Heidebeek Tent City

For a few weeks in July and August, Heidebeek looked more like a tent camp than a YWAM base. An outsider might have wondered if the Children of Israel had suddenly been transported to the future and had camped out in the grass fields of Heidebeek.

This was all due to a number of activities that took place here this Summer. Starting with Boomerang tours for teenagers, then GO Teams for young people, and finally Family Camp. We also had a 3-week Mini-DTS here, but they stayed in the dorms.

Thankfully, we were able to escape Heidebeek at the busiest time – when Family Camp was running together with the Mini-DTS – and get away for two weeks of vacation. But, I’m getting ahead of myself…

Lisa’s Schooling

We shared in our last update that we were trying to decide where to send Lisa to school this September. We were finally able (with God’s wisdom, we hope) to settle on the Christian school. In June at the end of the school year, she said good-bye to her pre-school by bringing treats (In Holland, you bring treats to school on special occasions like Birthdays). She was also able to go to her new school for a couple of mornings to start getting used to it.

Preaching

On July 15th, we were in Goes where I preached in Jolanda’s church. I spoke on the subject of worship, which is near and dear to my heart. I was a little bit nervous, though, since I’ve never spoken in her church on a Sunday morning. I also had to do it all in Dutch which was not a small challenge.

Another reason I was a little nervous is because her church is very liturgical which means the order of the service is very strict: votum and greeting, song, prayer, scripture reading, sermon…song, benediction. While I’ve sat through many services, it was very different leading this one myself. It went well, and I had several positiv comments afterwards. You can listen to the whole service online if you ‘d like, but it’s all in Dutch, so most of you won’t understand it. (You could always pray for the interpretation.)

Vacation

As I hinted at earlier, we had two weeks of vacation, and part of that time we spent at Jolanda’s Dad’s place. We made little day-trips here and there including a visit to an amusement park, a ride on an old-fashioned steam train and a couple of visits to the beach.

Furlough

Heidebeek is kinda dead now because most people are or on vacation/furlough after the Summer’s busyness and before the new season begins again in September.

Which brings us to our own furlough which we will be having in October. We will we visiting Arizona in October to show off our new, little family member Sarah and spend some time with our church family there. Thanks to a couple of gifts, the tickets should be taken care of, however, we could use some help in other areas while we’re in the US. You’ll be receiving an e-mail from us shortly with a list of some things we need/would like to have while we’re in Arizona.

We look forward to seeing you all when we’re there. Please don’t hesitate to contact us already to set up a time to get together.

What were you doing on Pentecost Sunday? Chances are you went to church as usual; here in Holland, the Monday after Pentecost is a holiday so everyone has off form work. We spent the Pentecost weekend in Germany at an amazing conference held by YWAM Europe.

Festival of the Nations 2007

More than 900 YWAM staff and friends from more than 40 nations across Europe gathered for a Festival of the Nations in Herrnhut, the small German town that gave birth to the modern missionary movement. (For more information on Herrnhut and the Moravians, check out the website I setup for the Festival: www.ywam.eu/festival)

Loren Cunningham, founder of YWAM
standing in front of the banners I helped design.

Even though YWAM Herrnhut took care of most of the arrangements for the Festival, we were very busy in the YWAM Europe office the last few weeks before the Festival started. My responsibilities included last-minute updates to the website, designing and printing out over 1000 name-tags, and designing the 5 huge (8ft by 4ft) banners for behind the stage at the Festival itself. (See picture to the right.)

The trip by car to Herrnhut itself should have only taken about 9 hours, but because Lisa was carsick the whole time, we took 15 hours and two days to get there. Thankfully, for the way back we got a motion sickness pill from one of the other Heidebeek mothers which made the trip back much more pleasant and only took 9 hours.

The Festival itself was a great time of meeting new YWAMers from all over Europe and seeing old friends from Bosnia and Eastern Europe. There was kid’s praise program every morning followed by seminars, then concerts and workshops in the afternoon. The plenary sessions were in the evening with Lynn Green, YWAM’s International Chairman, Brualia Riebeiro, The leader of YWAM Brazil, and Loren Cunningham, the founder of YWAM. (I will be posting audio and video from the plenary sessions and from some of the seminars on the festival website soon.)

