I never had a burning vision to be a "church planter."  My general involvement in church leadership can be credited more to a sense of incidental availability than a natural desire of my heart.  And well, to be honest, personal involvement in long-term "overseas missions" was never an aspiration of mine...

Yet here I am, serving as a pastor, helping to develop a fledgling church in Amsterdam's city center.

How did this happen?  Well, up until the early part of this decade our family was involved in a student ministry called h2o at Bowling Green State University (in northwest Ohio).  Around that time, our church had grown and solidified to the point where we felt compelled by Jesus' instruction to "Go and make disciples of all nations" and thus consider starting another church elsewhere -- someplace with a lot of young people (since our experience was in ministering to university students), someplace with opportunities for strategic influence (we wanted to influence a city that could in turn influence entire people groups and create inroads to other parts of the world), and someplace with a need for churches.  In the process of considering our options, God led us to team up with another church in Colorado (to which we were connected through mutual involvement in Great Commission Ministries), and eventually Amsterdam became a particular point of intrigue -- aligning quite astonishingly with our search criteria:  a city of 1.5 million with approximately 400,000 between ages of 18-30... An extremely international community (the population is roughly half Dutch and half international, with 140 different languages spoken in the city)... And less than three percent of the population living as evangelical Christians.

We decided that we had to check it out for ourselves.

In May of 2001, my wife and I were a part of an exploratory trip to Amsterdam, with a team of 35 people on assignment to get the counsel from any Christians we could find in the city and talk to the average "person on the street" as well, in order to gauge the spiritual vibe of the city.  Every church and ministry leader that we talked to urged us to come.  Furthermore, in interacting with random strangers in the parks and pleins and cafes -- asking for a sampling of opinions about God and about church -- we were shocked by what we learned.  In all of our random encounters during the course of that trip, we did not meet a single person who had ever even visited a church before!  Even so, there was a tremendous sense of curiosity and openness that seemed to beckon us to choose Amsterdam as the location for our eventual church plant...  And after much prayer, discussion, and consideration, that's exactly what we did.

Our family landed on the Continent in January of 2003, and since then we've seen God do some pretty amazing things.  In a Western European context, where church growth is typically measured in terms of dozens of people over decades of time -- our ministry has actually seen over 200 people become involved after just a few short years as a church community.

And, believe it or not, we feel that the best is yet to come.