Marc's Messages

Intercessory missionaries

Went to Rhijnauwen for a beer with Ron Becker, who leads Youth Alpha in the Netherlands, and just returned from training young leaders in Wladiwostock, Siberia. It was good to catch up. We were part of the same Ichthus small group back in 1988, and have been in irregular contact since then. One of the things we talked about is how prayer and missions go together for impact. Like in 24-7prayer and the IHOP, where intercessory missionaries are raised up 'to prepare the spiritual atmosphere in nations for a deeper move of God' (see video).

A manic nation

Our government fell over the Hirsi Ali affair, just before the Summer holidays. What a bad timing, and quite embarrassing to see the various political cards being played out now. In my view Verdonk, the Minster of Immigration and Integration, should have stepped down already over the issue of the Iranian Christians, but certainly after her miscalculations in the Hirsi Ali affair. The Liberal Conservatives didn't want to let go of their 'Iron Rita', and so the Liberal Democrats blew up the coalition, while our Christian Democratic PM didn't show leadership when he needed to. Meanwhile the parties on the Left are calling for elections, taking full advantage of the situation.

This week Intermediair ran an article calling the Netherlands a 'manic nation', because we're in some sort of corporate identity crisis that's causing emotional ups and downs, often out of proportion. I'm afraid they might be right.

Connect Europe 2006

It's official: the next Connect Europe gathering will be in Istanbul, 6 to 9 October 2006. This gathering is for dreamers, pioneers and innovators, for those who are called to break open new ground for the Gospel in Europe, for church reformers and movement starters, for those who desperately long to see the Kingdom come to their city, region and nation, and want to grow in participative leadership and organic, multiplying church movements. Pray about joining, to connect with old and new friends! The invitation will not be available on the web. If you're interested to join, then please contact me by e-mail.

My excavating anointing

I think I might have a special excavating anointing. One and half year ago, just one week after I visited Wittenberg, German archaeologists discovered Martin Luther's toilet seat (yes, that's where the Reformation started). This week, just after I visited the catacombes in Rome, Italian archaeologists discovered more than 1,000 first-century skeletons dressed in elegant togas, probably the first 'mass burial' of its kind. What do you think: should I pay a visit to Mount Ararat?

What are we shifting about?

Chinese food with six reformation-wired friends, talking about the paradigm shift we all go through. You may recall that a few months ago I mentioned Feitse Boerwinkel's book 'End or New Beginning', that describes this cultural-historic megashift and how it is influencing the church. Lucas Vos was so kind to make a pre-/post-shift overview, so that at least we know what we are shifting about. I reworked it a bit into English for your convenience.

Download theshift.doc

Baptisms at Soul Survivor (2)

On May 8 I posted on the novelty of baptisms at the Soul Survivor festival. As a response, Mark Zellenrath, whom I met in The Hague last Saturday, kick-started an interesting discussion on disciple-making that's worth checking out. When I asked Martijn Moens, Soul Survivor's press officer (who just took on a new job) how people responded to the baptisms, he said there was only one negative newspaper article, but that's it. Not even a phone call from the EA to call them heretic.

The game is over

So the game is over for the Dutchies, who lost with 0-1 from the Portuguese. I can live with it, as the Orange lions were not in topform anyway. But with a historic 16 yellow cards and 4 red cards the match looked more like a battle field than real soccer, and it makes one wonder where this degeneration started. Gabi calls it 'footboxing' in her latest post.

Sunday morning walk (2)

One of the blessings of not attending church meetings is that we can enjoy Sunday morning walks in Gods own cathedral, and glean some wisdom from the ants and flowers. This morning we continued our track in the water and meadow area of Tull en 't Waal.

Chinese food with heretics

Matthijs and Lindsey invited 25 missional pioneers for a network night with Chinese food in their community in The Hague. I thoroughly enjoyed the various inputs and conversations, and Gijs was so kind to write an extensive blog report in Dutch.

Chosen Generation in Bari

This morning I spent some time with Mirko and Sara, who were at the first Connect Europe gathering in Herrnhut back in 2002. They started a youth movement called Generazione Scelta (Chosen Generation), that links around 400 young people in the Puglia region in prayer and missions.

Ministry in a Catholic context

For those interested, I made a few notes on ministry in a Catholic context, and how the Catholic communities function:

- Lay movements in the RC Church are being led by lay people; the parish priests only function in a supporting (non-hierarchical) role.
- Spirit-filled Catholics are not much different from Spirit-filled Baptists; their lives get more centered on Christ, and they function in (some of) the charismatic gifts.
- The big lack or need in the RC Church is practical daily life discipleship and training for ministry, which is an area where Protestants can help if they are willing to serve.

