Being Church in a Post-Christian World
A podcast with stories from the Dutch church for the sake of the North American missional conversation. In one of the most secular societies in the Western world, the church in the Netherlands lives truly at the margin of society. As it turns out, this has, however, freed up creative energy for the church to missionally reach out to its post-Christian neighbors. Through a series of interviews with Dutch journalists, academics, denominational leaders, and practitioners we explore how this works and what we in our North American setting could learn from this.
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Episodes
Wednesday Oct 22, 2025
Wednesday Oct 22, 2025
When contexts change, ministry changes; and when ministry changes, theological education will also need to change. In this conversation we talk about the ways in which the Protestant Church in the Netherlands approaches the education of its (future) pastors, and how the praxis of ordained ministry itself changed over the last decades. Our conversation partner is Klaas Bom, associate professor of theology and intercultural theology, who oversees the educational program of the Protestant Theological University.
https://www.pthu.nl/en/about-us/people/k.l.bom
Wednesday Oct 29, 2025
Wednesday Oct 29, 2025
As a broad, national church the Protestant Church in the Netherlands holds together different wings with very different theological perspectives. Different from the USA, where many experience unity and purity of the church as opposites, the PCN believes the church’s unity expresses its purity. In this episode we host Marco Batenburg, who for five years was the moderator of the national synod of the Protestant Church of the Netherlands. He currently directs the largest independent organization that supports missional work within the PCN. With him we talk about what it looks like to hold together a church as broad as the PCN, and how secularization impacts the national structures of a church, as well as old and tired oppositions between the left and the right.
About the church’s vision of the unity of the church, see also:
https://www.academia.edu/7080996/Church_and_Covenant_Theological_Resources_for_Divided_Denominations