Blog 4: My quest for spiritual covering
Returning home in 1975
I started working with Open Doors, a ministry that worked in Eastern Europe, smuggling Bibles. Together with Jan Pit, We went once to Budapest. We had written travel instructions where we would have to deliver our Bibles. Driving with a caravan wasn’t that easy in a town I had never been. We followed the instructions, but something was wrong. We drove through the town and finally decided to go one more time the whole route from our starting point. Desperation started to come as we drove again, we were lost. I said to Jan, “I am not going one meter further. God has to tell us what we need to do”. I stood on the brakes … A man signed with his hand. I opened a window, and he said:
“We were getting a bit anxious…you should have been here much earlier”.
God had intervened, He allowed me to become desperate at just the right place. We quickly handed over the Bible and left for a hotel. There was only a double bed. Jan fell very quickly into a sound sleep. I was still recovering from the excitement. Then Jan turned in his sleep over towards me, put an arm over me, and said “Lies…Lies”… I gently put his arm back and said,
“Your wife is at home, Jan. I am Téo…”.
We have had several times a good laugh about that.
The work in Open Doors was exciting, but after a year I felt that something was missing. I had a task in the leadership and that didn’t satisfy me. Praying about this, the Lord seemed to indicate that I had to make a choice.
“I can make you a good director or a good counselor Téo, you can’t be both. That would be too much power for you”.
I hadn’t had for at least a year any requests for counseling. I resigned and on that the same day I got a call asking for pastoral advice in a rather tough situation.
A Bibleschool asked me to teach Missions and Pastoral Care. I had learned one management question that I used before saying yes to the director of the Bibleschool:
“What are you afraid of that could go wrong when I come to work here?”
His reply was an eyeopener. He talked for forty-five minutes, sharing his concerns. I kept these in mind as I accepted a half-time assignment to teach. I planned to use the other half, for my developing counseling ministry, both in Holland as well as internationally.
I had received an invitation to come to Youth With a Mission (YWAM) in Norway. The first meeting went well, and other requests followed. Then a leadership crisis arose, and a brother from YWAM International came to sort things out. During prayer God gave me a strange vision. I saw a boat stranded on the rocks. Small boats came to help, carrying materials to repair the ship. I shared this with the brother who had come from Kona, Hawaii, U.S.A. He smiled and said:
“Téo, this is the Lord talking. You need to take this on.”
“I am leaving.” I protested as I was scared about the problems I could get in. He was firm and said that I had to accept this assignment. I went on my knees before him and asked him:
“Then please bless me?”
He gave a beautiful, encouraging blessing. I started to go four to five times per year to Norway. Once I was invited to come to a YWAM base in the more Northern part of Norway and attended a Lutheran service. This one was rather formal. God spoke to me through it though. As the priest blessed bread and wine. I felt as if God said: this is really my Body and my Blood.
After about working in Norway for ten years, the Lord warned me through reading Ezechiel 14 where people turned to the prophet to ask for guidance while at the same time cherished an idol in their heart.
“Téo, I don’t like it that they don’t come to me anymore with their questions, they say: we need to wait until Téo is coming.”
It was a hard word, but I shared it”. I told them that they needed to hear what God was trying to say to them, that I couldn’t use my gifts anymore for giving answers to their questions.
A period of soul searching started — like the question of how God wants to handle authority in the Church. I had at that time no one above me except the Bible. That wasn’t ideal. I also knew that many different interpretations had caused churches to split. Wil and I had suffered through some of these church-splits as well.
The contact with the Shepherding Movement
In the eighties, the Shepherding Movement had come to Holland from England. Our local Church recognized this need for authority. They became involved with the English brothers who started to teach them. One leading elder of our church said to me,
“Teo, you go around the world teaching, but you should be under the authority of the local church,”
My own need for authority responded with
“thanks brother, I have a stack of invitations for ministry, can you pray about what I should accept and what not”?
He agreed, and I waited for an answer. After six weeks, I still hadn’t had received a response, so I approached him and asked what he had decided. He was honest and said,
“Téo, I don’t seem to get any answers,”
He gave me the invitations back.
I went back to the Lord. My thoughts went to a Church History study done for Fuller’s School of World Mission by Jim Mellis Sr. on the development of “task-oriented groups” (Monasteries). He called them the Mobile Church. He observed how in Church History, there was often friction between these two. Mellis understood that there was a difference in their primary calling and spiritual gifting. A Local Church stood open for everyone. The Mobile Church was different: there you had to fit into the TASK.
I decided to start a Foundation with the name Z.O.N. (Mission Support Netherlands). It became the beginning of my “task-oriented group.” The need for a spiritual covering wasn’t met yet. Mellis study, whetted my appetite for Church History. The need to study grew, but where could I do that? I didn’t fit in the Dutch system and as I was already so much focussed on th English speaking world, I wondered “should we move to the USA”?
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