- Most Protestants in Catholic nations are anti-Catholic, which is understandable from a historic reformation point-of-view, but limits them in their missional effectiveness. Probably the best approach is to accept the Catholic cultural context as a given (with its good and bad things, without the need to embrace it for your own spirituality), and simply help people rediscover Christ, experience Him and center their lives on Him. This will in the long run also effect the theology and practice of the church.
- There are hundreds of communities in the charismatic renewal movement, and most of these communities are in fact extensive international networks or movements.
- The communities have a specific charisma, or ministry to the wider Body of Christ. For the Community of Jesus this is ecumenism, intentional cross-fertilisation with non-Catholic groups, from Pentecostal to Russian Orthodox.
- They focus more on quality (fruit) than quantity (the typical church growth paradigm), and they cannot meet the increasing demand to start new communities, which even more stresses the need for more training.
- The RC Church also has ambient/contextual movements and in fact offers quite a lot of space for more organic or convergent initiatives.

Catholic charismatic communities

Today we drove to Bari on the Adriatic side of Italy to meet with Matteo Calisi, president of the Communita di Gesu and the Catholic Fraternity of Charismatic Covenant Communities and Fellowships. He's a kind of apostle for the charismatic renewal movement in the RC Church, that links 120 million believers worldwide. He just returned from Buenos Aires where they threw a combined Protestant-Catholic leaders conference, and together with the Argentinian Baptists prayed for the cardinal of BA to be baptized in the Holy Spirit. Cool. This would be unimaginable ten years ago. God seems to be breaking down some barriers.

The reason for our meeting with Matteo was to learn about developments in the RC Church, and gain insight in how a DAWN process could look like in a Catholic context (basically South and Central Europe). While most people don't show up anymore for masses, the communities seem to be thriving, and received a mandate from the pope to reevangelize the church and the nation. It was a fruitful meeting and we ended up preaching in the community service. My DAWN colleagues Andrew, Andreas and Reinhold posted some excellent thoughts and pictures that are worth checking out.

Convergence in Caserta

The past two days I've been in a meeting with the European DAWN team in Caserta, a city near Naples. It's quite hot here. Caserta has a huge royal palace Versaille-style, designed by architect Luigi Vanvitelli (son of a Dutch painter) for the kings of Naples and Sicily. But we spent most of the time praying, planning and assessing church planting developments in Europe.

It was also good to spend time with our host Tony Palmer of The Ark Community, a challenging guy who embodies a rich diversity of spiritual traditions (see my earlier posting here). He told us he just became the prior of a monastic order called 'Missionaries of the Holy Spirit', based on Franciscan-Benedictine spirituality, of which the members (families and singles) live in different places and participate in society, while keeping the four daily prayer hours that help them to center on Christ throughout the day. They stay in community through an embryonic group blog and have retreats two times a year.

The underground church

Today I walked the Via Appia Antica to the catacombs of St. Callixtus. The catacombs are the underground burial places of the Jews and early Christians. There are quite a number of them, and they form an extensive labyrinth of corridors and chambers, often in five or six layers above a each other. According to our German guide the catacombs of St. Callixtus have 20 km of corridors, and 500,000 people have been buried here, a complete underground community, of which many courageously died as martyrs. The many Christian symbols and paintings remind of the hope of eternal life. What a contrast with the splendour of the Vatican.



Later I visited the Cappuccine Crypt at Via Veneto, an obscure burial place that the monks skillfully decorated with the bones of their deceased brothers. The ultimate form of recycling. Guess my friends from 24-7prayer (ucbones icanarmy) would get excited. I finished my second day in Rome at the Pantheon, one of the oldest pagan temples that's still intact, originally dedicated to the seven main gods in the ancient Roman state religion, later turned into a church. Pictures here.

The imperial city

Rome is a huge city. Travelling from Fiumicino airport to Tor Vergata where the Alicino family lives took me 2.5 hours. Today I've been strolling the historic city, starting at the Colosseum (where gladiators fought and the early Christians were fed to the lions), over the Forum Romanum (the heart of imperial Rome which is an extensive area in itself), along the Circus Maximus, crossing the areas Trastevere and Gianicolo to the Vatican. Under St. Peter's Church you find the tombs of the apostle and several popes. Pictures here.



