Marc's Messages

Happy birthday Karolien!

Today is Karolien's birthday. I bought her favorite orange-red-yellow roses. And we threw a small family party.

We wanna see Jesus

This morning I visited Frans Horsthuis, a 83-year old Catholic priest, who in 1968 decided to give up his position in the organised church and sell everything he had to follow Jesus. In 1988 he published his book 'The Royal Way', the story of his pilgrimage in Christ and a prophetic message to the Church in Europe that was way beyond his time.

We talked about paganism in the church, how the church as an instituation often blocks the revelation of Christ, and how everything in life bottles down to one thing: do we live for Christ or for men? What a richness to hang out with this older brother.

The cops are coming

To celebrate Karolien's birthday (tomorrow), we took the kids and my parents to the Police and Ambulance Museum in Apeldoorn. Was fun. They demonstrated how to catch a crook with handcuffs, there was an impressive Chevrolet-type ambulance that looked like a hotel on wheels, and we found a bottle with ten fingers that some agent cut off from a victim when they wanted to take fingerprints.

Out of the comfort zone

Hung out with Theo, Maaike and other friends of Soul Survivor at their young leaders' conference. Good to catch up and hear Peter Helms preach prophetically on 'crossing to the other side', leaving the crowds, entering the boat with Jesus, to be pushed out of your comfort zone. Yes, the right message at the right time.

Welcome to new bloggers

Its' time to introduce a few new bloggers to you, fresh entries on my bloglist. First the Dutchies. Mr. Time to Turn Frank Mulder and his companion Freek keep a duo-blog on justice issues, smoking cigars and more. Holy bean Mirjam Verhage is a multi-media designer with a typical girls-feel weblog.

Then we go east, to revolutionary Markus Laegel, who heads up the 24-7 team in Germany. I already introduced Alexander Campbell of Simple Church in the UK. DAWN buddy Andreas Wolf also entered the blogosphere to offer his perspective on the world. Jan Inge Saltskar from Connect Norway started zealously, but suddently stopped blogging, hopefully he wakes up again from his nordic winter sleep. Finally there's Mark Lane from Rivertribe in Australia.

It's also time to say farewell to my friend Ronald van der Molen who found out that blogging is actually a very boring activity, and called it a day. Good news for his wife, for sure.

God among the indigenous

Met with a group of prophetic people today, and heard some crazy stories. Two guys went to Australia and witnessed a revival among the Aboriginals, where a new stream of the prophetic is coming from. I think God is up to something with the indigenous people. My friend Niina from Finland is connecting with the Sami in the north, and mailed me this website of a World Christian Gathering of Indigenous People.

Keeping appointments

Last week a trainee of youth movement Soul Survivor called me to ask for my cooperation in a project she's working on: a review of Soul Survivor's communication outlets. Does the movement communicate effectively with its audience? How about charismatic jargon like 'ministry', 'outreach' and 'stepping out in faith'? Are there better alternatives?

I told her I had a tight schedule this week, so we agreed that she would call me in my office this afternoon to go through the questionnaire. She didn't call, but somehow it didn't surprise me.

Over the past months I had several appointments with and promises from Soul Survivor folks, and in 60-70% of the cases they didn't return phone calls or e-mails, and in three cases even forgot to show up in person. My guess is that their communication problem is not in the jargon, but in credibility.

It's not my intention to be negative. I know my friends at Soul Survivor are pretty overstretched. Trying to keep too many plates in the air inevitably leads to black-outs. How does one break out of a quite ad-hoc organisation culture? The new structure (with clearer responsibilities and planning) is a good starter, but more important is living out shared values, like keeping appointments by principle.

It's a basic Christian discipline: say what you do and do what you say. Shouldn't be too complicated, right? It helps to not make any promises you're not likely to keep (because of time pressure or because your heart isn't in it), so you don't raise false expectations. If you already made a promise, but foresee you can't keep it, reschedule it realistically. If somehow you completely forgot an appointment, always apologise instead of making excuses.

Tonight my boys came up to me with their 'Bible stories for kids' and I read the story of the father who asks his two sons to help out in the vineyard. One said no, but changed his mind and showed up. The other said yes, but didn't keep the appointment. Which of these two sons did the right thing?

Joel News restyling

Just finished the restyling of the international section of the Joel News website. The video-cd 'Globalizing Prayer, Transforming Our World' is now also available for our international readers and supporters.

And if you're looking for a good investment opportunity: together with the DAWN International Network we partner in a funding project that gives you a revenue of 50-100% on donations for leadership development and church planting.

House of prayer in Utrecht

Caught up with the team of the house of prayer in Utrecht. It's encouraging to discover that God is speaking to different people about the same topics. Also heard an encouraging story about older intercessors teaming up with young evangelists in the city, creating open doors to minister among muslims and prostitutes.

