BTJ Netherlands founder and director, Krijn de Jong, passed away last week and hundreds of people came out to pay their respects. Krijn’s life is a testimony to all Christians.
Before helping found BTJ in the Netherlands, Krijn worked for 43 years at the Christian foundation Tot Heil des Volks, known for sharing the Gospel with addicts and people in vulnerable positions in the toughest areas of Amsterdam. He also founded and co-chaired a foundation in 2016 that helped refugees in Holland.
Born in 1945 in Holland and raised in an extremely conservatively reformed family, Krijn developed an early foundation to a strong Christian faith. In his service, Krijn was emphatically committed to helping “the whole person,” in which he linked faith and practice inseparable. He found it important to serve others even when it put him at odds with organized religion. He often dared to be critical of his own reformed and evangelical background. He called himself a “bial-linguistic Christian” and emphasized both the severity of sin and the need for compassion and inclusivity.
Krijn had a special heart for the BTJ vision in Africa and can be seen in the Bible study series Chasing Revival climbing the mountains in Ethiopia to learn from monks living on one of the hardest-to-reach mountains in the world.
During the 2020 pandemic, when people felt lonely and disconnected to one another, Krijn launched an effort to bring comfort through the power of worship. He initiated a movement for neighbors in his small Dutch village of Urk to step outside and sing hymns together. Singing old familiar hymns together worked! It lifted the spirits of everyone in the village and connected the hearts of neighbors in a way that only God can.
This week, just before the funeral of Krijn, hundreds of neighbors stepped outside and welcomed his casket with songs of praise and worship. Their worship was a beautiful testimony of how one life can make a difference for the Kingdom. Below is a video showing the villagers on the island of Urk coming together and singing before the funeral.
BTJ and the underground house church of China are incredibly grateful for the deposit that Krijn De Jong made into the lives of so many.