What hits home is the continuing line between the Roman Empire and the RC Church. When Christianity became the empire's official religion, the Church developed imperial pretentions, and when Rome fell, the pope became the Pontifex Maximus, orginially the high priest of Roman (pagan) religion, later a political title reserved for the caesars. When the Church sides with Empire, she gains political power, but looses spiritual authority.

On my way to Italy

Today I'm flying to Rome to meet with a Connect friend and see some of the city. I've never been there, which I admit is incredible for a historian. Then on to Caserta, near Naples, for a meeting with the DAWN team, followed by a trip to Bari to meet with leaders of the Charismatic Renewal Movement in the RC Church and some other Connect friends. To get some idea of what we're up to, check out Andi's posting on Catholic convergence. Will fly back from Bari Friday next week.

Winning without prayer

I had a moral dilemma today: join a planned prophetic team meeting in the house of prayer, or watch the soccer match Netherlands - Ivory Coast. Barbara, a friend from Sao Paulo, gave me the not so objective advice to only stay home for Brazil, and suggested the Dutch team could use some prayer, so I joined the meeting. Then during the day we had such an excellent time of sharing and praying for each other, that we more or less forgot about the match. Now I can skype Barbara that contrary to the Brazilians, the Dutch won even without prayer back-up!

Celtic daily proposals

Have been working on a proposal for DAWN, how we can help catalyze the organic church planting movements in Europe. On the one hand I dislike this kind of desk work, and rather be on the road working with people. Besides, everyone who really works organically knows that it's a largely theoretical exercise (estimated guesses) to plan more than six months ahead, let alone five years. If God really is at work in Europe, which I believe, then what really matters is sensitivity to His Spirit and pro-activeness in the context of our overall vision/calling. There's no way the book of Acts would have happened if Paul would have had a five-year plan and really stuck to it. He would have missed Macedonia and most other things God had prepared for him to walk in, opportunities that arose as he travelled. On the other hand, the good thing about planning is that it helps you to focus and think through what is needed to accomplish something, and how it can be done in an effective way, even if you decide to move flexibly with God.

The exercise reminded me of a text Reinhold published on his blog from the Celtic Daily Prayer: "Many a Christian worker has raised up a work that perhaps was worthy to be called 'church life' or 'body life'. Once built, problems developed. He fought tooth, tong and nail to preserve his work. Why? I wonder. Why fight to preserve it? It will stand if it is Christ. If part of it stands, and that part is really Christ, then having nothing but that little part surviving is far better than a large work that has to be held together by reason, logic, theology, money, fear, accusation, doctrine or whatever. In my judgment, the worker might seriously consider stepping back, even out - dying to his work, letting the fire fall on that work and seeing just how much of it can survive."

Getting things moving

"Motion is back and it’s about time," says Andrew Jones in this article for Worship Leader Magazine. "For too long, our western churches have generally defaulted to a static stationary position for worship or prayer. But in the Bible worship festivals were often very mobile. And the Psalms of Ascent (120-134) were worship songs for hiking, for physical motion outdoors, not written for a chair-bound audience." He suggests six ways to get things moving at your church.

Why YOU should plant a church

Bob Hyatt of Evergreen Community posted a refreshing article on why you and I should plant a church. "Through my experience in church planting I have learned that there's a hard way to do this and an easy way," Bob says. "The hard way involves plans and proposals, hundreds of thousands in seed money, denominational strings and a host of headaches. "Start with a bang!" they will tell you. "Mailers to every home in three zip codes!" they will advise you. "A full band! Complete children's ministry! Advertising!!!" Don’t listen. Start small. Raise some support, trust God for the rest and get a job at Starbucks if need be. Let your community be what it will be. Refuse to do for the people who come the ministry that they should do for themselves. Concentrate on laying a foundation of community and common core values and let your church grow organically without superimposing a grand 'vision' on it."

The talking statue

A workman is doing work inside a church. He sees a little old Italian lady get down in front of a statue of Mary and start to pray. The workman decides to have a little fun. He gets behind the statue of Jesus and loudly says, "Woman, get off your kness. Don't pray to her, pray to me!" The little old Italian lady looks up at the statue of Jesus and says, "Shutup your mouth, I'm talking to your mother!" Ship of Fools compiled a top ten of funniest religious jokes.

This week the e-zine will launch St Pixels, a new online community, and Joel News will run an item on church planting in cyberspace.

