May God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ
give you grace and peace. Jesus gave his life
for our sins, just as God our Father planned, in order to
rescue us from this evil world in which we live.
All glory to God forever and ever! Amen.
(Galatians 1:3-5)

Greetings from Amsterdam!  This is our first written communication since our time of traveling, visiting, and talking on the phone with many of you, during our time in the American Midwest this summer; so I want to start by just saying thank you for all your hospitality, your words of encouragement, and your increased financial support!  It was really refreshing to have had the opportunity to personally interact with so many of you (though I wish it could have been everyone).  Even though all the travel was somewhat taxing, we felt really “filled up” by the time we returned to the Netherlands.  We’ve been back in the Netherlands for almost a month now, following nearly six weeks fund-raising in the United States—and even though we’ve become pretty well accustomed to this whole trans-Atlantic existence, I have to admit that this has been a particularly challenging transition back into Amsterdam this time around.  Especially the first week or two.  We had to deal with horrendous Dutch weather:  skies of battleship gray, high winds, buckets and buckets of rain, and cold temperatures.  Our basement flooded twice in that first week-and-a-half that we were back.  And stepping back into my church leadership responsibilities, it also felt like it took a good while before I felt up to speed on everything.  Though I won’t burden you with any further details, it’s been a particularly challenging transition back into Amsterdam.  But—thank God!—over the last couple of weeks, things have finally been getting back to a normal rhythm again.  Everybody is back from their vacations and getting back into “real life” again.  Momentum is starting to build again.  And I sense that we’re coming into a really great season of refreshment and renewal and refocusing for the future

Have you ever seen the Star Wars movie, “The Return of the Jedi?”  It came out when I was six years old (one of my earliest childhood memories is going to see it in the movie theater), so it made a big impression on me… But anyway, there’s this one scene near the beginning of the movie just after the good guys have just gotten away from this ruthless mobster named Jabba the Hutt.  They’ve blasted off into outer space with a plan to reconvene with the rest of the Rebel fleet at their mobile headquarters.  When they arrive at the headquarters and assemble in this big round room, there’s a brief moment of reunion.  Old friends hug and joke with each other; they smile broadly and catch up a bit on what’s been happening while they’ve been away from each other… But even while they’re in the midst of all this reunion action, it also becomes apparent that they’ve all assembled for a military briefing.  This weird-looking, fish-headed creature named Admiral Ackbar stands up and gives a presentation about the challenges that they’re all facing from the evil intergalactic Empire.  He describes the life-and-death conflict that the Rebel forces will have to initiate in order to defeat the evil Empire—and he starts going through the strategy that’s been worked up to meet the challenges.  Different people chime in at different moments, bringing in key pieces of information that help to shape the strategy.  And then, after the entire strategy has been discussed, they break to go their separate ways and make it happen.

You see, that’s the kind of season that I feel we’re experiencing with our ministry in Amsterdam right now.  We’re just reconvening again after the summer, after a lot of people have been traveling and such, and there is this very sweet sense of reunion that we get to experience as a church family.  We need to check in with each other and catch up on what’s happened over the summer (which turns out to have been a great season of refreshment, community, and even getting to see a number of people newly decide to follow Jesus).  But it turns out that we’ve also got some serious business to discuss.  As we look around us in Amsterdam, we are reminded of the spiritual battle that we’re constantly facing as a church; and we realize the need to repeatedly remind ourselves of the vision and strategy that we’ve developed to engage with this battle.

We need to freshly commit ourselves to knowing Jesus, becoming Like Jesus, and making Jesus Known.

Isn’t it crazy how we become so easily side-tracked in these pursuits?!?  The pendulum swings fast and hard—vacillating between laziness and legalism.  And this is why we’ve decided to take the fall to focus on studying the New Testament book of Galatians, as a church.  It’s such a beautiful reminder of the beauty and power of the Gospel of grace.  It’s an explanation for why Jesus really is a worthy object of our worship and allegiance.  As our church’s leadership team looked at the “battle plan” for this coming season of ministry, we felt like Galatians would afford us a special opportunity for growth and development, if we could allow ourselves to be impacted and envisioned by its simple message of grace and living a Spirit-filled life.  So I’m really looking forward to the opportunity to study and teach through this book of the Bible (along with a team of others).  In addition to focusing on this message in our Sunday worship gatherings, we’re also encouraging the people of our church to deeply examine Galatians in the context of their communities and life groups and personal lives as well.  And already (just two weeks into our study), we’re beginning to see some fruit…

But in all of this, we desperately need prayer support!  This is actually an integral part of our battle plan for this fall, too.  The spiritual battle in Amsterdam is intense, and we need God’s help for good communication, understanding, and application.  We need God’s help to make disciples and love our neighbors.  We need God’s help to love each other!  Since coming back to the church from our time away, I’ve noticed that there seem to be several low-grade conflict situations plaguing our church right now—nothing to get too alarmed about, I hope, but definitely something which needs to be committed to God in prayer.  We need to pray for more fruit of the Spirit:  love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (like it talks about in Galatians chapter 5).  And just in general, we need a lot of prayer support!  Fortunately, from all of my conversations with ministry partners back in America this summer, I know that we have a broad network of highly-committed prayer warriors (i.e. those of you, who are reading this letter).  So could you please be praying with us and for us?  We really appreciate everything you do to keep us going.  We’ll be in touch…

Eric