A conversation with Gert van den Brink
Love Found a Way
A family between two worlds
Gert and his wife, Mahima, make up a family that you might not immediately expect upon first meeting. He, a Dutch Reformed boy from the utterly quiet village of Putten; she, a Gereformeerde Vrijgemaakte (Reformed Churches in the Netherlands, Liberated) from bustling Amsterdam. They met through the Christian dating site, Funky Fish. It soon became clear that the cultural and ecclesiastical differences were quite a bit larger than they initially thought.
Mahima, adopted from India at the age of two, grew up in a completely different tradition. Gert laughingly recalls her first time attending church in Putten: “In Amsterdam, they had already moved the organ out thirty years ago, and the pastor stood in his shirt sleeves. Here, a stately clergyman in a gown ascended the pulpit.” Her first reaction, which he will never forget, was priceless: “‘Why is that man wearing a bat suit?’”
They eventually settled in Putten. For Mahima, this demanded a significant adjustment to the village’s collective way of thinking. “The first five or six years, she really struggled here,” Gert openly admits. “She came from the city, where you, as an individual, pursue your own path. But ever since our son, Jesse, arrived, she has embraced the place. At least he can play in the street here, without fear.”
Six years of silence
The first years of their marriage were marked by a noticeable search. Gert and Mahima literally went ‘church-hopping,’ visiting just about every church in the area—except for the Catholic one. They couldn’t come to a consensus and consequently spent six years without a church home.
“We would watch Nederland Zingt (The Netherlands Sings) on Sunday morning, and then a deafening silence would fall,” Gert recounts. “You just noticed that, as a believer, you also need your brothers and sisters. I missed the community and the fellowship. At one point, I said to Mahima, ‘Look, I’m just growing to dislike myself more and more. I’m turning into a self-absorbed jerk.’ I missed the twice-a-Sunday ‘pause’ from my youth.”
The clash between Amsterdam and Putten also manifested itself in everyday conflicts. The Putten way of making up was to stay silent for a while and then act ‘normal’ again. “But she wanted to talk. ‘We are going to sit down, and we are going to talk it out.’ That was completely foreign to me. That is something I truly had to learn from her.”
The strict God and the forest bench
Gert’s own faith journey took a surprising turn at age seventeen. He grew up with an image of God as a strict, all-seeing Judge. “The Law was read out weekly. You tried to keep it, and you failed every single week. That wasn’t exactly motivating, let’s say.”
The breakthrough came at a Youth for Christ camp. The first time, he was mainly there to “learn to drink beer” with friends, but the second camp was vastly different. He was moved by the sadness in the lives of his peers and how they supported each other. “They would pray for one another, sing, and offer comfort. Suddenly, I became jealous of a Christian. For the first time in my life.”
On the final evening of the camp, he walked into the woods, found a bench, and experienced his moment of conversion. “I already had the knowledge of God. It just needed to sink down to the heart.” A friend at the youth group saw it immediately: “Hey Gert, what happened to you?” The difference was simple: “Before, I had to grit my teeth through the part with songs from the Opwekkingsbundel (Worship/Revival Songbook). And now, I wanted to sing, and I didn’t want to stop.”
The unexpected calling
As a “quiet boy with a rich inner world,” Gert drifted through the education system. He studied Management, Economics, and Law, but quickly realised: “If I listen to my heart, I don’t want anything to do with this.” What he did discover was theatre. At parties and gatherings, he noticed he “could hold the room.” The mother of a bride said: “Gert, you have to do something with this. You step onto the stage, and something happens.” He bought a gift assessment test, searched online for “something you can combine with your faith and with creativity,” and ended up with the Switch theatre team from Youth for Christ. At twenty-three, he was accepted. This was later followed by the Drama Teacher training programme in Zwolle.
