UvA Buildings | In the Singelkerk it’s not about what you believe, but how you live
Located on the Singel Canal since 1607, the Mennonite church used to hide from Calvinist Amsterdam. In cooperation with the Athenaeum Illustre (and later the UvA), however, the church grew into a faith community of liberal Amsterdammers, still maintaining ties with the universities. “They became the cultural elite of the seventeenth century.”
Hidden behind three stately buildings directly across from the Singel University Library is the church of the Mennonite congregation. The green pillars are meticulously carved and the chairs form a circle around the pulpit lit by tall windows. “Here, you don’t come into the church from the back to hear a thunderous sermon about what you’re doing wrong. Instead, churchgoers sit on chairs around the pastor who shares Bible stories. Afterwards, we talk about life together over coffee,” says pastor Henk Leegte.
Leegte himself studied at the Mennonite Seminary, then affiliated with the UvA, now part of the Theology Department at the Vrije University. There he learned Hebrew, philosophy, and the art of speaking. “When I was 26, I preached my first sermon in church. It went pretty well, but I suddenly thought, ‘Hey, what else am I going to say every two weeks?’ But now I’ve been doing it here for 20 years.”
A green barn
The Mennonites during the Reformation in the sixteenth century were not only for a “reformation” of the Catholic doctrine of the time but for a radical reformation, even abolition, of the institution of “the church.” Moreover, the Protestant Mennonites believed that a person could not commit to a creed until adulthood after baptism.
Seventeenth-century Calvinist Amsterdam forced other religious teachings, including the Mennonites, out of the city walls. In 1607, however, the city government allowed the simple community, “especially people who came to live in the Jordaan,” according to Leegte, to build a hidden church outside the wall of the Singel Canal. Refugees from the Dutch War of Independence, mostly Flemish, hammered together a barn painted green inside, which within 30 years would grow into a stately building across the Singel Canal.
UvA History
In 1735, together with the then Athenaeum Illustre (predecessor of the UvA), a Baptist seminary was founded, which taught subjects related to the faith. Later the seminary remained attached to the theology faculty of the UvA. After being closely associated with the university for nearly three centuries, the seminary moved to the Vrije University in 2013, although sporadic UvA lectures have remained.
Vondel and Flinck
What is special about those Mennonite benefactors, many of them well-known entrepreneurial families who still attend church, is that they never wanted to be named as donors. For example, benefactor Christiaan Pieter van Eeghen refused to have the park he donated to the city named after him. The Baptist investor agreed on a compromise, with the outcome that the “Vondelpark” was named after another Baptist (poet Joost van den Vondel). “That’s because Mennonites believe you should selflessly do good works on Earth. So they became a bit of the cultural elite, the VPRO of the seventeenth century,” grins the Groningen native Leegte.
Vanity is also out of the question here, as proved by the Baptist Abraham Fock, president of De Nederlandsche Bank, the only president with an empty portrait on the wall of the DNB. And so it took the 17-year-old Govert Flinck much persuasion to convince his father to allow him to learn to paint from the husband of the Anabaptist Saskia Uylenburgh. Flinck was eventually taught by Rembrandt van Rijn. A portrait of his cousin by Flinck’s famous hand still hangs in the Singelkerk. “Portrayed just like the French Sun King,” as Leegte describes it, “but we recently found out that the red shoes and hat were later repainted a sober black.”
So when the then-director of the Rijksmuseum Henk van Os came to see such works of art in the Singelkerk, he described the plain church to Leegte as “austere.” “But by that, he meant that in our church you are forced to look at yourself intensely, as there are no saints here to explain to you how to do it.”
Escape in priestly garb
Meanwhile, the church also has special ties with other churches nearby. For example, there was some jealousy of the Lutheran Church just opposite, now also used by the UvA, which was allowed to be within the city walls. “That was only because Lutheran countries that Amsterdam’s city government traded with, such as Sweden and Denmark, forced the city to do so.”
When Napoleon separated church and state early in the nineteenth century, the walls hiding the Mennonite church could also be torn down. At the Herengracht entrance, the Mennonites built a magnificent black fence. “A sign of the emancipation of our church,” Leegte smiled.
But the church now also has a special bond with the immediately adjacent Catholic church DeKrijtberg. “During the Second World War, both churches, once themselves in hiding, hid people in the attic. Some entered the Baptist church and were then smuggled through secret passages to the Catholic church. There they emerged dressed in priestly garb and were able to escape undetected.
Good life
The church also still attracts young people. Leegte tries to find meaning with them, too. “The question we all ask ourselves is: Where do I put my soul, what do I live for? Whether you do that through the Koran or Hinduism doesn’t matter so much. I happen to do it through Jesus because I come from that tradition. But everybody thinks about ‘Where did I come from? Where am I going when I’m dead? And why is the world the way it is?’ For us, this is not about what you believe, whether you think Jesus’s blood is holy, but whether you live well. At the end of the day, I can’t look into your brain, but I can see when someone is trading weapons, for example.”
However one thinks, everyone in the Singelkerk is free to do so. Whether you come there for the music, Leegte’s sermons, or the history of candlestick holders associated with the university. “People who come to us often only go to church once a month. Because living well is not something you do on Sunday in a service, but on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Simply in everyday life.”
