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

We have shared together the blessings of God…
defending the truth and telling others the Good News.
(Philippians 1:7)

Greetings from Amsterdam!  Can you believe that it’s been exactly three years since our family moved from Northwest Ohio (Bowling Green) to Northwest Europe (Amsterdam)?!?!  To us, “three years” feels like both a surprisingly long time and a surprisingly short time to have been here.  We continue to be encouraged by God’s work in and through our lives.  With this prayer letter, I am following a tradition that I’ve established through my years of ministry with GCM—using the first prayer letter of a new year to write a more extended overview of our lives and our ministry.  Please feel free to skim or to read in-depth.  We are extremely grateful for your partnership in prayer and finances, so we just want to keep you informed.  Without a doubt, it a privilege to report all that God has done and is doing…

Cultural Assimilation

The last twelve months included several significant milestones for our family’s assimilation into Dutch culture.  It could be said that our first year consisted largely of making the actual move and setting up our home.  The second year, then, was defined by a process of learning the language and becoming more acquainted with the culture.  And this third year of living in the Netherlands proved to be a time for greater establishment and exploration into new territories of the culture…

Elliot began peuterspeelzaal (pre-school) in September, and his introduction into the school system has taken our family to a new level of immersion in our neighborhood and in Dutch culture as a whole.  We also successfully navigated through the medical system to have a tumor surgically removed from Olivia’s forehead in December; and this gave us increased confidence (following many doubts) that we can effectively operate on the most practical levels of Dutch society.  Interestingly, it just seems that more and more of life seems to take place in the Dutch language.  We’ve decided as a family to implement “Nederlandse ‘s vrijdags” (Dutch Fridays), so we can practice Dutch at home one day each week (although we continue to maintain English as the primary language of our home).  Continually, we seek to find creative ways to maintain a solid footing in two cultures.  As time has passed, we’ve felt less and less like strangers and more and more like Amsterdammers.  We still have much to learn, and we continue to miss the USA at times.  Yet all in all, we’re glad for the life that God has given us in the Netherlands.

Church Growth

Of course, the whole reason that our family (and others) subjected ourselves to this process of cultural assimilation was to help establish a new church for young people in the secular stronghold of Amsterdam’s city center.  By God’s grace, we can say that we experienced much progress in 2005.  We started the year by multiplying Sunday worship gatherings (having one gathering at 4:00 in the afternoon and another gathering at 7:30 in the evening), and already both gatherings are packed full again.  It’s amazing to realize that the majority of international church plants struggle just to survive in the first five years, and it’s often decades before there’s any significant increase in the number of people being affected by the ministry.  However, less than three years after its establishment, Zolder50 continues to expand exponentially.  Our weekly large-group gatherings now include a total involvement of as many as 250 people.  The church also multiplied two home groups in 2005, and we’re seeing the potential for much more to happen in the months and years to come.

It’s so encouraging to see God moving.  More than just being excited about the bigger crowds and positive statistics, we’re thrilled to see genuine life transformation.  Many have come to faith in Christ.  Men and women are experiencing healing and growth in the areas of deepest hurt and dysfunction.  Plus, more and more Europeans are taking responsibility for serving and leadership within Zolder50.  Our desire has always been for God to continually multiply believers, home groups (5-15 people), and neighborhood churches (50-150 people) throughout Amsterdam, relying largely (if not eventually entirely) on Dutch leadership.  And by God’s grace, it’s already happening! 

Special Projects

Throughout 2005, our ministry schedule included a series of special projects to reach out within the city and beyond.  In the spring and summer, Zolder50 organized several events to bring us into closer contact with the multitude of non-believers in Amsterdam.  From an arts and music festival to a large-scale distribution of approximately 3000 flowers in the Vondelpark, God blessed us with many opportunities to spread seeds of God’s Kingdom.

In the fall, our home group sponsored an “Alpha Course”—teaching the basics of the Christian faith to an eager group of seekers and new believers.  Although it was our first such venture, the course actually turned out to be a highlights of the year.  At least one young woman became a Christian through the course, three others decided to be baptized, and our home group effectively doubled in size as a result of people wanting to continue their process of spiritual development following the Alpha Course!

