Monique’s story begins in California, where she was raised in a Christian family, by Dutch immigrant parents. As she grew up, so did her faith in a God who is not distant, but near and wants to be in relationship with us. She grew up visiting family in the Netherlands about every other summer and that’s how she fell in love with the tiny country. She loves the bikes, canals, the countryside and ‘gezelligheid’ (a commonly used Dutch word that doesn’t have an English equivalent, but cozy comes close).

During her visits, she would attend various churches with family and it was there that she noticed how few kids and teens were present and how distant and irrelevant the services were. Being a teen herself, she realized that it couldn’t be an accident that she had grown up in a Dutch home in the States where she attended a church where Jesus was alive and she had youth leaders who cared, invested, encouraged, discipled and showed her what it looked like to follow Him. This is how her desire to invest herself in the next generation of the church here in Europe grew. After studying Psychology and Christian Ministries at Biola, it was finally time to move!

She spent nearly 7 years doing youth and student ministries at Crossroads Leiden, a Communitas church plant. After marrying her Dutchman, she moved to Zwolle and joined Communitas’ Global Mobilization team, helping to recruit, shepherd, and mobilize new church planters to the field. She is now the Mobilization Liaison for Western Europe and is part of the Benelux Advancement team where she helps to mobilize new church planters and also enjoys using her Spiritual Direction experience to shepherd others into their calling.