Pastor Update

Hello, YVPCers and Friends, 

Our Pulpit guest on January 4, Rev. Marc Loos, tells us a little about himself:  

Introduction

My name is Marc Loos. I was born in Sint-Truiden in Belgium and I grew up in a Catholic family. My wife is Saskia van den Heuvel, who was born in the Netherlands. We were married in 1981 and have two sons, Frans and Bart and three grandchildren. Bart lives in Pleasant Hill.

 

I became an evangelical Christian through the work of the Belgian Free Evangelical Mission Church and attended a Bible school. I spent ten years doing exempt church youth work for Youth for Christ, an evangelical movement among young people.

 

Gradually I could not reconcile myself with the evangelical views on the Bible, ethics, and politics.  Because of that I took up the study of theology at the Protestant Theological Faculty in Brussels. I graduated in 1990.

 

In September of that year, I was ordained and confirmed as a minister in the United Protestant Church in Belgium in the parish of Gent Rabot. Biblical theology and liberation theology are my main sources of inspiration as a theologian and minister.

All these years, Saskia and I have worked together in the church with a special focus on interfaith dialogue, migrants, refugees, and children.

 For eight years, I was a member of the Synodal Council of the VPKB and for four years chaplain of the synod, and for many years I was jointly responsible for the youth exchange program with the church in Rwanda and South Africa.

 Since 2022, I have been retired as a pastor and have been appointed as a Protestant chaplain at Brussels-Zaventem Airport for one and a half days a week.

 My hobbies are traveling, music, cycling, and table tennis. A few months ago, I started learning music theory and playing the piano.

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Sylvia has a dream--to plant a native and pollinator garden in our front area that now is mostly weeds.  We are a small church with older members who don't have the ability to do the work of establishing or maintaining a garden on their own.  If there is a group of interested people that have a desire to create a garden that welcomes our native animals from insects to birds, please call the church and let us know.  
Peace and blessings, 
Paula and Sylvia