miller or Baker.

So I think about my friends Jurren the Great... or Jannie of the Helmet... or Marco Peacocks... or Frank Windowshop...

Or when I hear about Dutch sports stars, my mind cannot help but translate their names into Frank the Farmer... or Demy the Guy-from-Zeeland... or Maarten Prickly-Mountain... or Rafael of the Fart (actually, the Dutch "Vaart" should be translated "Voyage" -- but my English ears can hardly avoid the obvious association with the English word "Fart," which is pronounced very similarly).

Funny, huh? Do you ever notice this kind of thing? If so, what are some funny or interesting names that have stood out to you?

Crane - red spot

Mostly grey

Scared Cor bad

Pecked Cor in the head

Elephant

From Asia

Eats sticks

Baby elephant loses teeth

40.000 muscles in trunk

Takes a bath and eats grass

Big

Spectacled Bear

White circles around eyes

Good climbers

Father bickering

Leopard

Spots yellow

Good climber

Active at night

Big member of cat family

Playful

All text by Elliot Asp (age 9). All illustrations by Olivia Asp (age 6).