Family Stories (Origins 42-1: Free Article)

“Family stories” can mean a lot of things. For the Spring 2024 issue of Origins, it means two things: stories about families in the literal sense and stories that expand and diversify how we think about the Reformed “family.” This blogpost includes one of those stories for free (see the link below). For the rest you’ll need to subscribe (we hope you do) or wait four years until we put them online for free on the “Origins in Print” page of Origins Online. The Spring 2024 issue will go to the printer this week and should be in the mail in mid-to-late April.

Three of the stories are about families in the literal sense:

• A mixed-race family, the Verhagens, that migrated from the Dutch East Indies to the Netherlands and then the United States in the 1950s, ending up in North Carolina in the segregated South. The racism they experienced there would force the Christian Reformed Church (CRC) to confront racism and segregation.
• Dutch immigrant families to Vermont in the 1950s and 1960s and their efforts to start a Christian Reformed Church congregation there, despite skepticism from officials in the CRC that the group was large enough and stable enough to sustain a congregation.
• Part II of the story of Wilma and Walter Lagerwey, recently married and soon an ocean apart, with him serving in the Signal Corps of the U.S. Army during WW2 and her at home pregnant with their first child.

Four stories are about the “Reformed” family, either the familiar kind of Dutch American Reformed story that has long been the “bread and butter” of Origins, or stories that stretch and diversify how we think about “Reformed,” ethnically, racially and religiously.

• A story about Paul Jones, the first Navajo student to attend Calvin College, in the 1910s. He encountered CRC missionaries as a boy and young man in New Mexico and would become a chairman of the Navajo Tribal Council in the 1950s.
• A memoir about Oets “O. K.” Bouwsma, a son of Dutch Reformed immigrants who attended Calvin College in the 1910s and became an influential philosopher with a puckish sense of humor at the University of Nebraska. Bouwsma and Jones knew each other, and both are in the photo on the front cover of the Spring 2024 issue of Origins. (Click on the cover image below to see them in more detail.)
• A German Reformed immigrant to the United States. He was a preacher and a schemer, a mystery man of sorts who went from one church and scheme to another across the United States from the 1870s to the 1910s.
• The Verhagen family also fits this category, with its Indonesian roots, its experience of racism in Terra Ceia, North Carolina, and the questions their experiences raised for the local church, its classis, and the Synod of the CRC.

The free story (click on this link) is the memoir by Richard Mouw about O. K. Bouwsma. Mouw first got to know Bouwsma while a student at Northwestern Junior College in Iowa in the late 1950s. Mouw went on to teach philosophy at Calvin College and then to Fuller Theological Seminary in California, where he became president of the institution. His memories of Bouwsma and Bouwsma’s life and work are windows into the intellectual and religious history of Reformed Christianity and Calvin College.

The Spring 2024 issue also includes reviews of two books: K. A. Van Til’s A Name for Herself: A Dutch Immigrant’s Story, and Eugene P. Heideman, The Canons of Dort: God’s Freedom, Justice, and Persistence.

***

William Katerberg is a professor of history and curator of Heritage Hall at Calvin University. All images courtesy of Heritage Hall.