Once a CEO of a Dutch tech company, Peter Paauwe and his wife Ilona had their lives completely turned upside down and transformed by the call of God.
PHOTOS BY MICHAEL CHAN
Last weekend, City Harvest Church welcomed to its pulpit Pastor Peter Paauwe of Doorbrekers Church in the Netherlands. Pastor Peter’s sermon on “unshakeable faith” encouraged the congregation to grow their faith in God.
Pastor Peter and his wife Ilona are the founders and senior pastors of DoorBrekers, a contemporary and influential church in the Netherlands. DoorBrekers has five locations with more than 2000 members. Married for over 30 years, Pastors Peter and Ilona have four children and two grandchildren.
Before founding DoorBrekers, Pastor Peter held various positions in business, sales and marketing, and his last corporate job was as the CEO of an educational software company that is part of the global Baan Group.
Pastor Peter travels the world preaching and working with pastors and business leaders to live life to their fullest potential, and to steward their time, talent and resources for Kingdom purpose.
Singapore was the final stop for Pastor Peter and his wife Ilona, who were on a sabbatical for three months in Asia. They travelled across the region, from Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand to Delhi and Mumbai, fulfilling speaking engagements and enjoying their rest. City News sat them down for an interview before they returned to the Netherlands.
City News: Welcome to CHC! How did you come to know Pastor Kong?
Peter Paauwe: We were at a conference in England and Pastor Kong was preaching. Pastor Jeffrey (Rachmat) was travelling with him, and we were sitting next to each other and so I connected with Pastor Jeffrey. Our church was 400 people at the time, and Pastor Jeffrey had 4000 people, so I said, “I would love to talk to you.” He was in Holland the following week, so we had a meeting in Holland, and he invited me to come to Jakarta. I told him I couldn’t do that, but I went home and I felt the call to go. So I gave him a call, and he said, “What if you come to Singapore this weekend? Pastor Phil Pringle (founder of C3 Church in Sydney) is with us, and after that we are going to the C3 Conference in Australia and you can come with us.” And that’s the way we came here for the first time. We met Pastor Kong, and then we came to the next Asia Conference in 2010, and that’s how our relationship developed.
We understand you are both on sabbatical. What made you decide to take a sabbatical?
We started our church 18 years ago from scratch, and it’s been very hard work. When the church was 10 years old, the board said “You can go on sabbatical for three months.” But we had a family and kids, we were very busy so we never took the time to go on sabbatical. After Covid, we took a trip to Thailand for a speaking engagement, then we took a 10-day holiday after that. Then we felt those 10 days were too short (laughs). So we planned to have a sabbatical. So, we went back home to our team and said, “Hey, we want to take three months off. Can we look together and find some space?” So we started our sabbatical in February, and we have been cut off from everything—we don’t know anything. No report from the church, nothing. The only thing we did was plan four weekends where we would speak for churches. We had a great time. Tonight we fly home—this (Sunday, 23 April) is the last day of our sabbatical.
You were a CEO in the corporate world before you became a pastor. Can you share with us how you were called?
It’s actually quite a story. We both grew up in a very traditional religious legalistic church in a small village in the Netherlands. I was working for a Dutch tech company and I had started to read my Bible again. One time I was in the middle of a very big business deal, and it was very, very challenging. That morning, before I went to work, I was reading my Bible, and I really felt when I was reading the Bible passage that God said to me, “You know, don’t be intimidated by this business deal. Know that I’m with you. I’m for you. You will make the deal.” It was very comforting and encouraging. I really felt like God was speaking to me through the Bible verse. Then I read the next line, and it said something like, “I will lay my words in your mouth to show the sign that they are my people.” (Isaiah 51:16) When I read that, it was like, Bang! I didn’t know what it was, but I knew was it was God. And I said immediately to Ilona— she was in the same room—“I think God called me to be a preacher.” I had no idea what to do with that because I couldn’t see myself as a preacher, and I had no idea how it would happen. Actually, after that calling, I still worked for eight years more in the business world—my career really took off after I was called! But I knew all the time that I was called.
And then, all of the sudden, God took us out of this very religious church and planted us over in an evangelical church which was part of the Church Planters movement. It was a very big change for us. So, I said to God, “I cannot believe that I heard You right that You called me to be in the ministry.” We were going to be baptised—I was baptised as a child but not by immersion. I told God, “You need to speak to me when I’m baptised, otherwise I will say, ‘Okay Lord, You did not call me.’” When were were baptised, the Lord said, “Yeah, I’ve got you.” But it still took another six years from there: we were three years in that church as church members. Then I left my job, and I served in the church three years as a staff member. Then we planted our church. Yes, it has been a whole journey.
