The dozen or so distinct lines across his face looked good on him, made him seem almost legendary. He smoked a lot–most men did back then–but all those Chesterfields or Luckies lowered his gravelly voice, made him sound like a man who could have spent his life in film. A trimmed goatee gave him the look of a seasoned artist.
He wasn’t.
Honestly, I don’t remember what he’d done pre-retirement, but he was, back then, a man who was not only capable of, but willing to impart stories of the past. He had them, and he was more than willing to share with a young prof, someone who wanted to be a writer.
He talked, and I listened eagerly to stories of Montana, where he spent his childhood, and a blessed few of his Calvin College years, in the early 1930s, of going to the denominational school when every last enrolled kid spoke Dutch, or at least understood it.
He knew Fred Manfred, the prairie novelist who grew up in northwest Iowa and made the whole region, first, proud–and then ashamed when he swung his attention to his people’s dirty laundry. This Montana-born story-teller remembered the day that Fred Manfred, then Feike Feikema, walked on campus at Calvin, a sky-high sodbuster whose height was as memorable as his farm boy ways.
Feikema was the only 6’9″ kid on campus so the basketball coach dragged him to the gym where he was building up a team. Now this Montana story-teller explained that he was himself the coach’s assistant. What the coach couldn’t help but observe was the giant farm kid had just plain zero timing, so he assigned his assistant coach to run with him on the court and jab him in the lower back at the exact time he could expect a rebound, to teach Feike when to jump.
Montana got off the kitchen chair to demonstrate. It was a moment I’ll never forget because I worshipped Feikema/Manfred and couldn’t help but love the story.
Forty-nine years have passed since I heard Montana’s rendition of coaching Feik Feikema. Montana is long gone. His story of teaching the giant to jump happened 46 before that, so I’m retelling a story that’s almost a century old and almost totally forgotten. And that’s okay.
But there’s more. Montana was a wicked conservative, a man who believed that the church–our church–had long ago lost its bearings and was veering far off track of the doctrinal purity it once owned. Montana’s son, my friend, tried to argue with him. Invariably the volume grew unhealthy.
After Montana’s couple of visits to Iowa, I couldn’t miss his name beneath cantankerous letters to the Banner editor, some of which I couldn’t help but think the editor didn’t really need to let see the light of day.
Montana had a side that was a monster.
1927-2015
A half-century ago I was writing things for The Banner frequently enough to know the editor, Rev. Andrew Kuyvenhoven, yet another character in this museum I’m remembering. In the doctrinal wars of the time, Andy tended left–not radically, mind you, but his voice was a progressive’s. He tore up the denomination with a Banner cover that featured burning wooden shoes.
I’m not at all sure how Montana came up between us, but one day I mentioned I’d met Montana in Iowa and couldn’t help but note his Banner letters, so fretfully full invective.
“That’s nothing,” Andy said, or something to that effect. “You should read the ones we don’t publish.”
Kuyvenhoven was reared in the occupied Netherlands, like many CRC members back then. Once upon a time his people had fought Hitler toe to toe. Andy was not a man who feared a fight, but Montana’s letters made him shake his head shamefully.
I say all of that because I sometimes think there’s mean streak in the people from whom I come, the people I’ve served, really, as a teacher of their covenant children for most of the last fifty years. And that mean streak, as Manfred himself knew, is never quite as proud as when it can hang on some doctrinal principle that legitimizes its existence.
Yesterday, I read a summary of the 2025 Synod of the Christian Reformed Church, and in its repeated declarations of no, the summary reminded me of Montana and his letters to the Banner editor, and the commitment he’d made to a doctrinal line that wasn’t all his own–he had compatriots, after all. That 2025 summary–maybe it was biased–made it clear that Montana’s mean streak is very much alive and well.
A century later, I still find that preening righteousness repellant. We’re no longer a bunch of quarrelsome immigrants struggling to know when to jump in a game we’ve never played. We don’t have to be mean as we have been.
Judging by the very nature of our faith, we certainly shouldn’t be.
18 Responses
Remember when you saw the Nick Sandman story emerge from the media and you immediately jumped on the bandwagon of hate towards that kid? You posted that day, right here in these comments, something about how mean that kid was.
That was kind of mean, too.
I’m sad to say that a penchant for meanness is in me too, as it is, Paul says, in all, or at least most, of us.
👍🏾
This is powerfully told with so many layers skillfully woven together. And painful truth.
Thank you so much
To be a college basketball player, one needs to have an intense love of the game and a strong commitment to the game and the team. Those of us with CRC roots have a heritage of those with a deep love for the church and its witness in the world. But when that passion drives us to meanness and pride, it squeezes out our ability to love without fear. I have felt the same thing you noticed when reading the synod summary. Some of what I experienced is from words that were spoken and written, but some is from the feelings I experienced from being present at synods 2022, 23, and 24. It felt punitive, oppressive, judgmental, and yes – with an edge of meanness. My Dutch immigrant grandparents had a word they used to speak that might apply here – Stijfkoppig (or sometimes Eigenwijs).
Yes, passion, misunderstood as holy, can “drive to meanness and pride” and thus take love out from action. We see it in the Pharisees and the Sanhedrin conducting the trial of Jesus. We are seeing it among ourselves.
