These are the Seeds

If you expect church history to be a chronicle of buildings and budgets and official policy documents, this is not the book for you. But if you want to see church life up-close and personal, Chris Meehan’s story of Lee Street Christian Reformed Church delivers the goods in his classic reporter’s style. The ups and downs, the hopes and disappointments, meticulous plans and their often-surprising outcomes, radical changes in the neighborhood and in worship style—they’re all here. Through it all runs the dauntless perseverance of a modest band of Calvinist saints. This is a history of compassionate and courageous Christianity at the grassroots level, told with honesty, nuance, and affection. 

James Bratt is a historian of American religion with longstanding interests in the Dutch Reformed tradition. He is the author of Dutch Calvinism in Modern America: A History of a Conservative Subculture; Abraham Kuyper: Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat; and co-authored Gathered at the River: Grand Rapids, Michigan and Its People of Faith with Chris Meehan. He is professor of history emeritus at Calvin University.

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Few places have shaped my life more than the community historically known as Galewood,

Urbandale, and Burlingame. I first came here as a student and later returned to serve as Lee

Middle & High School principal followed by superintendent of the Godfrey-Lee district.

Throughout those years, Lee Street Christian Reformed Church stood next door as a constant

presence, quietly bearing witness to the many changes that transformed this neighborhood and its

people.

This centennial history captures that witness. At its heart, this is a book about people; their faith,

perseverance, ministries, and relationships. It reminds us that institutions endure not because of

brick and mortar, but because generations of individuals invest themselves in a shared purpose.

Through well-researched stories of pastors, families, ministries, and missions, it reveals a

congregation that navigated economic hardship, war, demographic change, and cultural

transformation all along striving to remain rooted in faith and service. While readers seeking a

broader community history may wish for additional attention to the changing neighborhood

surrounding the church, they will nevertheless discover in these pages something deeply

valuable: the story of a church that sought to understand its place in the world and respond

faithfully to it.

In many ways, the history of Lee Street Christian Reformed Church mirrors the history of

countless American communities: tradition and change existing side by side, each generation

receiving a legacy and then passing it forward. This book is a fitting tribute to the people who

have carried that legacy for the past one hundred years.

David G. Britten, Lieutenant Colonel, USA Retired

Local Educator, Historian, and Archivist

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All houses go through good beginnings, troubling transitions, and are always in need of constant fixing. These stories, captured by Chris Meehan, provide a kind of house inspection in seeing the missional hand of God in the midst of cultural change through ordinary saints.

Dr. Reginald Smith, diversity ministry consultant, Thrive (CRCNA), and author of "Roosevelt Park Rising: A memoir of renewal of A Pastor, A Church, and A Neighborhood. " 

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This book offers a warm and insightful history of the internal heartbeat of Lee Street Church.  It is a pastoral history, a book that brings many of the deeply spiritual hopes and fears of a community into view, a kind of history that helps us imagine the nature of God's work in and through the many layers of relationships in a congregation over time.

While it will naturally be of interest to members of the Lee Street congregation, this is the kind of book that could helpfully be read by current and future pastors and other ministry leaders of any congregation as a model for paying loving attention to the histories of their own congregations.

John D. Witvliet, Calvin Institute of Christian Worship (1997-2025), currently serving at as Chief Officer for University Missional Initiatives, Belmont University"

When the Centennial Committee of Lee Street Christian Reformed Church — Dan Holwerda, who served as our chairperson, Dave Bouwkamp, and I — began meeting together to plan the celebration of our church's one hundredth year of ministry, we were united in wanting this milestone to be more than a momentary occasion. This was not an intellectual endeavor for us. Dave has been a fixture at Lee Street with his family for 27 years. Dan’s grandfather was the second pastor of the church, and his uncle remembers being carried across Martindale Avenue from the original parsonage to the new one riding proudly on the top of a mattress. My grandparents joined Lee Street in 1927, the year after it was formed. My father and all 4 of his siblings grew up on Rathbone Street, attended Lee Street, and were baptized and married here. My parents, in fact, baptized me in 1967 at Lee Street in the same baptismal found that I now use to baptize babies today.

Given all this personal history, we were committed to seeing a Centennial Celebration that would be a lasting gift. We wanted to tell a story, not simply narrate facts.

The Centennial Committee brought this vision to the Lee Street Church Council early in the process, seeking both their wisdom and their authorization for the necessary funding. We believed it was essential to confirm that a project of this scope was consistent with the mission and vision of our congregation — and the council's unanimous affirmation gave us the confidence to move forward with full community blessing.

The question, of course, was who would tell it? Several of us on the committee carried a love for words and storytelling. But love for a task and the time and capacity to do it well are two different things. And so, we began to look outward, to ask who among those we knew might be the right person to give voice to one hundred years of seeds planted and harvested at Lee Street Church.

For me, the first person that came to mind was Chris Meehan.

I had come to know Chris through years of urban and overseas work with my family as missionaries with Resonate Global Mission, the denominational mission agency of the Christian Reformed Church. Chris had spent many years as the religion editor for The Grand Rapids Press, and had written hundreds of articles for The Banner, the CRC's denominational magazine. He had also authored books chronicling significant chapters in the denomination's history — particularly its engagement in urban ministry and challenges around engaging mission in the midst of racial tension and other social justice issues. Our paths had crossed repeatedly over the years as we shared a deep interest in the stories of urban church leaders and communities. I had seen firsthand how Chris works: with patience, rigor, and a rare gift for drawing out the humanity in the people and places he writes about.