The quiet waters of the Linge

Went for a day canoeing on the Linge river between Enspijk and Acquoy, one of Holland's most pittoresque water landscapes. Why don't I do this more often... probably no-one would look back on his life wondering 'why didn't I spend more time in the office'.

Sunday morning walk

It's another hot day. We strolled along the Dutch Water Line between Tull en 't Waal and the Honswijk fortress at the Lek dike. One of those water and meadow areas that make the Netherlands so beautiful.

A day on the beach

For daddy day (some fun time together) I took Peter on a bicycle trip in the dunes of North Holland, and several hours on the beach.

Alternative worship

This morning I met with Rebecca Bos to talk through several developments in Soul Survivor. In the evening I taught at the youth leaders track of Wittenberg seminary in Zeist, at the invitation of Sabine van der Heijden. The topic was 'alternative worship', which I twisted a bit to 'church as a creative, multi-coloured movement'. God created us as creative people to show his manifold wisdom in the middle of our culture. Or, we create as an act of worship. But the impression you get when visiting an average reformed church service is that Christians are likely the most boring people on the face of the earth. So I challenged them, and went through several quite out-of-the-box (not stage-led) forms of celebration and community. Btw, if you're interested in alternative worship, make sure to check out Jonny Baker's worship tricks. He compiled 171 ideas for alternative worship, the latest one being 'mowing a grass labyrinth' (and here's my personal labyrinth review from Greenbelt).

Heretics at home?

The most-heard argument against the house church movement is the suggestion that house churches are more vulnerable to heresy. As a historian I never understood this argument, as it's so obvious in church history that most heresy came (and still comes) from established churches, but because it's established heresy no-one really notices. How refreshing then to hear an ordained minister with the Assemblies of God defend the house church movement on exactly this point, stating that "house churches are in fact the least likely seedbeds of heresy. They are the natural offspring of the Reformation's cry Ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda (the church reformed and always to be reformed)." Check out his article on the Ministries Today weblog.

Paradise on earth?

Emergingchurch.info reports about a new incarnational missions initiative called 'Naturists Unashamedly Doing Evangelism and Surfing' (NUDES). According to the initiators "nakedness is crucial to what we're about. Once people get beyond the pretence of fashion and image they find that they can be totally open with each other. It's led to some revealing conversations." What a pity that this 'being naturists to the naturists' story was published on April 1, I think it's a cool idea. Not that I would envision myself surfing the beaches of Holland in my adam's costume, but hey - the Finns have some experience here, let them do it. Every naturist an evangelist, every sauna a house church, and we can surely turn the world back into a paradise. :-)

Pentecost in the Vatican

Tony Palmer mailed me today: "Look at these photo's. I've just spent Pentecost celebrations at the Vatican, by invitation. It shows how serious the Roman Catholic Church is taking the charismatic renewal. Around 400,000 Catholic charismatic believers celebrated in St. Peter's square. The pope said that being baptized in the Holy Spirit is fundamental to genuine Christianity, and that the charismatic renewal is the way forward for the church. Below you see me with two archbishops from Australia, very warm and embracing guys."



Tony will be hosting us next week when we visit Italy with the DAWN team, and meet with several leaders of the Catholic Renewal movement. He's an organically-thinking fluidly-moving South African who ministers in Italy, lives in America, and works with The Ark Community, an ecumenical Christian convergent community within the Celtic Anglican tradition - how out-of-the-box can you get.

Brian McLaren's observations

Brian McLaren travelled intensively this year, engaging in conversation with many leaders and practitioners in the global emerging-missional community. In this article he shares nine observations. "I frequently see a number of people in various places getting 'anti-' about one thing or another," says McLaren. "In every case, they've identified something worth being against. But I've also noticed that whenever a group reacts and becomes anti-something, two things happen.

First, they limit their options. There may be some percentage of good in what they're rejecting, and by their rejection they cut themselves off from it. Second, when people strongly react against something, they're in danger of swinging to the other extreme. Dangers seldom come in ones, and the line between good and evil or wisdom and foolishness usually runs through, not between, alternatives."

Good food for reflection and critical self-examination. While, starting with the Council of Nicea, conformism to one theological point of view and practice became the norm, which led to many religious fights throughout the centuries, the emerging church embraces variety and draws from the different streams of life in the church. That in itself is reformational, and inevitably also provoking.