Was it frightening for you to come out of a church you’ve been to all your life?
It was the biggest change ever. It was a decision we took in six weeks—God took us through the process. He brought us to a church where we heard the gospel from a different perspective in a different church. That woke us both up and we made the decision to leave. Our family did not see it coming. Our friends did not see it coming. Our colleagues did not see it coming. Everybody thought we were going to hell. They said, “What are you doing?” So we lost all our friends. The school that our kids went to belonged to the church, so our kids had to leave the school. Ilona used to go to church in a long skirt, always wearing a hat. Then, all of a sudden, we came into an environment with drums and guitars. So, for us, we knew God said, “You have to be that.” But it was a huge battle for us to be that because everything was different from what we learned over the last 30 years. It was a very, very challenging step, a big step. It turned our lives upside down.
Wow, could you share your salvation story?
We grew up in a very small traditional village where 50 percent of the people go to the same church. We married very young: Ilona was 19, I was 23. Our relationship started when she was 14. It was a very, very traditional environment. When I started to work for the tech company, we moved from this village to the centre of the country. As I discovered the world, I saw the money, I saw the cars, I saw the free life. So, I actually I wanted to break up with Ilona after three years of marriage. We had an argument and she was crying about it. I was cynical to her and said, “Why don’t you go and pray?” We never prayed, even though we went to church. But Ilona moved out of the bed and got on her knees and said, “Lord, help me!” The amazing thing is that that Sunday, when we went to (the legalistic traditional) church, someone had passed away at the age of 64. I was about 25 at the time, so 64 seemed quite short. I started counting my days. The preacher preached about the story of the Ethiopian who came to Jerusalem: he had everything. He was rich, he had security guards, he had everything I’ve dreamed of, and he’s still seeking God. So I realised, in that moment, that my life is short and I was chasing the wrong things. I read a book by CS Lewis that a friend gave to me, The Screwtape Letters. In Holland it’s called Letters From Hell. That made me so curious: there must be more in the world. I was traveling a lot for business so I was always in airports reading my Bible. In the week, I read my Bible and I thought, “I’m a child of God. Yes, I’m safe.” There are so many things in the Bible I didn’t understand, like I wanted to know what it was to have the Holy Spirit; what was it like to speak in tongues? And then on Sunday, everything I was believing in was more or less taken down in the sermon at church. After reading The Screwtape Letters, I saw an advertisement for Bible study in our town, and it read “The church of the future”. That was the first time I came into an evangelistic type of meeting. And I heard for the first time the gospel preached as I read in my Bible. So, I came to the conclusion, “I’m not stupid. I can read the Bible as I have been reading the Bible.” At that moment, I became really free and I was really sure I’m a child of God.
I came home and I said to Ilona, “You need to go with me.” And she said, “No, never, ever.” (laughs) But she noticed in the next two weeks that I was changed. So after two weeks, she went with me, and she got saved as well. Then we decided to step out of our old church, and that was when our journey started. I know that I know that God called me for the ministry, but I could never see it happening in that traditional church. But when we were planted in a church that had the church-planting vision, yeah, I could see it happening. It’s all God’s timing.
You said earlier that your children had to leave the school when you all left the church. What was it like for your children, journeying with you through this?
We have four kids. But at the time we left our old church, we had three kids. Our oldest was seven, one was four and we had a baby. Our oldest son, Arnoud, went through the most change. He really lost as well—he lost all his friends. But the funny thing was, he never used to want to go to our old church—we had to carry him into the car every Sunday, fighting. So, when we visited this new church and we decided to make the move, we sat him down and said, “Hey listen, we are thinking about changing churches, and this is how it will affect you. You will lose all your friends, and we want to know what you think about it.” He looked us straight in the eye and said, “We need to do this.” Yeah, it has cost him a lot. I think of all our kids, he paid the biggest price. Not only because he was part of our church swop, but also, when we left the business world, our income dropped 90 percent. At that time, our son was around 10, 11 years old. We went from three holidays to one holiday. Many luxury things went out of the house because we couldn’t afford them. He really lived through the financial loss. But today, he is part of our leadership team, leading the creative part of the church. He has a beautiful wife and two children. I think he is very blessed now. In Holland, we have a huge problem with housing, and three years ago, our son was able to buy a lot of land. He’s very creative, so he does things cheap but with excellence, like we do in church—we do a lot with little budget. He has been able to build a beautiful house on the plot of land. So, I would say he is blessed beyond measure.
