We are Freek & Angelique van Balen and we live in Aalsmeer. Beeing part of the YWAM family in The Nertherlands Freek serves as national leader/convener and Angelique runs our national office. Our home church is the Living Gospel Church in Aalsmeerderbrug.

Our family is very important in our lives. We love our kids very much, we are proud on each one of them. We have 4 children in the age of 18 to 27, two sons and two daughters. Marcella is the youngest, she came in our family when she was 5 years old, she is a student. Maryse finished her education in 2017, she is trained to care for elderly people. At this moment she serves as staff in the Urban Presence DTS in Amsterdam. Dennis is a sport instructor, he is a snowboard instructor and dive instructor. He works as a snowboard instructor in Austria. Robin, the oldest, studied finances, strategy & environment at the University in Amsterdam. He worked as a financial advisor, at this moment he is primarily focust on a startup. We are so blessed, we are proud parents.

As a family we have done our DTS (Discipleship Training School) and FMS (Family Ministry School) in 2002 with YWAM, Baguio City in the Philippines. After a year in the Philippines we moved for a year to Romania at the YWAM base in Constanta. We decided to stay long term but because of family reasons we had to move back to The Netherlands. It has been an amazing and life changing season in our lives. It also brought a change of direction in our ministry.

• Now we serve within YWAM, a wonderful family and global mission movement of different generations and cultures with a love for Christ and passion for young people, with an amazing dream of waves of young people going into the nations.

• The years before 2002 we have been pastoring in a team of pastors. This team worked together based on the five fold ministry to serve the Living Gospel Church in Aalsdmeerderbrug. In those years we have been involved in youth ministry, we took many teams to countries like Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary and also France. We also have been part of a worship band called Life-Line. We have been leading worship in many many places in Holland and worked together with EO, dutch broadcasting, and EO Ronduit Praise. 6 Praise nights have been braodcasted in the Dutch national TV and one album has been recorded, called ‘It’s Time To Praies’. We bought our own 50 seater bus and traveled to all those countries. We pioneered Baan7, this is a youth event every first Sunday evening with worship, preaching and personal ministry in Aalsmeerderbrug. After 25 years this event still exists. Robin our oldest son is one of the hosts and also Maryse our daughter has been part of the Baan7 core team.