Foolish things in Europe

Had a coffee in 'De Tijd' with Tim Cerny, the new youth networks coordinator of Hope for Europe. Hope for Europe is an emerging network of networks (I know, this is getting complicated) initiated by YWAM's European director Jeff Fountain that aims to bring godly transformation in different spheres of influence in our continent. A crazy vision, so I guess it's from God. ;-) Tim also works with Foolish Things, YWAM Amsterdam's outreach to young people and the artistic community. We talked about God's work among the emerging generation in Europe, and some of the tensions I described in my earlier posting and article titled 'The hearts of the children and the forms of the fathers'. It's good to see new friendships being formed between emerging visionaries in Europe.

In the evening was in Nieuw-Vennep with Freek & Angelique van Baalen, where I challenged young people to think and act out-of-the-box (Nemo's escape from the aquarium), and told some crazy stories of what God is doing in Europe with a new generation. And as they say, "unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow."

The mosque experience

Gabi wrote some interesting reflections of our time in Istanbul. "Here is the most shocking thing. The mosque is the friendliest place you can find. It's spacious, welcoming, comfortable (those thick woolen carpets!) and you are free to wait on God." It's an observation I tend to share. While church buildings (except for some Catholic churches) are closed most of the week and feel cold and sound hollow, mosques are open 24-7, are more inviting (who said the term 'carpet time' was invented in Toronto?) and function much more as a 'house of prayer for all nations'. OK, this may be a challenging thought for some of my Evangelical friends, certainly in the light of my earlier posting on Islam, but it's good to be challenged. Btw, Niina is now in Beirut and blogged some impressions from there.

Beware of 666

This morning my radio alarm clock woke me up with the ANP report that "Christians worldwide are praying against the devil, because today, 6 June 2006, 666 will execute his plans to spread evil." How silly and reactionary we can get... We're giving this fallen angel way too much credit, and bringing these kind of activities into the media is always counter-productive for our credibility and effectiveness. If I were the devil I would have rescheduled the project to 5 June without telling the Christians. No doubt some of his followers will use this symbolic day to perform their rituals, but this doesn't concern me as much as believers pulling their shofars everytime the devil is making some noise. Btw, the official term for the 666 hype is hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia and according to Technorati over 130,000 blog posts are mentioning it.

EPIC Church in Münster

Today we visited Stefan and Andrea Lingott of EPIC Church in Münster. They work with Christian Associates International, a ministry that targets to plant one or more 'high-impact churches' in 50 major cities in Europe by the year 2010. Before we headed for Starbucks, Stefan showed us St. Lambert's Church, where they still have the cages where they exposed the executed leaders of the Anabaptist rebellion. While some streams of the Anabaptist movement brought life and modelled personal commitment to Christ (see this book by German publisher Down-to-Earth, to be released in October), other segments got terribly off-track.

Web 2.0 and Church 2.0

Tim O'Reilly wrote an interesting article on 'Web 2.0, design patterns and business models for the next generation of software'. Web 2.0 is not something new, but rather a fuller realization of the true potential of the web. When reading this article I couldn't help but thinking of Church 2.0, a phrase coined by my researcher friend Andreas Wolf.

Just imagine a church that has an 'architecture of participation', a wiki-style collaboration, and really harnesses collective intelligence in an open source way, that forms a radical experiment in trust where users add value and are treated as co-developers. I like the idea of church as a 'perpetual beta'. But I'm afraid most segments of the church are not even version 1.7 as Andreas suggests, but in terms of network dynamics and organic thinking in a pre-web phase (0.5 if you like). And as O'Reilly states, "a single monolithic approach, controlled by a single vendor (read: church/denomination), is no longer a solution, it's a problem." What we need is "lightweight programming models that allow for loosely coupled systems and remixability." If you're interested in this topic, also check out my earlier posting on the participatory church.

Setting goals Presbyterian-style

Satirical e-zine Lark News reports that the Presbyterian Church in the USA launched an ambitious plan to lose only 5% of its members. "People at the grassroots need hope and motivation," says a spokesman. "This is a positive goal we can all get behind."

Also funny: Church asks 'TMI pastor' to set boundaries and
US kids jealous of sponsored children.

Outsourcing to India

The world is flat and humor is round. Satirical e-zine Lark News carries two hilarious stories on the global side of life. The first is about a major television ministry that outsourced their prayer lines to India, leading to interesting incidents. Last month, Lori Danes, 43, called the prayer line and requested prayer for her mother's persistent ulcers. But her prayer representative, who called himself 'Darren', prayed in a strong Indian accent that "all the gods would bless her mightily." The other story is about a woman who evangelizes the world through 800 numbers.