The real breakthrough came through a chance encounter on the train with Hans, a friend of his younger brother. Hans proposed they develop graduation musicals for primary schools together. Gert did not hesitate for a moment, recalling the quote from Pippi Longstocking: “I have never done that before, so I think I should definitely be able to.” He started by writing short sketches, inspired by childhood hero André van Duin. “I loved how he could simply touch emotions and bring a smile to people’s faces in a very short, five-minute sketch.”
What Gert and Hans immediately noticed about existing musicals was the lack of humour. Gert’s approach was therefore different: he writes humour on different levels, from jokes for toddlers to puns for parents and grandparents. “Wordplay is really for the parents. That’s how you get so many bonus points.”
A sword of Damocles
On January 1, 2018, around half past midnight, Gert’s life abruptly changed. After a severe epileptic seizure, he woke up in the hospital. A five-centimetre tumour was discovered in his head. What is striking is how Gert reacted. “When I woke up and everyone around me was in a panic, I wasn’t. Because I knew: if this goes wrong, I’m simply going straight to Jesus. The theory of faith, at that moment, became the practice of faith.”
He started counting his blessings: he had just been insured for disability for a year and a half after years of being uninsured, they had just arranged a mortgage for their house, and the musical for Group Eight (final year of primary school) had been submitted to the proofreader three days earlier. “It truly felt as if God had already placed all the chess pieces on the board, knowing that I would fall.”
Fortunately, it turned out to be the most favourable, slow-growing scenario. Gert had surgery, received chemo and radiation, but part of the tumour could not be removed without causing severe disabilities. It is now, as he calls it, a Sword of Damocles. “I get a scan every six months, and so far, thankfully, it’s always: it’s stable.” Despite fluctuating energy levels, Gert continued to write. “Even if I sometimes had to muster the energy to squeeze something out for an hour or two a day. But it simply came to be.”
The warmth of the church and family
Just before the illness, Gert and Mahima finally found their place in a small evangelical congregation. “We ended up there because we simply felt so welcome. They were still happy we were there, even if I was sitting in the back row with a face like a sour plum.” The warmth of the community was crucial. The sexton would pull out extra chairs if the back row was full because he knew: those people like to sit at the back. That was the warmth. That’s how we felt welcome and accepted.
The content also resonated. “The preaching of the Word—we learned something new every week. Living life as an overcomer in your faith, taking steps, growing—I was able to learn an immense amount in those areas.” The turning point was unexpected: “At one point, I had a service where there was only one song, one sentence that touched me. And I walked out of the service feeling so blessed. Because He only needs one sentence to touch you, doesn’t He?”
When the illness struck, both the church community and his own family and other loved ones formed an indispensable circle of support: “Then you get sick, and suddenly, someone is on your doorstep with a pot of soup. Cards came from all sorts of places. That is a barrel of love that is poured over you.”
Bread-and-butter writer and late bloomer
Gert is now sixteen musicals further along and is working on number seventeen. He is a true ‘bread-and-butter writer’: “A musical has to be released every year. We spend about six months being creative, and the other six months on promotion, client contact, and distribution.”
At forty-six, he calls himself a late bloomer. “Of course, sometimes you think in hindsight, ‘I wish I had discovered my passion sooner.’ But I only started the theatre programme at twenty-two, twenty-three. I wasn’t ready then for what a sixteen-year-old classmate was already doing.” Despite the limited energy—“I work five hours a day, and then I’m simply done”—he continues to innovate, recently through a collaboration with a professional Christian rapper. What remains is the power of stories and community. “Word is fleeting, but image is captivating,” Gert says. He continues to write musicals that allow generations of children to conclude their primary school with humour and music, and Christmas musicals that tell the story of Jesus’ birth.
“A church is more than just a club of people who gather on Sunday,” he concludes. “That is a family that surrounds you.” For someone who searched for his place, who drifted churchless for six years, who got a tumour in his head—for him, that family is everything. Every musical he writes, every laugh, every moment God touches a heart—those are the blessings he continues to count.
@Wim van Putten