FIRE Holland is Dead!

Posted on September 14, 2007. Filed under: internship, leeuwarden, seasons |

An old season has ended, and a new one has begun…

I’ve been visiting the Heiks and Dan up Leeuwarden, as they are moving out of the legendary apartment above De Fakkel, a Christian bookstore whose name is almost prophetic, since in Dutch it means “The Torch” and for the last three years various incarnations of the FIRE team have lived above it.

I first came here 2 1/2 years ago to do my “internship” with the team here, and in five months after I arrived, for various reasons most of that team went their own way, back to America and one of the missionaries relocated to the Philippines to join the FIRE team there. Ever since that era, FIRE Holland has just not died, but not existed in the way it did when a bunch of grads from the revival school in America came over here to start a base after seeing tremendous fruit. It’s not my time or place to talk about the powerful fruitful ministry those guys did and the doors it paved for us to enter into, but in 2004 or so the version of the team at that time relocated from Ede to Leeuwarden and fixed up an apartment and made it livable, and now finally, that apartment is being moved out of.

In fact, even on paper, this week FIRE Holland will no longer exist or have a bank account. The old has passed and the new has come. I’ve been a part of the ministry FIRE Nederland, and although it is separate and a different entity, there is no way it could have existed without the way paved before us by Gregg Montella, David Lyons and the original FIRE team that came over here. It feels like ever since the team shrank, FIRE Nederland and the rest of us who’ve stayed have tried to find our footing and prove ourselves aside from the “FIRE team’ reputation, but only now does it feel in some ways like we really are launching out and beginning something new. Things have been changing and shifting around the time of this year’s summer school, and I don’t just mean Dan and the Heiks finding somewhere else to live, and and me and Joel also in Rotterdam maybe finding somewhere to live if we are not allowed to stay in our temp apartment (please KEEP praying about that one!).

I’ve come up to visit all week since Stephen and Francine Heiks have been living in America all year trying their hardest to get back here, and I timed my visit up here to coincide with helping in whatever way I can since I initially lived here the first 6 months I’ve lived in this country. In many ways it doesn’t feel like I’m visiting friends when I come up here, but like I’m returning home. Things are different and peoples lives are changed for the better and they’ve grown, but otherwise, it hardly ever feels like I’ve been gone whenever I come back.

I walked through centrum today after another ill-fated attempt to open a bank account in this country (how did all the old FIRE Holland people ever open ABN or Postbank accounts?)

I listen to some old mp3s from Encounter weekends in the years past about dreams and vision for the country that many FIRE School grads, interns and F.I. missionaries had for this nation, and feel like I’m stepping out and reaping the harvest that many of them have sown into. I mean, a national day of prayer in the Hague with 100,000 people next summer? What on earth? But the way you shovel your driveway in winter, you don’t do in summer. Different seasons require different things of us, and in many ways I can’t put my finger on just what it is but I know the seasons are changing in some way for me personally also with regard to the Netherlands. I don’t know what it looks like or how it will manifest, but I’m looking forward not backward.