Marc's Short Messages

We joined a teaching day of the Dutch simple church network on our image of God, our relationship to Him and the dimension of grace, countering the law-based Calvinist theology many people grew up with. Good inputs from Dolf, Henk and Martijn, and some small group time.

I'm a Protestant for good reasons, but have to admit this advertorial and accompanying site for the Catholic Church is very well done. IKON Kerknieuws reports that due to this campaign in Phoenix, Arizona, over 90,000 people who had left the church returned home, which is a 12 percent growth. Not bad for a church that's loosing millions of members.

This year the Dutch church commemmorates Ludger, the first prominent indigenous apostle from the Netherlands, who died 1200 years ago. A disciple of Willibrord and Boniface, he evangelized the north and east of the Netherlands and became the first bishop of Münster.

The Joneses took off from Orkney for their year-long road trip through Europe. Big family in a big truck.

Sometimes I run into a keen web application I like straight away. Take Symbaloo, an application that integrates a lot of functions into one or more personal and practical start-up pages. How nice to have all the sites, feeds and tools you use frequently in one screen, just one click away. Symbaloo will replace my old improvised bookmarks page.

Because the standard computer smileys are quite boring, David drew his own ones for use on his weblog. Of course not all of them are happy and smiling.

Prayer walking and picking up rubbish in the area can go hand in hand. Karolien and Peter joined the folks from the Overvecht group in one of the adjacent areas.

Jonathan Morgan finished the design for the simplechurch.eu website. We hope to launch it this Spring.

Tomas reports about an amazingly timely trip to Prague with his team, prophetically praying into some crucial issues for the European Union and Israel, and open doors with government officials.

After years of hard work Sasha finished his project: translation of the Bible in modern-day Czech. The Bibles were printed in the Netherlands.

Consider signing up for my publication Joel News International if you haven't done yet. It's one of the most encouraging newsletters around, chronicling the advance of God's Kingdom in six continents. It's real, inspiring, and time saving. Check it out!

I like Gerard Kelly's Twitturgies, Celtic-style meditation tweets.

Since David discovered Windows Movie Maker, he's creating all kinds of little movies with music and special effects. Fun. Here's the one he made today, an introduction to Google Earth. After his own blog he now also has his own YouTube account.

Today I mailed out our latest family newsletter. If you don't receive it yet, but would like to - let me know.

David (9) set his mind to reading the Bible from cover to cover and boldly started in Genesis. Obviously a good thing, but while on the tele he watches only family-friendy programs, the 'real' Bible is not that family-friendly at all. In fact it's R-rated. He now reads stories about murder, rape, prostitution, mass killings, and slavery. OK, we can talk about it, but isn't the paradox interesting? There's no kids' version of the 'Dina and Sichem' story. I'm wondering how he will cope with Leviticus, and I'd rather not think yet about some of the ugly stories in Judges. ;-)

The Connect Europe core team agreed to take 2009 as a 'sabbatical year' to hear from God afresh for the future. This means there will be no Connect events, except for a few focused prayer and support trips. I also updated the Connect Europe website and mailed an update to the whole network.

I updated my ministry focus for 2009. It gives a concise description of the projects I'm involved in. If God leads you to partner with us, let us know.

Peter created a 'Me, God and Jesus corner'. Don't know where he got the idea, but it's a place where he hangs out and reads his bible. Baloo's weight and two cloth pegs on his ears are holding the holy of holies.

David discovered Windows Movie Maker and made some some really neat movies out of pictures, CD tracks and a large number of crazy effects.

While schools in the Netherlands have been cutting on history lessons over the past few years, there's a revaluation of history in the media, leading to excellent education sites like Anno.nl, History.nl, OtherTimes.nl, Weekofhistory.nl and InEurope.nl. The sites ImagesofTime.nl, SecondWorldWar.nl and LessonoftheYear.nl for children are also well done.

A biologist who was part of our former church wrote a book titled 'Formed out of stardust. Creation, design and evolution'. Faith and evolution are more or less a national debate in the Netherlands right now, so timely reading. Of course I now have all the answers I was looking for. ;-)

Met up with Ronald van der Molen and Nico Dirk van Loo to discuss further development of a more intentional church planting network in the Netherlands.

Frank Mulder reports that the mayor of Utrecht paid a visit to the Overhoop community. That's nice.