Then at the end of the year, Amsterdam played host to GCM’s first-ever pan-European conference:  Awaken 2005.  Honestly, it was stressful to figure out all the logistical details for housing, feeding, and involving 230 participants from eight different countries—but by God’s grace, the conference went smoother than we ever could have imagined, and it turned out to be an amazing success!  People were challenged by in-depth teaching from JR Woodward, Noel Heikinnen, and Kolya Skopych; they were inspired by in-depth worship, sharing songs and traditions from multiple cultural backgrounds; and they were invigorated by in-depth fellowship with European believers from Spain to Ukraine, united under the banner of Christ.

In 2006, we look forward to a number of other outreach projects.  In particular, one exciting initiative is to couple the church’s five home groups with five short-term missions teams from America to serve as “Spies in the Land” (see Numbers 13:1-25), scouting out five other cities throughout the Netherlands to determine the potential for eventual church planting beyond Amsterdam…

Ministry Team Development

We cannot help but be amazed by God’s ongoing provision for our material needs.  For seven years now, we’ve been supported in full-time ministry through the generous giving and faithful prayer of individuals, families, and churches from the United States—our ministry team.  We are so thankful for this team, which provides the practical and spiritual foundation enabling us to be a part of the ministry of Zolder50 in Amsterdam’s city center.  Thank you for your role on our support team.  Even last summer, when our family faced an imminent crisis in our financial support situation, we were amazed to see how God provided for us through the continued (and increased) faithfulness of so many on our ministry team!  We appreciate you more than you could possibly know.

Our Personal Lives

Our family has been an ongoing source of encouragement (and occasional challenges) throughout the last year.  We are so thankful to God for the basic blessings of a stable home, an ever-deepening marriage, and wonderful children.  Not only do we encourage and support each other, but we’ve found that a godly family in the center of Amsterdam can be a powerful mirror for reflecting the light of Christ; thus, our home presents many opportunities for ministry.

Olivia is now 16 months old.  Her hair has grown long and thick in recent months (completely covering any residual scarring from the surgery to remove her hemangioma in December)—and she looks more like a little girl and less like a baby these days.  She loves to run around the house and do whatever her big brother is doing.  She is naturally effervescent, curious, and passionate, and it’s neat to watch her personality emerge as she constantly improves her verbal communication.

Elliot is now almost four years old.  His experiences in school have helped him to develop greater self-assurance and social skills, and he increasingly enjoys being the center of attention.  His Dutch comprehension is almost as good as his English comprehension, though he still prefers to express himself in English.  As he’s grown, we’ve really come to admire his intelligence, creativity, and faith.

Marci is (and has long been) a resourceful and resilient woman of God.  Whether it’s caring for our family of four or caring for the multitude of young Amsterdammers who pass through our home for ministry events or casual conversations—everyone knows that Marci can be counted on for wise counsel, compassionate listening, and delicious baked goods (yet even with those wonderful baked goods, she managed to lose about 20 pounds in 2005)!

As for me, I continue to enjoy my role in leading Zolder50 and in leading our household through life in Amsterdam.  It can be very challenging at times, but also very rewarding.  In 2005, I rediscovered a latent passion for creative writing, developing a new outlet for creative self-expression and communication through establishment of a web log (www.amsterdamasp.blogspot.com), and I look forward to possibly even trying to write a book (or a compilation of short stories) in 2006…

Please keep praying for us.  There is much hope and excitement about everything that God is doing in and around us in Amsterdam, and we look forward to keeping you informed as developments occur.  Thanks again for everything.

Love in Christ,

Eric

 

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ABOVE: our Home Group; Marci and the kids on the bakfiets; Alpha course weekend session; our crazy staff team

BELOW:  Asp family portrait, January 2006 (couldn’t get the kids to smile at the camera, but you get a glimpse of reality!); 17^th Century cathedral restored to use as place of worship for Awaken 2005; Elliot’s first day of school

       

           

ABOVE:  Olivia’s progression through hemangioma treatment

LEFT:  Todd Watkins and I baptize a young man named Thomas (August)