De Goede Godskerk in Knokke: Dirk Dhondt’s private chapel

Par Gabriel Goldberg 11 July 2026 5 min read

You think you know Knokke — the seawall, the Kustlaan, the galleries. Then, a few streets from the Friday morning market , a door opens onto something else entirely. A house. A chapel. And a man, Dirk Dhondt, who has spent decades quietly collecting the crucifixes, icons, statues and holy images the region no longer wants. This is De Goede Godskerk , the "Church of the Good God". You enter out of curiosity. You leave genuinely moved. An ordinary corner house in Knokke. Nothing hints at what it contains. Key insights De Goede Godskerk is a private chapel founded by Dirk Dhondt inside his own home in Knokke, a short walk from the Friday market. The collection includes thousands of Christian objects — crucifixes, icons, saints’ statues, rosaries — donated by families moving out and by parishes that had stored their saints in cellars. Dirk Dhondt teaches a personal theology: one single Good God, one divine person, breaking with the classical Trinity of Christian churches. Visits are free — by appointment. The place is a reminder that beside the Knokke of shop windows lives a Knokke of quiet, stubborn conviction. A door, and behind it — a world The house is unspectacular. A red-brick corner building with pale shutters, the kind you find by the hundred along the Belgian coast. That is exactly what makes the contrast so startling. Dirk opens the door, smiles, waves you in. Room after room, you discover what thirty years of methodical accumulation can produce: walls, ceilings, window…