As we are eagerly waiting to get to the Netherlands we enjoy every snippet of new we can get. Today Stan (pastor of Cross Culture Calvary Chapel in Hoofdorp) sent out an update that I thought you would enjoy reading. Contact me if you’d like to read the whole thing, but I’m just including the church news portion for brevity’s sake. Enjoy!
MINISTRY
The Lord is blessing us in ways that we couldn’t have imagined a couple of years ago. We have a wonderful group of people who call themselves Cross Culture Calvary Chapel.
The Lord is raising up leaders from amongst our adults and our youth. It’s not only beautiful to see this happening right before my eyes, but it’s a huge blessing to me personally because much of the (practical) ministry is being done by these saints; this allows/enables me to focus more on the ministry of prayer and the Word.
As most of you know we have a thriving youth group that genuinely desires to know and serve Jesus. The group consists of about 20+ young people between the age of 12-21. Joey and Kate Wulf, who just had their first child, Jude, will be joining our ministry team in October 2008. Joey will be our Youth Pastor (http://joewulf.wordpress.com ). Nathan and Anna Younger will be joining our team as well in October 2008 and will be serving in various capacities including music, youth, audio-visual and other practical stuff.
We are blessed to have our team strengthened by these young couples.
This summer we had two young people, Arto Vinkka and Shey Macnack visit CrossRoads Community Church in Vancouver WA for three weeks. They participated in Jr. High Camp and were assigned as small group leaders. The highlight of the camp for Arto was when a 13 year old ‘pain in the neck’ boy gave his heart to Jesus. He was baptised the the following week!
They also participated in the preparations for a summer outreach to The Netherlands. This was pretty cool because we now had two of our own young people help prepare for the outreach and summer camp that CrossRoads was doing with our church.
Arto and Shey really served as ‘bridge-builders’ between our two churches.
The team that came out from CrossRoads held a one-week summer discipleship camp with a small number of our own teens. It was an awesome time of fellowship, Bible study and relationship building. The Lord also used this week to bring about positive changes in the hearts and minds of our young people.
We also had a young lady named Alicia Smith, a missions training student from CCBC in Hungary stay and serve with us for five weeks. She was an absolute blessing and joy to Marnie and myself. She served selflessly and was up for everything.
Two of our three home fellowships are doing very well. The one that isn’t doing as well lacks mature leadership, so Stan will be taking it over and training up a man named Tom Gerritsen to lead it.
Our Wednesday morning prayer times are really blessed. We start at 06:00 a.m. sharp and finish right at 07:00 a.m. as most of us have to go to work afterwards. It’s amazing to me that both young and old gather once a week for early morning prayer. There’s usually between 8-12 people who show up and the Lord meets us there every time. We’ve seen so many of our prayers get answered, that it only encourages us to pray more. The Lord is good!
On September 7th we will be moving to a new meeting place for our Sunday services. The present location doubled the rent last October and it simply got to be too expensive for us to meet there. So we found a place that’s even better for us and will save us around 400 euros per month.
In the fall Stan plans on starting a mid-week Bible study in the bungalow and a men’s discipleship class. Marnie is planning on starting a monthly women’s meeting.
There’s lots of work to be done and so we must be good stewards of our time, remain focused and hard working.
Stan and Marnie Marinussen
You may already know that our friends Nathan and Anna Younger are planning on ministering in the Netherlands (watch their 
