James Calvin Schaap

There was, finally, the business of the Calvary Church sign. Pastor Jack had placed the item at the end of the consistory agenda, not only because it wasn't top priority, but also because replacing the sign would prompt a ton of jokes, all of them aimed at him.

Heidi and Professor Snyder come to discover new meaning in the Resurrection

[Heidi, a college student, comes to the office of her academic advisor, Dr. Snyder, to get one final signature to complete her registration. They are good friends.]

Heidi: I've got my registration finished, Professor Snyder. It's done correctly. I know what I want— the courses, I mean, [arrogantly] I don't care what you say, I don't care what the registrar says, I don't care what anybody says—I know what I want to take.

I am not a Picasso, a brutal misogynist who inflicted terror on nearly every female around him. Neither am I a Hemingway, a drunken lout given to baring his chest and knuckles at the drop of a hat. I adore Van Gogh, but I would not off my ear for anyone.

Fran needed the courage of a kindergartner to face this year's worship planning

He calls himself "Pedro" even though he's not Spanish but Anglo—-from the John Lennon tin-rims to the half-baked goatee and turtle-neck to the gray felt fedora he's not without, even in church. But I can live with that. I'll you there are some in Riverside that can't, but live with a hat. Our own kids have been sporting caps for a decade.

What Pastor Reg realized one night after a worship committee meeting was that nobody read the Gazette's Saturday religion page as devotedly as Christians. At least the members of the committee seemed to know everything everyone else was doing.

Beth Olson said the Lutherans were showing the new Billy Graham film up on the side of the church and urging everyone to bring lawn chairs—homemade pie, coffee, and punch would be served. No offerings. "Wouldn't that be great?" she said. "Why didn't we think of that?"

That I wholeheartedly agree with Missy Simpson's lecture about over-sentimentalizing Christmas, that I laud her annual efforts on our church's nativity pageant, and that I know no one more determined to put Spring Arbor Church on the map—none of that alters the fact that Missy Simpson is not my favorite human being.

So I understand why my daughter was owly when I picked her up from church a few nights ago. She had to listen to the lecture. I heard it too, rehearsal having gone about ten minutes late.

It would be hard to overstate the enthusiasm Meredith Cleghorn brought to an idea everyone thought novel and promising, an idea Meredith herself had come up with—an idea she thought would put Bethel Church on the map for once. On good days, Meredith wanted to believe that stodgy Bethel was the turtle of the old fable, the rest of the upstart evangelical churches around them a pack of speedster rabbits. But on bad days—and there were more than a few—she thought this turtle of a congregation so awkward, so stuck in its own shell, that someday it would be left in the dust by its neighboring churches.

It all started in the late 70s.