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MARCH 2012: AS WE SEE IT by Jared Ayers In the summer of 2008, my wife Monica and I crammed the contents of our house on Eleventh Street in Holland, Michigan, our two-year-old son, and our dog into a Budget Rental truck and made our way 739 miles east, to downtown Philadelphia. We had agreed to be guinea pigs for a new initiative in the Reformed Church in America called the "Classis of the City": an ecclesial structure that would…

FEBRUARY 2012: INSIDE OUT by Thom Fiet "You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect." Matthew 5:48 Trudy Brower prayed for us in English, and then she prayed again for us in German, the assumption being that prayers spoken in German are superior to those spoken in any other language. Trudy was precise, like a micrometer. She expected perfection from those in her family and social circles. She expected it of her pastor, heaven help him. And…

FEBRUARY 2012: REVIEW by Terri Martinson Elton Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers Is Telling the American Church Kenda Creasy Dean Oxford University Press, 2010 $24.95. 264 pages. Don't judge this book by its cover, at least not completely. It might seem like a book about teenagers, and in many ways, it is. It offers as its starting point high-level insights and personal stories from the findings of the massive 2003–2005 National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR),…

FEBRUARY 2012: POETRY by Kristina Erny Due to the formatting needs of this month's poem, it is available as a PDF. Familiar with being an outsider from her childhood in South Korea, Kristina Erny became interested in dialect, storytelling, language acquisition, spirituality, and community (insiders vs. outsiders) more deeply after spending four months in Freetown, Sierra Leone, in 2008. It was here, in this place still suffering from the aftermath of civil war, that she was first introduced to the…

FEBRUARY 2012: ESSAY by David Zwart A pair of burning wooden shoes! It is probably the most famous— or infamous—cover of the Christian Reformed Church's magazine, The Banner. It appeared November 3, 1980, the work of a new editor, Andrew Kuyvenhoven, himself a native of the Netherlands who had migrated to Canada and then the United States. If anyone should have wanted to keep Dutch traditions, it should have been this member of Generation 1.5. Yet the magazine's cover and…

FEBRUARY 2012: ESSAY by Marla Lunderberg When I get near an airport, any airport, any friend's take-off or return, I celebrate the motion, the rhythms of humanity on the move, and I do a quick mental check of my calendar to figure out when I might next board a plane. It is my firm belief that no grown woman should ever find herself without a valid passport. I keep a bag of toiletries in small containers ready to be tossed…