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Happy New Year! We hope you all had a wonderful Christmas holiday celebrating our Savior’s birth! We were
extremely blessed to be able to spend our Christmas and New Year’s with our families in North America. Our
landlord in the Netherlands works for Delta and was able to get us super cheap tickets.
Along with housing, Tyndale has been a true blessing – all that I hoped for in a seminary. As a whole and even specifically in terms of
classes, Tyndale is tremendously missions-focused with mission-minded professors that have spent many years on the mission field
and, in fact, raise their own support to teach at Tyndale. What’s more, the student body
is as international as the world is diverse. I am the only Canadian and there are only two
or three Americans and about five Dutch. The rest are from Africa, Asia, and Eastern
Europe. Classes, which are all in English, are personally challenging and directly
applicable/practical for missions. Much of what I am learning that I cannot put
immediately into practice in my present ministry and church, I will definitely put into
practice in my future ministry. The classes that I am taking primarily deal with
discipleship and evangelism, the essence of missions, church planting, and Christian life.
All in all, my time at Tyndale is proving to be incredibly beneficial making me more and
more excited to spread the Good News of Jesus Christ and live a life of full-time
missions.
God has also blessed Angie beyond belief. She has been able to obtain a part-time babysitting job for the baby boy of a wonderful
Australian couple that we met in our church in Holland. However, most of her time is spent volunteering for Interserve Europe as their
Public Relations & Student Secretary. With offices all over the world, Interserve exists to send professionals, including engineers,
doctors, nurses, teachers, businessmen, computer specialists, to minister in the closed Arab and Asian countries. While Interserve
started over 150 years ago, Interserve Europe is only three years old and is therefore only in its beginning stages with the huge
responsibility of covering all of Europe, including Eastern Europe. Therefore, Angie’s job centers on making connections with people
and promoting Interserve throughout Europe at mission conferences, schools, churches and student groups. Since we don’t have a
car and the commute by bus and train to Interserve is 2.5 hours one way, Angie does a lot of her work at home going to the office
every other week for a two-day over-night stay. She will also do quite a bit of traveling in Europe to promote Interserve.
Regarding church, God has blessed us with two wonderful places of worship – Crossroads and Zolder 50. Crossroads is an
international church planted by Christian Associates in Amstelveen, just outside of Amsterdam. It is extremely vibrant and outreaching
and contains many opportunities to worship and serve God. While it is a 25 minute bike-ride, rain or shine, winter and summer, Angie
and I always look forward to each Sunday morning. This coming semester we plan on joining a small group and getting involved in
their youth ministry, arts and design team, and children’s ministry. Sunday evenings we bike and bus into the center of Amsterdam to
Zolder (Attic) 50 (Year of Jubilee), which is a young international church in a casual café-style setting packed full with young adults
worshiping God followed by fellowship over a kupje kofe and stroopwafel. It is truly a blessing to have such places of worship with
other Christians, of which, as opposed to popular thought, there are many in Amsterdam.