This year we again had a combined service for the Feast of Trumpets in Venlo, the Netherlands.

80 people from our UCG-Netherlands congregation and the Dormagen congregation of UCG-Germany met yesterday in Venlo, just inside the Netherlands on the Dutch-German border. It is our annual opportunity to have a combined service, which presents a bit of a linguistic challenge. Our Dutch songleader Wim Dekker leads songs in three languages (Dutch, German and English). Then we have announcements for the Dutch folks in Dutch and in German for the German brethren. This portion of the service is not translated. I gave the sermon in German, thanking the Dutch brethren for being willing to have a German sermon in their country. Most of them understand German fairly well, and for those who don’t, we provide a simultaneous into English. For the Dutch it would have worked to have the service in English as well, but as a courtesy to the German brethren they agreed to have it in German. Years ago the Dutch and German brethren did not have all that frequent contact with each other, but with the current set-up we have regular exchanges, and Schluchsee in Germany is the assigned Feast site for our Dutch brethren.