Let us acknowledge the Lord;
let us press on to acknowledge him.
As surely as the sun rises, he will appear;
he will come to us like the winter rains,
like the spring rains that water the earth.
(Hosea 6:3)

Greetings from Amsterdam!  Although it's as cold and blustery here as it's been all winter, I have to say that the onset of March offers me much hope for the promise of spring.  The days are lengthening noticeably, and I can hear songbirds chirping each morning in the pre-dawn stillness of the city.  Holland's famous daffodils and tulips have started to send up some tentative green shoots in the planting boxes around the neighborhood, and this sense of natural optimism and development seems to affirm my own hope and anticipation for the coming season.  Spring is just around the corner!

In the more figurative sense, we’re also excited to see the ways that our ministry in Amsterdam is allowing individuals to grow, develop, blossom, and become more beautiful and alive in Christ.  Our last several weeks as a church community have been focused on providing opportunities for deep soul healing among the people that are involved with Zolder50.  So many in Amsterdam are broken and hurting from the deep wounds of their past; they are often overwhelmed by the subsequent addictions and coping mechanisms that plague their everyday existence.  Thus, at the beginning of February, we asked a local man named Keith Bakker to share about his struggles to overcome homelessness and severe drug addiction to stay clean and sober to the point that he is now actually serving as a counselor for other addicts.  Although we knew that there was a general need for speaking into these areas of society, we were astonished by the response from Keith’s story when about 70 young people showed up on a Saturday morning for a three-hour follow-up seminar about the nature of addiction and recovery!  Since then, we've been considering how we can best follow-up with support groups, seminars, and more effectively utilizing extant elements of Zolder50 to continue the process of emotional and spiritual recovery in the deepest areas of people's lives.  By God's grace, people are already healing and becoming more whole—blossoming into the men and women that God wants them to be—and it's even more beautiful than seeing the tulip fields of Holland prepare for spring.  Still, your prayers for further progress in these areas would be greatly appreciated.

In addition to this cultivation of a broad field of people within the Zolder50 community, our church has also recently been planting some strategic seeds for the future.  We’re currently in the midst of a dialogue on how we can more effectively develop leaders within Zolder50, and it’s been very encouraging to see the level of excitement that’s building through the process (you can also be praying for continued developments in these areas).  Furthermore, our church has been blessed with a number of different opportunities for practical training of ministry workers, by offering internships and international work experience for a handful of individuals throughout the early months of 2006.  Two Great Commission Ministries staff couples—Mark and Jill Beebe, from Bowling Green, Ohio (Go Falcons!), and Will and Jenni Lafferty, from Austin, Texas—are serving in Amsterdam for an extended period of time, both to help our church out in very practical ways and to gain exposure and experience in their own lives.  Additionally, for the first time in our church’s history, we’re hosting interns from within the Netherlands, who want to learn within the context of Zolder50 in hopes of one day being further involved in full-time ministry within their native country.

Specifically, we've been given the opportunity to host an intern from the Christelijke Hogeschool Ede (Ede Christian College) for the months of February and March.  A young man named Kor Grit is serving full-time with Zolder50 for these two months, as a part of his Godsdienst Pastoraal Werk (Practical Christian Ministry) training. It's been an interesting and invigorating experience.

Kor has seemed genuinely pleased with the opportunity to learn from our ministry, and he says that the experience has already been immensely beneficial. He's sat in on strategic discussions about the worship aspect of Zolder50. He's blended in with two different home groups, to get a deeper sense of the community aspect of our church. He's observed the operational outworkings of coaching sessions with various members of our staff team. He's in the process of working to help us pull off a neighborhood outreach, where we can bring the ministry aspect of Zolder50 to bear on a senior citizens' center that's just around the corner. And he's even taking a crack at some small-scale teaching and Bible instruction. All in all, it seems like Kor is getting a fairly well-rounded perspective on church leadership, and he's learning a lot.

The truth is that I'm learning a lot through mentoring Kor as well.

I'm getting a fresh look at our church community, through the eyes of an inquisitive “outsider." I'm learning how to better describe and explain the various elements of our core beliefs, casual customs, and church culture in general. I'm learning how to connect with and envision young Dutch Christians for the task of following Jesus and participating in the Great Commission, here within the Netherlands... Of course, I feel like I still have much to learn about ministry myself, but it’s an amazing blessing to be in a situation to help train and develop young people to be a part of building God’s Kingdom in Amsterdam (and beyond)!  It is, in fact, the reason we followed God’s calling to Europe…

Thank you so much for all your prayer support and financial support that allow us to be in full-time ministry, helping to develop the Church in Holland.  It's hard to make such words of gratitude sound sincere and meaningful month after month... but seriously, we want you to know that we deeply appreciate everything that you do for our family and our ministry!  You're a brilliant testimony of God's faithfulness and provision for our lives.  We love you, and we'll continue to be in touch...

Eric