There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under heaven.
(Ecclesiastes 3:1)

Greetings from Amsterdam!  We’ve had a beautiful fall season so far this year.  Typically, autumn in Amsterdam seems to be nothing more than a slow, gray descent from summer into winter, weather getting steadily cooler and rainier, daylight getting steadily shorter and more muted… But this year it has seemed somewhat different.  The air feels fresh and cool.  The sun shines in sepia tones through the trees.  There is a hopeful sense of change in the air.

And it’s not just the weather.

Our family has been going through its own season of change, with the addition of our fifth member.  Five-week-old Cor is doing very well, as is the rest of our family; in fact, I’m actually surprised by how well we’ve managed the transition up to this point.  And as if all of this was not enough—our church, too, is working its way through some very significant transitions this fall.

Since the establishment of Zolder50 in Amsterdam, our vision has been to follow the example of the first-century church, as recorded in the book of Acts.  As such, we’ve organized our ministry around concentric circles of ministry, starting with Life Groups (single-gender groups of 2-4 emphasizing accountability, in-depth personal Bible study, and prayer for unbelievers), then expanding to Home Groups (“family” units of 5-15 people “doing life together”—growing spiritually, growing relationally, and uniting to serve others in the community), and ultimately gathering in Neighborhood Churches (50-150 people meeting regularly for worship, teaching, and community)... We had always hoped that there might also one day be a network of Neighborhood Churches, loosely organized as a City Church (potentially thousands of people, meeting once every two or three months for worship and envisioning)—but this has been more theory than practice up to this point.  Going on faith, we’ve sought to build a culture of making disciples—particularly in the context of Home Groups and Life Groups—developing seeds to what we hope will be a continually-multiplying network of churches that will allow God’s love and His people to spread throughout the city of Amsterdam and, eventually, even beyond that to cities all around the Netherlands and Europe (Luke 13:20-21).  As we’ve come to phrase it, our church’s goal is to “know Jesus, become like Jesus, and make Jesus known.”

Over the past several months, we have been looking more closely into the subject of multiplication (making multiple churches from one). We’ve experienced quite a bit of growth in the five years since our church was first started, but it’s only been within the last year or so that our leadership core has become substantial enough and strong enough to realistically consider branching out further.  Also, as we’ve moved toward occupation of a new ministry center in the heart of the city (which automatically restricts us to smaller spaces, with greater limitations on the number of people allowed in a single meeting location), we’ve also felt the need for creativity in managing church growth.

Therefore, throughout our times of conversation and prayer on this subject, we’ve discussed a number of different strategies for multiplication, looking at various factors such as how Jesus led His disciples, how the first-century church was formed, how Amsterdam society works today, what the learning-style in a post-modern society looks like, and other such considerations.  More and more we came to the conclusion that the Sunday service may not always be the best place to showcase a life of faith or to make Jesus known to them—at least not in the context of Amsterdam’s younger generations.  In fact, we started to wonder if, by keeping the emphasis on our weekly worship gatherings, we might be teaching Amsterdammers the very same misconception which the church has been subconsciously perpetuating over the past centuries: Christianity is merely something for Sundays in a building we call 'church'.

But that's not what we want to teach them! We want to show them the Church as God intended it, the church described in Acts 2:42-47, the church where people live their lives together, care for each other, and actively multiply God’s love to others.  We want to bring the church to the people—instead of just bringing people to the church.  And in order to do this, we have to create time and space to build (new) relationships with people outside of the church and invest time in them.  Such relationships work best if they take place in familiar territory: among our colleagues, classmates, neighbors, friends, people from our sports clubs, or any of the other countless subcultures of Amsterdam—those whom we already know or with whom we can easily get into contact. We believe that it is these kinds of relationships which have a lasting impact and which can be life-changing.
 
Consequently, starting next month (November), we have decided to shift from one community meeting weekly for worship to two communities, meeting every-other week for worship and thus putting more emphasis on our home groups and life groups and creating an expectation for greater penetration into other subcultures throughout the city.  Four of our church’s home groups will gather as one Neighborhood Church for corporate worship on the first and third Sundays of the month, and the other four home groups in our church will meet together as a second Neighborhood Church on the second and the fourth Sundays of the month (in months with five Sundays, we'll do something special as a “City Church” on that fifth Sunday of the month).  Consequently, we should have more room for growth in our Sunday worship gatherings (essentially doubling our capacity) and more of a need for people to step up into key areas of serving and leadership, while simultaneously avoiding the trap of over-extending ourselves and burning out our leaders in the process.  Also, with such a schedule, our hope is that the people in our church would have extra time in their regular schedule to invest, together with others from their home groups, into the relationships for which they might otherwise never seem to find the time.

Without a doubt, such a transition is an ambitious undertaking.  We’ve been building up to this change for months, and we realize that it will be several months (if not years) before the transition is fully realized.  We understand that blazing new trails and building new relationships does not just happen overnight. It will take time and effort and perseverance. And it will take lots and lots of prayer (that’s where you come in!)!  Still, we’re confident that God is with us and for us, and the He is calling us in this new direction.  We look forward to keeping you updated throughout the coming months.  In the meantime, though, please keep praying.

Eric