You were with Baan Company for a decade and you became CEO of Xebic, which is part of Baan. To go from corporate life to life as a church leader, what were the two most difficult things you had to adapt to?
The company I worked for was a very fast-growing company when I when I joined. It became a global company, quoted on the NASDAQ in New York. I experienced all the years they grew from being national to global. So, when we planted our church, we employed the same idea: “Think global, act local”. When we started our church, it was a handful of people in a school hall—very local, but knowing that we were part of a global church, and we had the desire to have global connections. Of course, when we were in that small school hall, we could not ever see how we would be connected globally to churches around the world. We met a prophet who said, “You have golden connections”, and today we have relationships with churches all the way from New Zealand, through Asia, Europe and the United States—all around the world. So I found out, if you do well locally and you focus on doing your local church with excellence, you will have a global reach. That’s one of the things I took from business to the church.
Another big change for me was the mindset. Before I planted my church, I was part of the staff of a small church of 300 members. My challenge was that I came from a very professional environment to a non-professional environment—targets, goals, those were not there. Also, I was used to a certain type of leadership in business—we could have a very strong argument about how are we going to do this, but you will never take it personally, knowing that in the end, we will have a better strategy or a better plan of action. I found out if I did this in the church, it was taken personally; they thought you had something against them. All I wanted was to have a discussion, because iron sharpens iron. The pastor said, “Peter, this is not the business world. This is the church, and in a church, we do everything with love.” And “love” meant that, if there were issues, we didn’t talk about it. But you know, that doesn’t work. That was also one of my biggest mistakes when I started leading my own church. If I saw things that shouldn’t be, I was like “Okay, we don’t talk about it. We hope it will pass by.” While in the business world you would say “Hey, you have to change or modify.”
Now in our church, we have built a culture where it is good to have a very strong discussion around the meeting table and to disagree strongly so we can finally have a better solution, a better strategy and better plan. We are very aware that we have different personalities, with different strengths and weaknesses around the table. So that is what we honour and value. We always encourage our team to speak their mind, and we know certain people will shy away from speaking up because that’s their personality, so we give them the opportunity to speak first. Often, my views and my wife’s are opposite to each other (laughs). My team knows that. We don’t discuss matter beforehand at home, so at the office I may put something on the table that she’s not aware of, and we may even have an argument at the table. We may have opposite opinions, and then from there we negotiate our way to a strong decision. So, we are very intentional about creating positive conflicts at our meetings.
That’s amazing advice! Finally, for those reading this interview who are in the marketplace and struggling to find time for God, for work and for family, what advice do you have for them to balance their beliefs and work?
Yes, even the life of a pastor can be very busy. So I’m a big fan of free Bible apps—I have two on my phone. I make sure the content is pushed to me early in the morning when I wake up, and also during the day, so there will be a couple of times in the day when my phone is messaging me. I have a few minutes to read the Bible verse, then when I have a bit more time, I read the Bible passage around it. For busy people, the most important thing is to organise yourself on your phone so that you get nuggets. I always say that if you get one Bible verse a day, the Holy Spirit has 365 Bible verses to speak to you in a year.
Intimacy with God is important, being aware that Christ is in you. So that when you face a crisis, you have the right mindset. When you are in the car or between calls, or before you pick up your phone, say “Thank you Lord. You are in me and with me.” Many people think they need half an hour, but you can find a minute and you can make a habit of talking to God. Like when you get into your car, before you drive off, say “Lord I’m so grateful You are with me.” At the end of the day, you cannot bow your knee on every decision—you have to live from the awareness that Christ is in you, and that He is guiding you in your decisions.
Another thing is, I have seen, in the business world, a lot of divorces, especially among people who travel a lot internationally. So I decided a few things. I always fly home for the weekend—if we had to fly to Brazil or the US for work during the week, I make sure I am home on the weekend. Many of my colleagues who didn’t are divorced. Then, if I travelled, I would compensate by staying home on purpose: I would be home in the morning if this afternoon I have to go for a three-day trip, and when I’m back I’m committed to staying home. For business people who are busy five or six days a week, there must be a certain time when they really turn off their phones and they are fully there for their family and for church. If they do that, they will be good.
