My first encounter with Amsterdam, fifty years ago this week, was shrouded in confusion. 

I was on my way to the first of several concerts in the city with the Shekinah Company of some sixty singers, dancers and musicians, of which I was manager.

We had just completed a concert tour in England from York to London with concerts in cathedrals and other venues.

Under the leadership of the Canadian musicians, Merv and Merla Watson, Shekinah had introduced many to a rich expression of worship including the innovation of dance, new and controversial to the Christian public at the time.   

Now we were in Holland, travelling from Deventer towards the capital city. Most of the company rode in a bus, while I and a handful of others drove in the van with the instruments and sound equipment.

My immediate job was to navigate the driver towards the church venue of our first concert in Amsterdam, in a street called Olympiaweg. 

We were approaching the city from the bottom right-hand corner of the map, so as I picked up passing street names, I looked them up in the map index. That’s when the confusion began.

The streets whose names I could find on the index were not on the bottom right corner of the map. Some were scattered across the city! Others were not even listed. How could that be?

My driver kept glancing at me waiting for directions, and simply flowed with the traffic. But somehow the world out there seemed to have gone awry, as if some giant hand had messed with the streetnames.

Minutes ticked by and still I could not work out where we were on the map. My frustration and confusion grew. What’s gone wrong with the world? I wondered.

I prided myself on being able to read maps and had guided our way through many cities of England. So why not in Holland?

After what seemed an endless period of aimless driving, one of the passengers in the back seat looked over my shoulder and said, “But Jeff, that’s a map of Rotterdam, not Amsterdam!”

 

Wrong map

Ahhh! I can still remember the sense of relief I felt at discovering there was a reason for my confusion. I had the wrong map! Despite some similarities, Amsterdam is not Rotterdam. Rotterdam is not Amsterdam.

Yet both cities had an Olympiaweg. Both shared street names named after Dutch royalty, or colonies or heroes.

Both cities were started with the building of a dam across a river, the Amstel and the Rotter respectively. Hence Rotter-dam and Amstel-dam (later Amsterdam). I simply had the wrong ‘dam’ map!!  

My confusion stemmed from the similarity (to my non-Dutch mind) of the two cities, sharing street names and both being built around a river.

I simply had the wrong ‘dam’ map!!  

As all the names were double-Dutch to me, I did not realise I had the wrong map. Had the map been that of London, I would have immediately recognised the name of the Thames river and the English street names, and seen I had the wrong map.

I have often told this story to illustrate that while some worldviews – or ‘reality maps’ – may be closer to a biblical understanding of reality than others, they are still the wrong map.

C.S. Lewis argued that while some answers are closer to the truth than others, they can still be completely wrong. For example, 5+5=9 is closer than 5+5=6. But you cannot build a plane that would fly on that sort of mathematics. Which map fits reality?

 

New adventure

Some worldviews exclude all spiritual realities, and conclude that only matter matters. 5+5=6. Others like pantheism assume an impersonal spiritual reality animating all of life. 5+5=7.

C.S. Lewis argued that while some answers are closer to the truth than others, they can still be completely wrong

Yet others embrace personal but limited spiritual entities, as in polytheism. 5+5=8. Still others may be theistic, starting with the Creator, but do not recognise his incarnation in the person of Jesus Christ. From the Christian perspective, that is arguing that 5+5=9.

Little did I know then that this visit to Amsterdam would lead me to return to the Netherlands a year later and eventually to settle in the heart of the capital.

At the Shekinah concert in the Westerkerk, the city’s most prestigious Protestant church, I met the leader of the fledgling YWAM ministry in the city and future International Director of YWAM, Floyd McClung.

Some months later he wrote to me in Canada inviting me back to Holland to edit a magazine he had started. 

Which was the start of a whole new adventure encouraging Europeans, and now Amsterdammers in particular, to discover the map that fits reality.

P.S. Unexpectedly I am writing this weekly word in New Zealand after my wife and I travelled to be with my older brother and family after he suffered a series of strokes requiring critical surgery. Please pray with us for a successful outcome. 

Jeff Fountain, Director of the Schuman Centre for European Studies. This article was first published on the author's blog, Weekly Word.