Well, don’t you have dreams? And what will happen if you believe this is from God but it turns into a nightmare? Read what happened. It was 1985. This year was going to be the UN-year-of-the-youth. So that is an important year. So what are we going to do to give a Christian answer to the youth? Well in those days all major secular TV, MTV, and artists-managements did their own national “Rock-Nights” in the well known AHOY-Arena in Rotterdam. Independent from each other Leen, Ria and Rita Hulsman (general secretary of the board of CA) had a kind of dream, or voice or direction that we should do a ‘Christian Rock Night’ as our answer for the youth of our nation. So as a trio we believed together that this was Gods finger and we would do it. The famous rock-temple was hired, the professional sound and light of the best secular company hired, all the famous christian rock-bands of those days were hired, even Deniece Williams with full band from the USA and they all came for only for travel-expense as they all believed this was a great chance for ministry and to show to the world that Christan rock belonged to the tops of the pops. And so all preparations moved on. The promotion-machinery started to run. The secular press embraced this crazy idea, but the christian leadership and christian press started to operate against it. And hey, again the so well known opinions: ‘this can not be from God’, ‘rock-music is satanic music’, ‘how can such a respected continental-ministry do something so foolish’(we didnot know we were respected… amazing)… So we were fools. Christian magazines refused advertisement and the Evangelical Broadcasting Company said nasty things about this project via the radio. So suddenly everybody was again against us. The best joke ever was a christian leader who said: ‘christians sleep at night, so nobody should go to this wrong event, misusing the name of Jesus Christ’.
The only thing we three could do, was to stand for our convictions, follow the call of God, do a lot of prayer and hope that the damage would not be too great.
So the night started and ended the next morning. And still till today you will find persons who were there, telling you, that it felt like God walking amongst us, such a deep, great joy… the Holy Spirit was at work. Several christian organizations and churches had send spies… Later several apologized for their bad attitude and assured us, that if we would ever do such a rock-night again they would send their youth… But now there were only appr. 3000 persons, we should have had 6000 to break even. So a tremendous loss… appr. 50.000 EURO… The next monday everybody was back at the office and we started the day with reflection on the great event. The staff was worried that we’d go bankrupt, so they would lose their jobs. But the answer was: if this is really from God, so can trust Him, that He will provide. So instead of worrying we enjoyed the great memories of what had happened that night. And we prayed together that God would provide. That monday a friend called Leen to thank him for this great project, as he had been there. But he was worried too, he said: ‘I must admit, if you really want to go bankrupt, you need to do it with style, like you did’. We all smiled. And what would God do? Well, nobody showed up at the office door, offering us a piece of gold, nothing special in the mail… so how would God provide? Well, the next 6 months EVERY activity we did was a super success, all those more people brought in much more income, so that after 6 months all the unpaid bills were paid… You can say that this was a real miracle. And all the christian opponents? They grew silent and a few apologised.