October 31st is not a particularly special day in Amsterdam. Any of the individuals or clubs who would have been otherwise inclined to do something Halloweenish already got it out of their systems over the weekend, it seems. Even so, Halloween is just not that big of a deal here; it's more of an Anglo / American kind of thing. Honestly, I don't miss this particular holiday from my homeland all that much.

But I did notice some street cleaners at work this morning -- using witches' brooms.

It's not that Amsterdam's streetcleaners got these particular brooms out especially for this day of the year, though. It's simply what they use to do their work: long, brown, medium-stiff willow branches, bundled up at the end of a regular broom handle. They've always looked like "witches' brooms" to me, but I guess they're just the kind of tool that works best with getting leaves and cigarette butts and little pieces of litter out from the crevices in cobblestone streets and sidewalks. Or maybe they just like to do things the old way, here in the "Old World." In any event, these witches' brooms / streetcleaners' brooms are a fun little cultural artifact, from my vantage point.

On the other hand, I don't know what to think about the medieval sword that made its way into my kids' school this morning.

The sword was brought in to be a part of a costume -- but for a book report, not for Halloween. Elliot and two of his classmates were doing a presentation about a book called "De Grijze Jager" (which means "the Gray Hunter," though it is actually a translation of an English-language book called "The Ranger's Apprentice"), and they decided to dress up in medieval costume to make things more interesting. They wore hoods and capes. Elliot fashioned himself a crude bow and arrow from sticks and rubber bands. But Elliot's friend Gaitano brought a genuine, Medieval-style, large, heavy, steel sword. He carried it to school in a large hockey bag. And no one in the school seemed to think anything of it. There were no concerns about terrorism or school violence or anything like that (which is just as well since the sword certainly wasn't intended for any of those kinds of purposes). Still, to me a sword in school seemed like a recipe for injury, given the class that it was being introduced to a room full of 9- and 10-year-olds. I didn't know if I should say anything about it or not. The sword didn't seem to raise any eyebrows (at least not in the time that I was there at the school, dropping my kids off). So I just wrote it off as another cultural curiosity...

Still I wonder how I really should deal with things like this. After nine years of dealing with cross-cultural tensions, you'd think I'd have situations like this figured out. But I don't know. What's cultural, and what's common sense? What's funny, and what's fearful? I certainly don't know. It's just everyday life in Amsterdam.

Don't think too much about your answer.

Just go with your gut feeling: What name would you give to the color above? Or to the grid of variations in color here below?

To me, the color swatches above seem yellow. But that might just be me. Or it might just be Americans. I'd be especially curious to know what Dutch people think of these colors -- if they would also naturally trend towards "yellow" or possibly more towards "orange."

All of these colors are lifted from photographs of traffic lights, both in the United States and in the Netherlands. I used Photoshop to select a sampling of color from the brightest, most intense part of photograph featuring a traffic light with the middle segment of the signal illuminated, and that's how I generated the swatches above.

So the reason I ask the question about identifying this color is that I'm intrigued by the cultural differences on this particular point. Americans talk about this part of the traffic light as being the "yellow light," whereas Dutch people (or my American children, raised here in the Netherlands) talk about the same segment as being the "orange light" (oranje licht).

Honestly, I don't think of it as a question of accuracy but rather of perception. I just think it's interesting that the two cultures see it two different ways. It's true for a lot of different elements of culture, not just the color of traffic lights.

So what color would you say it is? Yellow? Orange? Or something else entirely?

My vacation ended four days ago, and I'm adjusting to normal weekly rhythms again. Getting back into "real life" in Amsterdam has been good -- but also exhausting. Maintaining a house again, paying bills, responding to a backlog of e-mails, getting caught up on ministry relationships and responsibilities, resuming healthier patterns of eating and exercising, riding my bike in the rain again... I see it all as good and necessary activity, but it's been tiring me out.

Even so, I've recently been appreciating the way that exhaustion (particularly in the immediate transition back from a time of great refreshment) is significantly better than discouragement.

Looking at the calendar this morning, I felt shocked to realize that we're already down to the last week of August! This was a very pleasant realization for me -- because, ever since moving to Amsterdam, August has been the time of year when I go through a period of feeling like a complete and utter failure. Amsterdam feels like a ghost-town to me, when so many friends are gone on vacation. Ministry loses all its momentum. I find myself feeling idle, if I try to keep up my normal routines through the summer vacation season. The days start getting noticeably shorter again, two months after the high point of the summer solstice, and (yes, even in August) my thoughts turn towards winter. I find myself asking all these existential questions and getting depressed, when I consider my life and ministry in Amsterdam, in the month of August... And I wallow in feelings of emptiness and failure.

Fortunately, it's usually just a seasonal thing. But even more fortunately, the planning of our family vacation for this year made it so that I practically skipped the entire month of August! We didn't necessarily plan it that way, but it's worked out wonderfully! Of course, we've been here for a week at the beginning and the end of the month; but prior to vacation, it was all busy activity and preparing to head out of town, and since returning from vacation it's been the warm afterglow of vacation rapidly blending into all busy activity and getting caught up on everything that I missed while out of town. I just haven't had the opportunity to do any wallowing in feelings of emptiness and failure! And I view that as a special reminder of God's grace and goodness to me.

So anyway, I share that just to encourage anyone who may not have had the privilege of taking a vacation this month and thus find himself or herself suffering from some version of the Agonies of August (Take heart: Realize that the end of the month is just around the corner!). And now I'd better be getting back to work...

I've been avoiding it for almost nine years... but this weekend, I decided I could avoid it no longer. I decided it was time to try raw herring.

It's a delicacy in this part of the world, often served with chopped onions. It's typically sold from small, wayside fish-stands. And from what I understand, a raw herring here in the Netherlands has the appeal of food that Americans might buy from a carnival midway: something seasonal, nostalgic, and special.

I always felt like I should give it a try -- that there really might be something to it, even for an unsuspecting American palate such as mine -- but I could never bring myself to do it. Because, I mean, it's raw. It's herring. It's raw herring! However, this weekend, when we went to the North Sea with my brother, Alex, I felt like the moment was right to give it a try. So I did. And I had Marci take a series of photographs to document the occasion, as seen here below:

And guess what?!? The raw herring tasted exactly what I thought it would taste like: raw herring! It was squishy and fishy and slimy and cold... And although I genuinely wanted to come out on the other side of the experience, saying that it wasn't nearly as bad as I might have thought it would be, the truth is that it was exactly as bad as I might have thought it would be!

I totally respect the rights of Dutch people to savor their raw herring -- but I have to say that I'm glad to have the experience behind me and know that I don't have to try it again.

"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. :-)