I also led a seminar on the subject of internet evangelism. About 30 people came to discuss this hot topic and I took down the e-mail addresses of 12 people who want to continue networking together.

The European Communications Team (EUROCOM), of which I’m a part, met together several times and gave a couple of workshops. It’s our task to serve the leadership of YWAM Europe, helping them to communicate, networking communications people together from all over Europe, and raising awareness of the need to communicate amongst YWAMers in general.

It was very encouraging to meet together with EUROCOM (which consists of Steve, the communications coordinator, Inge, the Western Europe coordinator, and Rebecca and Belinda the Central Europe coodinators). Since we’re so spread out (Steve-Budapest, Inge-Amsterdam, Rebecca-Czech Republic, Belinda-Bosnia) It was good hearing from each what’s been going on in our lives and also to help identify ways the enemy has been trying to attack us. The enemy has been busy trying to discourage us, and all of us have considered quitting more than once in the last half year.

It’s not without reason that the enemy has been trying so hard to get us to quit. Someone noted that, in wartime the first thing an enemy will do is try and take out the opponent’s communications, making it difficult for communication from the leadership, coordination of efforts and calling for reinforcements when one location is under attack.

Contacts

At the Festival it was also good to meet school leaders from a couple of different schools and let them know that I am available to teach. Hopefully I will hear form them soon if they want me to teach this Fall and next Spring. We’ll keep you posted.

Lisa’s Schooling

Please help us pray about a very important decision we need to make soon: which school to send Lisa to. She’s not actually required to go fulltime until she’s six, but she’s allowed to start from the time she’s four. We’ve narrowed it down to two schools, a public one and a Christian one. Both are actually public in the sense that they are free, because schools in The Netherlands can choose to base their education on a particular religion.

The public school has the advantage of being closer to home and having closer ties to Heidebeek (typically, Heidebeek kids have all gone to this school). The teaching style of this school also appeals to us more. The Christian school has the obvious advantage that Lisa will get some Christian teaching along the way and hopefully a little less "junk". Even though it is Christian, though, not all of the teachers and students are necessarily Christian. By the same token, there are Christian teachers and students at the public school.We need to make our decision this week so that Lisa can get enrolled and even go for a couple of "try-out days" before the summer vacation starts.

As always, you can read more about Lisa and Sarah on their blogs:
lisablevins.com, sarah-blevins.com

You can also check out a few pictures of the Festival here.

The days are getting longer here in Holland, and the weather is slowly starting to warm up. We’re thankful for the warmer weather and the promise of Summer that’s just around the corner.

Romania

It’s been almost 4 weeks since I came back from Romania. I was there for a week with a team of people helping to staff a course called Call2Worship. The team consisted of Belinda van de Loo, Didi Companjen and myself who came from Holland to teach, Richard Mauney who is a missionary living in Romania, and five YWAM staff from the base there in Romania. There were 15 participants from all over Romania.

Some of them were worship leaders, all of them involved in worship in one way or another. We taught on subjects such as Hebrew words for praise, the Biblical foundation of worship, lifestyle of worship, the Tabernacle of Moses, and many other topics.

At the end of the week the students testified to having learned a lot and being greatly built up. Hopefully they went back to their own churches with a renewed vision and calling to help lead their churches in worship. Another praise report is that through severl generous gifts, my entire trip is paid off.

Belgium

The Friday after I came back from Romania, I went to speak on worship in a church in Belgium. I was with their pastors and the people involved in worship in the church. First I shared about worship as an offering and then we had an hour of Q&A and discussion. It was good to be there as it reminded me of The River of Life about 20 years ago when we first made them move into Praise and Worship.

Sarah and Lisa

Our two girls are doing great. Sarah is growing well. She smiles a lot and even gives up a laugh or two now and then. The cutest thing to see is the bond between her and Lisa. If anyone can get a laugh out of Sarah then it’s Lisa.

Lisa is going through a strong-willed phase: wanting to do everything herself and usually succeeding, and also not listening very well to her parents. In spite of this, we see her growing in her knowledge of God. She had been sick last week, and as is our habit, we had prayed for her. That evening at the dinner table she was feeling better and we said we were going to pray for the meal. She spontaneously offered to pray and started by thanking Jesus for making her better and also for the food, amen.