I too having been a synod delegate, having attended in prayer support, and having watched online felt that thread of meanness and air of superiority that was sure God’s truth was on their side and justified all their decisions and punitive actions. Sadly, the denomination is losing many wonderful churches and many wise, thoughtful members.
Jim, So sad. So accurate. So painful and frankly embarrassing. I can’t count the young and old I know who’ve finally had no choice but to leave over the last few years. I do count, with “grelief,” our daughters and us among them.
Love that word “grelief.”
Jim, I’ve been a member of the Reformed Church in America or the Christian Reformed Church in North America for most of my 82 years of life. Experience has taught me the truth of what you’ve written.
The current schism we are experiencing in both churches today concerning the acceptance of professing Christian’s who are LGTBQ+ into our congregations or or turning them away because of how some legalistic leaders interpret a few verses in the Bible as demanding we place their concept of church purity over how we treat our fellow Christians.
The every time I see the hatred generated by disputes over a fine point in doctrine by so called experts in Biblical interpretation, both theologians and laymen, I am reminded that Our Lord’s strongest condemnations were directed against the “Pharisees and the teachers of the law.”
It pains me to see modern day Pharisees and self appointed teachers of the law demand “purity” from congregations that are composed of sinners, impure persons, divide our churches and weaken our witness here on earth.
Whenever I witness the meanness of those who demand pureness and conformation in our churches, while claiming that this will help the church retain our members and grow, I remember what my grandfather taught me. “You catch more flys with honey than with vinegar!”
Nothing meaner than a mean-spirited Christian … they drip with the syrup of sweet piety … yeah, part of the human condition, I suppose, but how refreshing it would be, if, like Darth Vader, they would simply say it: Let’s go for the hate – it’s our energy!
But such Vaderian honesty is not to be found … it’s all “love, love, love,” … creeds are quoted, previous rulings are underscored, there’s plenty of backslapping and doxological singing … but in every eye, a deadly gleam, in every smile, a snarl.
I don’t know how it happens, or why … but it does … and what has happened in the CRC is beyond me, though I think the seeds of it were planted a long time ago by your Montana, and those who came before him … the “righteousness” of creedal pride, and the ease with which the fagots are heaped beneath the pillar and set afire to burn the heretic and purify the church.
I think in some ways, they’re deathly afraid of being wrong, and if they’re wrong, they’ll face the wrath of God, or so they suppose. To prove to themselves how right they are, how safe they are, they have to have lots of enemies, and they must defeat those enemies … to make those enemies pay for their crimes against God … and so, in some bizarre fashion, those “enemies” become a substitutionary atonement … in their blood, in their suffering, the “righteous” are saved.
Thanks for your essay … and may the CRC find it’s way.
My daughter, who has left the church, and probably barely clings to any faith at all, has shared quite a bit with me about her journey. I’m grateful she still talks to me about it.
The one thing she has taught me from her experience of Christians and the “Church,” that haunts me and likely always will:
“There is no greater hate than Christian love.”
I could cry, and have, for what so many have done to my daughter. And all I can offer her, beyond the love of a father, which she hasn’t questioned, is the church’s repentance, which she will not accept. What is it worth when it comes from me?
Maybe there’s a “Christian” love that judges, and a Christian love that embraces? Does her faith in Jesus falter too?
Henry,
I’m not sure if it is too late for a conversation, but the answer is probably not. It’s not so much the love of Jesus that she speaks of with her experience of the church, but the church deciding what the love of Jesus is supposed to be. It seems to me that a true embrace comes with true discipline but somewhere along the way, the church turned discipline into punishment, and my daughter, sensitive as she is, has always intuited the clear difference. The truly sad part of this situation is she never experienced punishment or love as hate from our church, but she somehow knows that our walk with Christ is the odd one, the minority, and that has driven her away.
You have to wonder how much it’s related to our mean God. The God who punishes and tortures ignorant people unendingly in hell as a sign of his own righteousness is, well, mean. If God can be so mean, why can’t we his servants, writing our Banner letters, signing up for ICE, praising God for restricting Medicaid, etc etc. Fortunately, the Bible itself does not at all teach the conventional Christian doctrine of Hell. God is not the mean God that so many Christians believe God is. Oh, and while I love the best parts of the Canons of Dort, there is much in them that just does not “fully agree” with the Word of God (or whatever the CRC Covenant for Officebearers would have you say).
Ah…so true. But the wrath of God is such a powerful recruiting and compliance-maintenance tool, the church cannot seem to resist it. Fear motivates (at least temporarily and superficially). I suspect piety, or at least the illusion of it, has brought down more churches than the prevailing definition of sin within. If God is truly angry, I wonder why Jesus only applied anger to religious leaders. One must do the right thing for the right reason.
Jim, thank you for your humble response to Marty Wordaal. It seems to me that humility must be the starting point to turn from meanness and toward the fruit of the Spirit.
This reminds of an interview I watched where a son told his parents he was gay, and the parents said they were going to have him meet with the elders of the church to “convert” him. The son’s answer was “there is no hate like Christian Love”. That one line has stuck with me. Unfortunately, it is many times the sad, painful truth.