In October 2020, a Dutch government minister stood in the Tweede Kamer and promised to strip The Door Netherlands’ ANBI status, a tax designation worth real money to the church. The exchange is on video. The promise is on the record. Years later, The Door Netherlands’ ANBI status, so far as public reporting shows, was never withdrawn.
What the Video Shows About The Door Netherlands’ ANBI Status
The exchange took place during a Tuesday question hour in the Tweede Kamer, the lower house of the Dutch parliament. SP member Jasper van Dijk pressed the government on organizations offering so-called “homo healing,” reading directly from what churches themselves had said on the subject. He quoted The Door Netherlands’ own position: God can change anyone, including their sexuality. He asked the State Secretary to confirm the government condemned the practice, and to send tax investigators to check on The Door and a second organization, De Vluchtheuvel, by name.
State Secretary Hans Vijlbrief, then serving at the Ministry of Finance, did not equivocate. He said he had not heard of either organization before that week, but that both were now, in his words, “in the crosshairs of the tax authorities.” He confirmed the Belastingdienst would visit their addresses and investigate. He called the practices something the government could not accept. He said the underlying legal question was headed to the cabinet that autumn: whether existing law let the government revoke ANBI status on these grounds, or whether the law itself needed to change.
The Report Behind the Question
Van Dijk’s question followed press coverage that named The Door, De Vluchtheuvel, and a third organization called Schuilplaats. Dutch outlets including Reformatorisch Dagblad and NOS reported that lawmakers across the political spectrum condemned the practices in blunt terms. One member said the organizations did not deserve to be called religious at all. A newspaper has separately published a first-person account, in Dutch, from someone who went through it, describing what the church’s approach to sexuality did to them directly.
ANBI status is not a minor technicality. It means every donation to The Door Netherlands is tax-deductible, which makes giving more attractive and increases the money flowing into a church CFM already directs largely from Prescott, Arizona. Withdrawing it would not have shut The Door down. It would have removed a fiscal advantage the Dutch government extends only to organizations it certifies as serving the public good, a certification the Tweede Kamer was, on the record, questioning.
The Distance Between a Promise and a Policy
What followed the promise was not silence. It was process. Vijlbrief told the Kamer the Belastingdienst would investigate, and public reporting confirms that happened in some form. But the legal mechanism for actually revoking ANBI status turned out to be far less direct than the State Secretary’s floor remarks suggested. By mid-2021, Vijlbrief was telling the Kamer that current rules did not let the Belastingdienst simply strip an organization’s status on these grounds. He proposed a commission of experts instead, tasked with studying a change to the underlying definition of public benefit itself. That commission’s findings were still being folded into broader ANBI policy reviews as late as 2022 and 2023, addressing oversight and integrity requirements generally rather than any single named church.
Nowhere in that multi-year policy trail does The Door Netherlands’ ANBI status appear to have actually changed. The government’s own account of the process, not press speculation, shows the gap. A public commitment was made under pressure in a fifteen-minute question hour. Years of committee work followed, and none of it closed the specific case Van Dijk raised.
Nothing Happened
That is the plain fact this site can report today. The Dutch government’s own state secretary said, on camera, that The Door’s status could not continue if the reporting held up. The reporting held up. Multiple outlets covered it, lawmakers across parties condemned it, and the minister promised action. The tax advantage remained in place regardless. CFM’s churches have weathered plenty of bad press over the decades without losing standing. This is one more instance on the pile. A government went on record against the practice, and a church kept every benefit it had going in.
Scripture treats the gap between a promise and its fulfillment as worth naming directly. Ezekiel records God contrasting His own word with the kind that goes unmet.
I the LORD have spoken it: it shall come to pass, and I will do it; I will not go back, neither will I spare, neither will I repent. (Ezekiel 24:14, KJV)
That standard, a word that comes to pass because the one who spoke it does not go back on it, is not the standard a fifteen-minute question hour produced here. The State Secretary’s word came to pass in the sense that the Belastingdienst made a call. It did not come to pass in the sense Van Dijk asked for on the record. The Door’s ANBI status, still standing so far as this site can determine, outlasted the promise made to take it away.