Talking about Utrecht, I just put Teus Schep's moving story 'A taxi ride through Utrecht' online. Dutch (extensive) version here.

Cappucino IKEA-style

Met up in the IKEA restaurant with Dirk-Jan Horjus to discuss our book project on 'streams of living water in Dutch church history'. Yes, a theologian and a historian working on what you could label a 'prophetic identity project', sounds interesting, right?

BTW, we found out that between 9 and 10 am IKEA serves free coffee, tea and cappucino, without the obligation to walk out with a Billy under your arm. Swedish hospitality.

Me Tarzan, you Jane

A full day. Hang out with our Utrecht city team to evaluate our last leaders' day and prepare for the next one.

In the afternoon an information session in Alphen aan den Rijn with Dirk van der Schaaf, Leon van Eijk and several others about the Jane Evaluation, a talent and gift test focused on releasing people, churches and organisations into their God-given destiny. Good stuff.

Simple church in the UK

Alexander Campbell also kept a weblog of the DAWN consultation. He put this picture of Steve and me online with the footnote: Coffee break: the more mature ones continued the serious conversation outside. Allright...

Also check out his website simplechurch.co.uk, with some excellent contributions on organic church, like Jayne Ozanne's prophetic word 'Is this the end of the Church of England as we know it?' and Neil Cole's article 'If you could start all over'. Also interesting: conference notes of Tony & Felicity Dale's Luke 10 training and Alan Hirsch and Mike Frost's 'Shaping of Things to Come' day.

Cinema and family pics

Took David for a first-time visit to the cinema to see 'Plop and Kwispel', an umcomplicated movie from the Flemish Studio100 crew. He enjoyed it a lot.

BTW, I put some new family pictures online here.

Back home

I'm back home. Had a great week in Switzerland with friends, fondue, fire, fresh insights, frontline church planting stories and frozen legs. Photo album here.

Praying on the top of Europe

The consultation is over. Time for a team debriefing, some planning stuff, and a quick group picture.

Then I head with Steve and Mary Bufton to the top of Europe, the Jungfraujoch at 3454 meter (11,333 ft).

The Swiss are amazing - they built a train track right through the mountain to a plateau on the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau range, overlooking the Aletsch glacier in the south and most of Switzerland. It's the highest railway station in Europe. An amazing view, with the rare opportunity (if you're not a mountaineer) to literally pray over Europe. Pictures here.

Friendship and communion

We ended the consultation with a night of prayer, which was probably more prophetic and postmodern than the average DAWN facilitator is used to, but it was received well. Kerstin and I removed the tabels, chairs and notebooks from the room, set up a salon table with candles and communion elements, and projected pictures on the wall.

We started off with the story of a friend of mine who is a taxi driver in Utrecht. One day God gave him the assignment to keep a diary for the period of several months. This diary would be a prophetic message to the Church. It's about the people he met in his cab, their real-life stories on the raw side of city life. It ends with a prayer of compassion.

Then we served communion to each other, ending in prophetic prayer for four smaller nations: Ireland, Luxemburg, Greece and Finland. We wrote the prophetic impressions on four big papers that the representatives of these nations could take home. Andrew and Karsten Wolff veejayed us into the night. A wonderful closing of the consultation.

Ants, money, muslims and Fidel

Innovators' day. In the morning Andrew helped us to glean some wisdom from the ants. They form colonies without a hierarchical leadership structure, they leave trails for others, there's communication on every level. Sounds like the emerging church to me.

Wolfgang talked about the 'apostolic migration' that is taking place from 'babylonic church systems' to grassroots expressions of the Kingdom, and the implications this has for DAWN. As expected, he also touched on deliverance and money issues. "Money and power, not God, has become the defining factor for missions and church unity. It's time to break this stronghold and lead people into freedom." He gave some interesting examples of funding in the New Testament, and of deliverance as a key in church planting. A pity we didn't have time to dig a bit deeper into this issue.

S., a medical doctor, shared about the development of DAWN in North Africa and the Middle East. A truly intriguing story. In the beginning of the nineties there were around 1500 churches in the region, now - ten years later - this number has tripled to 4500. The believers are boldly taking on the challenge to plant churches, most of these 'organic' (house church format), with amazing results. Also many miracles take place, which results in muslims coming to Christ. Amaury and I had the opportunity to pray for him.

It's great that the international DAWN team also came over the hang out with us. After the consultation they will have an add-on three-day team meeting. Berna Salcedo shared about the development of DAWN in Latin America and humorously remarked that their most effective DAWN coordinator was Fidel Castro. When the Cuban leader announced that Christians weren't allowed to meet in church buildings more than 3 km from their village, this led to an explosion of house churches. In ten years time over 10,000 new churches have been planted in Cuba.

