The Vennekerk 2023 worship service on July 30 in Winschoten, Netherlands was a center piece of the van der Laan reunion and of Wendy and Henry’s seven week sojourn in Europe that summer. This account was written the following winter, supplemented here by photos from the event.
In 2014, my uncle Sense (Stan) de Jong wrote down his recollections of church life until his seventeenth year. ‘Winschoten, Grace on the Venne‘ is a lovely testament to the way things were. My own father (Sense’s older brother) is more cursory in his description of Church, but the Vennekerk comes up regularly in his writings (e.g. last week’s “A Good Friday“.)
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The Vennekerk has been poking up on the horizon of my life for as long as I can remember. When I was born, it had been only three years since my parents worshipped there for the last time. They had been members in this Winschoten NL church together since childhood. But only in the last six weeks, before separate emigrations in ‘53, had they started dating – to be continued in Aylmer and Port Dalhousie.
We often fail to appreciate the formative influences that churches may have on youths (we’re so beset by the negatives). But my parents (and their families) spoke fondly of the church where they worshiped as youths, attended catechism classes and where my father learned to play the organ. And they spoke often of their love for Dominee Hommes as a pastor and a preacher. The legend still lives of his leap from the pulpit to escape a Sunday morning raid by Nazis, and Hommes actually spent some time ‘diving under’ cover in my grandparents’ backcountry farmhouse.
But time rolls on and, an ocean away, the sanctuaries, fellowship and preachers of Aylmer, London Talbot Street, and Second Sarnia came to the fore. Back in Winschoten, my dad’s parents continued on in the Vennekerk until they retired to Groningen. The Gereformeerde congregation merged into the Protestantse Kerk fold in 2004 before giving up the ghost in 2015 and joining with the market square congregation in the older, originally R.C. Church of St. Vitus, constructed in 1275). The Vennekerk was then purchased and donated to a cultural foundation, and continues its long history as a concert venue, as well as a place for combined services like Christmas and Easter. It seats up to 1,500.
Seventy years after my extended families broke with the Netherlands and with the Vennekerk, the offspring of Harm and Dina van der Laan returned to home turf for a week-long family reunion, their sixth since 1998. Some one hundred clan members, mostly from North America, gathered from a Friday to Friday in Stadskanaal to pass on and explore their heritage. Sadly, my parents were not among them.
Our reunions always have a worship service, and I cottoned on early to the idea of utilizing the, now mostly vacant, Vennekerk for this event. This was welcomed by the building’s administration and was affirmed by our reunion planning committee and by the elders.
The reunion itself proved to be a wonderful experience, but the worship service stands out. It was our first excursion following the Friday and Saturday arrivals. Two retired city buses and a small contingent of cars made the half hour trek from Stadskanaal to Winschoten in time for a 10:30 start. I was on the early bus, and took the time before the service to explore the church.
I had seen the Vennekerk from the outside four times already since ‘71, but never from within. So I wandered around ceaselessly with my camera soaking up the ambience. Old pews, warmed by reformed seats for 120 years, high barrel ceiling for sermon contemplations, winding stairs to the organ loft, impressed with my father’s footprints, sunny stairwell with stained glass windows, fellowship hall echoing the din of children going back six generations and kitchen for its willing workers. All of these spoke of an enduring covenant.
The kitchen was occupied when we arrived. Even after seventy years, church community yielded four local volunteers to join in service. While their guests milled around waiting for worship to begin, three of the locals were busy preparing coffee and lunch for afterwards, while a fourth saw to the sound system. All the while, the sound of organ practice filled the space that was set for us, while in an upstairs hall the worship team rehearsed around a piano.
Our five extended families have seasoned worship leaders, three preachers and an organist among them, so we were good to go in this new old place. Herman and Stiny were missing, so my dad could not witness the organist’s mantel being passed on to his grandson, an Oberlin organ major. Nor could they listen to the Word that would be passed on by their granddaughter from an inheritance thirteen generations deep.
The worship began, after a Bach prelude, with the familiar words “Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made the heavens and the earth.” From there we sang Genevans, Redman, Lowry, Watts and Tomlin, accompanied variously by organ, piano and guitars. The sermon, with Psalm 145 as text, celebrated God’s goodness, passing on from one generation to the next.
No Dutch-Canadian church service is complete without a coffee social so we eagerly processed through the double doors beside the pulpit to the fellowship hall, where the servers were waiting. We filled that space completely and enjoyed more family fellowship, as well as interactions with our hosts. Then, after a while, they brought out raisin and ham buns to sustain us for the coming afternoon’s heritage tour.
We had some guests that morning besides the volunteers; some family and a school friend of my uncle, who was overwhelmed by the service and rued the fifties flight to Canada of the “strength of the church”. The Winschoten church community still talks about our worship service. We don’t talk much anymore, but we remember.
Vennekerk Photos
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