We are a Christian organization striving to make faith accessible to young people and young adults of the Syriac Orthodox Church in the Netherlands. To fulfill this mission, we aim to proclaim the faith from the Syriac Orthodox tradition in an open, accessible, enthusiastic, and inspiring manner. Our starting point is that our faith holds great significance in everyday life today, simply because we experience it in this way. We want to challenge young people and young adults to discover for themselves how much faith can mean for them in their daily lives. We aim to encourage them to walk together toward a more conscious, mature, and joyful life from their relationship with God, with themselves, and with others.

Our Core Values

1. The personal relationship each of us has with God is central to us.

2. From this personal relationship with God, we want to build respect, service, and unity among ourselves.

3. From this mutual bond of faith, we want to invite and challenge young people and young adults to discover for themselves how much God can mean to them in their daily lives.

Our First Source of Inspiration: The Bible

We draw our inspiration from the words of Jesus and the apostle Paul: “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve” (Matthew 20:28). “You, my brothers, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love. For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’” (Galatians 5:13-14).

Our Second Source of Inspiration: The Syrian Church Fathers

Church Fathers like Mor Ephrem and Mor Jacob of Sarug were teachers and shepherds of their fellow believers. They used all their talents to serve the faith of their fellow Christians. Mor Jacob wrote the following about Mor Ephrem – words in which we recognize our ideal: O listeners, listen with a pure heart to the story of the great Ephrem, full of mighty deeds. He made a sweet spring of blessed water flow through our land, from which the excellent forest of our faith grew: a true worker who began and completed diligently, showing in himself good works and wise words; a master of the truth who practiced what he taught others and set an example for his disciples so they could follow him; a simple man who, in his wisdom, avoided all subtleties to stay true to the way of the Apostles; a wise man, who spoke simply to help others and was able to be both a dove and a serpent, in accordance with Jesus’ command.

Our Vision

The community of believers that Jesus Christ gathers around Himself is not limited to the Syriac Orthodox Church. In the creed, we all say we believe “in one holy, catholic (i.e., universal) and apostolic Church,” the one great community of faith that Jesus envisioned, and which has taken on many forms in different apostolic traditions. We believe in a Christian identity that, depending on country, people, culture, or language, assumes a richly varied and ever-changing form, but at the same time transcends all ethnic, political, and cultural values. We live in today’s world and accept all worldly values from the perspective that God reveals to us in Jesus Christ – a perspective that transcends this world and leads us to God’s eternity. As Saint Ignatius of Antioch writes (Letter to the Ephesians 8):

“Worldly people do not live a spiritual life, and spiritual people do not live a worldly life, just as believers cannot live unbelieving lives and unbelievers cannot live believing lives. But even all the worldly things you do are spiritual: for you do everything in Jesus Christ!”

All within-worldly values – cultural, social, ethnic, political, intellectual, and spiritual – are thus seen as subordinate values, which are only important insofar as they help us build and carry out our Christian identity in this world.

Our specific Christian identity is the Syriac Orthodox one, rooted in the traditions of ancient Antioch, Syria, and Mesopotamia. It is an identity in crisis because a century of dramatic developments has placed the Syriac Orthodox Church in an unfamiliar environment and situation. Syriac Orthodox believers have spread across a global diaspora, where many traditional elements of their identity have receded or disappeared. Much of what was familiar and natural to them has lost its validity, and they are confronted with new questions for which their traditional views offer no answers.

We recognize that in the secularized European society, it is a great challenge to preserve and build a Christian identity – especially for a refugee community coming from an entirely different cultural, social, and religious context. Therefore, the Syriac Orthodox Church faces the difficult task of reinventing itself in a sense. Living from its authentic and ancient tradition, it is called to creatively rediscover and shape its place and function in today’s world.

But this is nothing new or unusual for Christians. In doing so, they follow in the footsteps of Jesus’ disciples and apostles, who spread the one faith across the world. Christians throughout history have constantly adapted to the most diverse historical circumstances, cultures, languages, and societies to bring their message of the Incarnation of God’s Son and His Resurrection from the dead. Thanks to the power and inspiration of the Holy Spirit, people from all places and times have repeatedly said in amazement: “We hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues” (Acts 2:11).

The apostolic tradition has always, from the very beginning – the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the disciples at Pentecost – been directed to real people in the concrete circumstances of their daily lives. Therefore, we believe that a church that no longer speaks to people “in their own language,” that loses contact with the world around it and can no longer make the redemptive power of Jesus Christ felt and experienced, is a church that is no longer fulfilling its mission and makes itself unnecessary. The Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ is a ‘Good News’ that wants to be heard, understood, experienced, and celebrated. Our tradition is not a closed and dead system, but a living message for living people of all places and times.

As young Christians, we therefore want to radiate and share our faith from our Syriac Orthodox tradition in today’s world. We want to be inspired by the way our Church Fathers explained and lived the Good News. We want to celebrate the sacraments and liturgical prayers of our Church together with many others, sing and search together, think and be creative together, and share the joy Paul speaks of (Letter to the Philippians 4:4):

“Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! Let your gentleness be evident to all.”