The Portuguese connection

Over dinner the Portuguese brothers had some encouraging stories to share. Paulo Pascoal told me that young people in Portugal took the initiative to throw a missions conference at the end of 2005, where they will gather young people from all over the nation, and cast the vision to adopt every unreached area in Portugal for church planting. To demonstrate their point, this conference will be held in a town without a church in the north. This is quite something for Portugal.

Paulo Perreira, who works in Luxemburg, invited me to do a prayer training, and reported that now several pastors in this nation regularly meet for prayer, which surely is a step forward.

In the evening there were different focus groups, but I ended up in the local pub to grab a pint with Andrew Jones and Wolfgang Simson. We talked about Wolf's new book on work and money, in which he pioneers a new paradigm, celebrated 10 years of FridayFax, and discussed a new concept of publishing.

When we came back in the hotel 'Troy' was on with Brad Pitt and Orlando Bloom. An epic drama with some great fighting scenes, but a bit too slow, as it took two hours for the horse to show up.

A fabulous excursion

WOW. We had a real cool excursion today. We went to Grindelwald by train, then with the postbus up to the Bussalp, where we had a hot chocolate before heading down from the mountain by sled. I took the fast track, and the speed and scenery were just awesome. Had to break several times in order not to fly out of the curve, the snow deep in my pants. Too bad that down in Grindelwald the track suddently ended in... cow shit! Yammie.

Rivers and cubes

Today it was my turn for an 'inspiration from Scripture'. I shared from Ez. 47, the river of life welling up from the temple, and used it as a metaphor for the prayer movement and DAWN. In my view prayer and church planting, the prophetic and apostolic belong together, as they both tap into the river of life, but fulfill a different role. Some are called to serve the altar, others to catch the fish. The river will bring healing to the nations.

After the break Tom Doyle introduced the EvangeCube, a cheesy American evangelistic tool that postmodern Europeans would probably never buy into, but that seems to be quite effective in reaching muslims. I still hear Tom's sales talk: "Hell is a real place where you will burn in eternity. Now, would you consider accepting Christ in your life?" Well, at least it's a daring approach towards the reevangelisation of Europe... I'm sure the kids will like it when I bring two of these cubes home, they love creative stories.

The face of DAWN in Europe

Yesterday we prepared for and kicked-off the consultation. Today several good introductions. Kerstin talked about 'doing the right thing at the right time', basically an introduction to the prophetic. Reinhold gave an overview of DAWN in Europe, and the challenge of church planting in a post-Christian environment. Andreas Wolf, Scott Friderich and Ruth Robinson introduced the newly formed European Missions Research Roundtable and the project they're currently working on (check out this website for an interesting comparison of research models).



Ovind gave a presentation of the DAWN process in Norway (see my earlier posting here), Paulo Pascoal presented Portugal (see my earlier posting here), Manfred Rusner Sweden and Peter & Kath Atkins the Humber to Wash, a regional DAWN-type process. Then we dug a bit deeper into how these saturation church planting processes were started, how the momentum was maintained, and how the development path for the coming years looks like. A kind of SWOT analysis, with good interaction, so we could all learn from it.

In the evening we shared encouraging stories about church planting, and ended up with a romantic comedy, 'Love Actually', censored by Andrew to make it acceptable for missionaries.

5 million new churches

Around noon I travelled to Thun, where on the station I bumped into my European friends Oivind and Kerstin, and Mike Steele of the Organic DAWN movement in North America. Reinhold picked us up and took us to his house in Steffisburg for pizza. The weather these days is just perfect, a bright blue sky, fresh mountain air, and snow. After lunch we went for a walk, which ended up in a snowball fight. At an unattended moment Oivind took revenge on me and threw me in the snow, nearly cracking my ribs. Now it hurts when I laugh. ;-) Most of the afternoon we used for our team meeting. Oivind suggested to form a team of prayer mobilisers who in the coming years could develop a saturation prayer strategy alongside a saturation church planting strategy. I can see the potential of that. In Norway, France and Switzerland this is already happening to some extent. Just imagine every community in your nation being prayed for in such a way that a new (expression of) church will spring up.

Mike (picture) told us about an interesting development in North America. Bill Bright, the late leader of Campus Crusade for Christ, received a vision just before he died to see 5 million new churches planted, all of them ‘simple churches’. Now Campus Crusade and John Maxwell (yes, the pear guy) are taking on this challenge and call for an international conference on church planting. Wolf Simson would say: “This is like the pope calling on all Catholics to become Reformed.”

In North America more and more Christians are leaving the established churches, not because they quit following Christ, but to preserve their faith. According to Barna there are now over 30 million ‘church-less’ Christians. Mike sees the potential of this group. “We basically help people to follow the Life-giver instead of religion,” he says. Amen to that.

