The Children of God

It was right after this opening that Ho and three more reinforcements arrived. There was enough work in England to keep them busy for years to come, but God wouldn’t let them stop there or slow down. Once He got them started, He just kept pushing them into all the world! This time He used four expired visas to do it. The London team had only ten older brothers and five new disciples when, on the fourth of August, Jonas, French Joseph, Ben and Miriam took the first leap to Holland and the European continent, followed a few days later by Faith.

Having no other friends in Holland, they stayed the first night with relatives of Ben and Miriam, but the next day found them in Amsterdam’s Vondel Park, at the time a haven for young travelers from all over Europe to meet, sell their drugs, and share their experiences. Most of the hippies there were hardcore, as the Dutch government was providing their medical care, giving them cheap housing in abandoned factories, and even subsidizing their drugs.

Miriam writes: “We found them lying around, playing their instruments, sleeping, or just watching each other. All we could think of to do was to sit down and start singing—just four of us in a large park, but God was with us. We soon had a big crowd around us and kids break-ing away from the other circle of onlookers to sit down with us and play their flutes, sing and clap with us. It was unbelievable how quickly they responded! Looking around during an interval while Jonas tuned his guitar, we saw several girls crying, and in that little time we took their hands, showed them Revelation 3:20, and prayed with them to receive Jesus.”

They witnessed there at Vondel Park all afternoon, then at Dam Square until late in the evening. At night they took advantage of one of the “sleep-ins,” really just an old factory where you could put your sleeping bag down for about 60 American cents. There were warning signs everywhere about thieves and pickpockets, and a little notice about bad acid that someone was selling. All night long there was talking, music, and people coming and going.

Amsterdam was a very different situation from London; there was no big explosion on television or in the press. Miriam writes again:

That first summer month of August, we spent all our afternoons singing and witnessing on Dam Square in the center of Amsterdam. The five of us often held a crowd of hundreds for up to five and six hours with songs, impromptu skits, and Gypsy dances hand in hand, leading the crowds in circles that stretched to cover all of Dam Square as everyone joined in.

We slept in the Park and in the sleep-ins until a hotel owner gave us our first place—an attic in the roof of his hotel right off Dam Square. The attic became quite a refuge for us. It had a full-scale restaurant kitchen that we began to put to use feeding all the people we’d meet each day. Every night we’d sneak 30 to 40 people up the stairs with us after witnessing; we always had some food to share and would continue to witness to them there. Nearly everyone who needed a sleeping place was welcome to stay.

The Lord provided every step of the way. When we needed a phone to keep in contact with all the people we were witnessing to, He led us to Elsa, an aristocratic, eccentric old lady whose house adjoined Vondel Park. She let us use her office phone for our base of operation, even letting some of us sleep there and use a little empty room for storage.

During this time we had no place for training new disciples, so Faith would periodically take the ferry to London with a group of new disciples to a training colony that the brethren had established in Horsmonden. It got to be such a regular run that the English customs officials became suspicious of all her entry stamps, and she joked that they would soon need their own private ship to ferry disciples across.

After a while some of the hotel guests started to get upset about all the strange characters they would meet on the stairs, so one night the manager paid us a visit and, finding wall-to-wall people, ordered us out of the hotel. So it was back to the Park again.

The day we heard we were losing the attic of the hotel, we were visiting some Christian friends. We all got on our knees and cried out to the Lord to provide a place for us. Our friends remembered a real estate dealer who has houses in Amsterdam, so we went to visit him and shared with him about our work. He first said he didn’t have any housing for us, but we told him that God had given us a promise, so we knew there must be something. He suddenly looked at us again and said that he had a little house for us by the Leidseplein, right in the center of Amsterdam!

That was also the beginning of our first publishing venture in Amsterdam, as this same man owned a Christian publishing house. He printed our Revolutionary Classbook, The Hem of His Garment and Streams That Never Run Dry for our worldwide COG. In return, we illustrated the Dutch edition of Ed Plowman’s book, The Jesus Movement, with action shots of our wit-nessing and singing to kids everywhere. We also added a final chapter on the Children of God in Holland, which left Mr. Plowman, a writer for Christianity Today and one of our staunchest critics, wondering how it got there.

They went into these countries and God just led them to the right people and places. They would meet someone or end up in a situation that provided free publicity for the message, or a house, a car, a meal, a night’s lodging, or an invitation to another country. One of these opportune situations took place three weeks after they arrived in Amsterdam: The Congress of Evan-gelism, one of the most important Christian events there that year!

The program consisted of testimonies from converted pop singers and actors, followed by a narrated slide show. About 20 slides were shown of people preaching in churches or in panel discussions, but the actual witnessing pictures were of the Children of God in Trafalgar Square, London, with Bibles open, sharing the Word of God with the many kids there.

From this congress, the message spread that the Revolution for Jesus was in Europe, and they received invitations from many other cities and countries from young European pastors. And from Amsterdam, the mecca of international youth, with its lure of easy drugs and many pleasures, they won the disciples who spoke the languages of these countries and who helped them to enter these open doors and the hearts of Europe’s youth.