This week, Jolanda was explaining to Lisa that she was also sick like Lisa had been. All of a sudden, Lisa stood up and scrunched up her eyes and starting praying for her mommy: “Thank you Lord for making mama better, just like you made me better, amen.”

Jolanda

Jolanda mostly does what she’s so good at, being a mother. And not just to our two girls, but also to other ladies here at the base. She is a mentor to several young ladies, one of which is a Dutch girl in love with an American guy. Jo is in a perfect position to offer her advice. She has also started working in the pastoral and staff care and development teams again.

Thank you once again for your prayers and support and for taking the time to read this update.

Dear Family and Friends,

My, my, my, it has been almost two months since we sent out an update, and a lot has happened since then, so we thought it high time to get all of our faithful supporters up to speed.

Sarah Anne

As most of you hopefully already know (we sent out a “special” e-mail update to announce it), our second daughter, Sarah Anne, was born on December 27th. We were very happy to welcome her into our family. She is healthy, and growing just as fast as she can.

We’re also very thankful to report that the nights – barring the occasional setback – are getting better and better. Since Jolanda is nursing, she’s the once who has to get out in the middle of the night (unless, of course, it’s for some other reason, then I have to get out). We feed Sarah for the last time at around 10:30PM, and she usually sleeps until around 5 or 5:30AM. She normally (not always) goes back to sleep and sleeps until her next feeding, about 3 hours later.

Lisa has quickly stepped into the role of proud, big sister. She tries to help out with everything, but especially with unbuttoning Sarah’s clothes and opening up her diaper at changing times. Bath-time is also loads of fun. She is occasionally jealous, but no more than is to be expected. Please pray for God’s grace for her, and wisdom for us on how to help her adjust normally to the new situation.

Teaching in Romania

Since the last couple months of Jolanda’s pregnancy and since the baby has been born, teaching and speaking has been on a back-burner for me. I was able to preach in a church last Sunday, the 18th. It was a small, cozy fellowship in the nearby town of Deventer. We were warmly received and I think people were edified by the message.

In just two weeks time, I will be flying off to Romania to be staff in a Call2Worship along with two other ladies from here and another American man who has been working and living in Romania for 10 years. The Call2Worshp is normally a two-week worship seminar, but this time we have shortened it to cater more to the schedules of the people attending.

There will be a total of 18 lessons, of which I will be teaching four: tabernacle worship, worship offerings, prophetic worship, and the identity of a worshipper (finding your identity in Christ). Altogether about 5 hours of teaching. Other topics will include: Hebrew words for praise, foundations of Biblical worship, and various practical workshops on song-writing, and worship team dynamics. Out students will be mostly high school and college age people who are involved in some way in leading worship on their churches, since apparently those age groups are the ones most involved in leading worship in their churches.

Our room and board while we’re there is taken care of, but I had to pay for the airfare myself, which came out to about $550.

More Travel

We also have two more trips that may be taking place soon. I have been invited to participate in YWAM’s Consultation on Communications, Research and Information Technology which will be taking place May 7th-12th in India. In the words of Lynn Green, YWAM’s International Chairman, “the purpose of this meeting is to bring together key players in YWAM communications, research and IT from around the world to dramatically transform the communications landscape in Youth With A Mission”. God has been speaking to YWAM about “healing the nervous system”, which means healing YWAM’s communication, both internally (from the Leadership on down to the “people on the ground” and vice versa) and externally to people outside YWAM. I have already been involved in this since I have been working part time in the YWAM Europe office.

This trip would not be cheap, and so I need a word from the Lord that this is really something I’m supposed to be involved in. The costs are $275 for the conference plus airfare which will be between $800-$1000.

Another trip that we will be taking as a family is to attend YWAM’s Festival of the Nations in Germany. This is a “family gathering” of YWAMers from all over Europe which takes place May 25th – 28th. It is certain that at least I will be going and we will do everything we can to go as a family. This will be a good time to meet YWAMers from all over Europe and hear what God is doing through and in them. Please be in prayer about the finances for these trips, and please also consider giving an extra donation to help out with the expenses.

As always, you can see the latest pictures of us in our gallery.

Thank you once again for your interest in us and taking the time to read our updates.