We finished the day with a real good traditional Swiss fondue. After all, the organic church meets when it eats. Danie Vermeulen, the DAWN coordinator for Africa, would say: "The church meets when it eats meat." So it's a meating rather than a meeting or just eating. ;-)

24-7-365 for Switzerland

Normally when I travel in Europe I fly, but Switzerland is also well connected by train. The City Night Line, a direct overnight train service from Utrecht to Basel departs at 20.40 and arrives at 7.55. The advantage is that you can sleep while travelling, and ‘skip’ the boring track through Germany.

In Aarau, south of Basel, I met up with Boris Eichenberger, who is part of an emerging generation initiative for Switzerland. Three years ago they gathered around 2,500 young people from all over the nation on the mountain meadows of Ruetli, where their forefathers had covenanted with God to form the Swiss confederation. The young people renewed this covenant with God for their nation, while they met in the form of a cross. A moving moment. Out of that event, a Luke 9 and 10 type initiative, sprang forth: every Summer young Christians are sent out two by two all over Switzerland to bring the gospel of the Kingdom. Out of their comfort zone (see my earlier posting about this principle

It was good to share hearts and ideas. Boris, who’s one of the pastors of Church Alive, carries the vision to start an ongoing youth prayer movement in Switzerland. This Summer they will gather 800 young people for a week of training in prayer and the prophetic. Next year, 2006, will be a non-stop year of prayer for Switzerland, 24-7-365 as the jargon goes. I challenged him that Switzerland has a special and quite crucial resource role to fulfil in Europe. What they are modelling here is what will also happen in other nations in Europe: covenanting with God for the nation, the rediscovery of Jesus’ way of training his disciples, and 24-hour prayer.

On my way to Switzerland

Tonight I'll be on my way to Switzerland for a team meeting and three-day consultation of the DAWN European Network on saturation church planting. I also plan to connect with Boris Eichenberger of the Ruetli and Vision200 network. I'm looking forward to some fresh mountain air, a thick layer of snow, and a long-expected cheese foundue at the Scharnowski's place in Thun. Will be back in the course of next week.

The hearts of the children

There’s a special blessing on the land when the generations (old and young) walk together in the ways of God’s Spirit. In these days God is turning the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers (Mal. 4,6). But when it comes to the forms and structures in which we walk together, things often get complicated.



I regularly meet younger leaders who are yearning for a fresh outpouring of God's Spirit and rejoice about the new things God is doing in many places of the world, but they're struggling with the forms of the fathers. They want to live relationally and not be tied up in unhelpful structures.

Several months ago an emerging leader asked me for advice regarding an invitation he had received to join an international committee. I reworked my response to him into this open paper in which I share my perspective as one who works with both older and younger leaders. The names of people and ministries are fictitious, because I don’t want to criticize, but rather give insight in the issues at hand. Feel free to comment and add your reflections. And may the love of Christ bind us together.

Download the_hearts_of_the_children.doc

Joel News restyling

Today I gave two friends a crash course in Frontpage. I also finished the restyling of the Dutch section of the Joel News website, and we published the first html version of Joel News. The next step is finding a good mailserver and content management software. Suggestions are welcome.

Awards for celebrity prophets

Satirical newspaper Lark News reports about the 15th annual American Prophetic Awards. "For fans of prophetic ministry, this is the big night," said celebrity reporter Jonathan McCloud, stationed at the red carpet where prophets in stunning evening wear arrived for the gala celebration.

Russ Springer took home the award for Best Special Effects for his Recurring Glory Mist, beating out Diane Knight and her Gold Dust/Gold Teeth phenomena. Both prophetic effects have caused a nationwide sensation. The Award for Humility went to Kent Overton, who initially refused to accept it, but finally agreed because "it will look like false humility if I say no," he said. Best Supporting Prophet went to young superstar J.T. Simers who said the Holy Spirit had told him in advance he would win. "This is a crowning achievement for any professional prophet," he said, holding the American Elijah trophy aloft.

After the event, cheering crowds lined the red carpet and clamored for autographs, while prophets reached across the velvet rope to pray for them. Hundreds of fans were slain in the Spirit by the time the prophets climbed into their limousines and headed for various conferences.

There may be more truth in satire than we like. Full story here.

The SCOT Project

Heidi Campbell sent me a copy of a cd she has been working on for the past four years. It's called 'The SCOT Project', a recording of the prayers of young people from all over Scotland, mixed with music from the Highlands (no pipes though). Passionate prayers in the spirit of John Knox ('Give me Scotland or I die') and Braveheart ('Freeeeedoooooooom!'). Copies are available at a 5 GBP donation. Contact Heidi for details.