When the time came to consider who might put pen to paper for this project, it was, in my mind at least, imperative that we first ask Chris Meehan. I extended the invitation to him around the time of one of our community festivals — a Back-to-School Bash in the church parking lot that year celebrated the independence days of Mexico and the nations of Central America. We raised their flags on the church steps, listened to their national anthems, and invited them to tell their stories. Chris attended that event, and he was visibly moved. Here was a Christian Reformed congregation, nearly a century old, so thoroughly committed to bridge-building across difference — to the celebration of the neighbor, the stranger who had become family. That afternoon sparked something in his imagination. He said yes.

What none of us could have anticipated at the outset was the degree to which Chris would not merely research the story of Lee Street Church but become an integral part of the story. Around the time he began this project, his own congregation — Coit Avenue Christian Reformed Church, where he had served as an elder and commissioned pastor — was navigating a painful season of discernment about its future. That process eventually led to the church's closure. Chris helped shepherd Coit Avenue through its ending, and then, quietly, he began attending Lee Street.

For the past two years, Chris has been present nearly every Sunday — sitting in the same row of the balcony, looking out over the congregation at worship. He has attended church events and community gatherings, sat in on meetings, and shared in the ordinary rhythms of life at Lee Street. The story he was commissioned to tell became a story he was living. He was not a researcher observing from the outside but was grafted in, a participant in the unfolding narrative he was chronicling.

The research Chris undertook was as thorough as it was devoted. He conducted upwards of eighty interviews with people connected to Lee Street at every level of the church's story — from members in their early nineties who carry memories stretching back generations, to young families with small children discovering their first church home. The voices he gathered represent a remarkable breadth of experience: those who have worshiped in the Christian Reformed tradition their entire lives, and those who, even today, couldn't tell you what "Christian Reformed" means but who have found in this local church something they can only describe as a loving family, a place to call home. Many of those interviews were later recorded on video and have been shared during Sunday morning services as a living preview of the stories now gathered on these pages.

In addition to the interviews, I opened a closet for Chris in the church where roughly three dozen handwritten ledgers — spanning more than a century of deacons' and elders' meetings — had been kept under lock and key. We moved all those ledgers into my office, so Chris would have ready access to take home a handful of them at a time and then return for more when he was ready. He read through every one of them, meticulously tracing the formal decisions and quiet faithfulness recorded in those careful hands across all those years. He spent long hours at the Calvin University library, reading everything archived there on Lee Street Christian Reformed Church. He combed through decades of Banner archives, extracting every article that touched on Lee Street's history and weaving those findings into the developing narrative.

We also had the gift of a remarkable local guide. David Britten — longtime school administrator and superintendent of the Godfrey Lee School District, local historian extraordinaire and co-author of the book “100 Years at the Lee Street School” — has devoted years to preserving the history of the Godfrey Lee neighborhood and the city of Wyoming. Dave opened his personal archives to us, sharing material from neighborhood newspapers and local records, answering questions, and helping us understand the broader context in which Lee Street Church has lived and served. He led us on a walking tour of the neighborhood and filled up an entire Saturday morning in the sanctuary lecturing on our neighborhood history using hundreds of Power Point slides full of pictures and images. 

The book you now hold is the fruit of all that labor, all those conversations, all those hours spent in ledgers and libraries and living rooms. Its title — These Are the Seeds: One Hundred Years of Planting and Harvesting at Lee Street Christian Reformed Church — emerged from the conviction that what God has been doing here is not primarily about an institution, but about seeds. Seeds planted in faith, sometimes in uncertain soil. Seeds that have taken root in unexpected ways. Seeds that have grown into a congregation whose story is, at its heart, a testimony to God's faithfulness.

That faithfulness is also captured in the theme we have chosen for our centennial year: We Preach Christ Crucified. When the sanctuary was built in 1940 above the basement church, those words arched over the pulpit at the front of the worship space. They are words drawn from the apostle Paul, who wrote to the church at Corinth that the message of the cross — foolishness to some, a stumbling block to others — is to those who are being saved by the very power of God. For one hundred years, Lee Street Christian Reformed Church has staked its life on that proclamation and sought to live out its implications in the neighborhood around it and in the wider world. Pastor Steve DeVries and I have been leading the congregation through a sermon series rooted in First Corinthians this year, returning together to what it means — and what it has always meant — to preach Christ crucified, and to live in the reality of the resurrection. Whenever possible, we’ve drawn sermon illustrations from the pages of this manuscript.

This book, now in published form, is our attempt to honor that century of faithfulness — to name the seeds, to celebrate the harvest, and to give thanks to the God who has been at work in this place long before any of us arrived and who will continue His work long after we are gone.

These are the seeds.

Pastor Joel Van Dyke

Lee Street Christian Reformed Church Centennial Team

Wyoming, Michigan 

What is a church’s history? Is it the dates of important events? Is it a list of ministers and building projects? If that were the case, a book about our church’s history would be easy to write, because those are the kinds of details that we record and that aren’t up for debate. But just as a church is more than a building, church history is more than a list of names, dates, and facts.

The New Testament book of Acts is my idea of church history. It’s an inspired account of people like Peter, Stephen, Barnabas, Paul, and others. It tells what they did, what they said, and what happened because of it. It’s inspiring. People are baptized, encouraged, freed from imprisonment, healed of disease and demon possession, and their lives are changed. It’s a story of how God worked, and because of the stain of sin it’s not neat: God’s people disagree, are killed, flee for safety, and are shipwrecked. No prosperity gospel in Acts. Yet in a special way, God uses it all to build his church and bring about his kingdom.

If only we could tell Lee Street’s history the same way. But we are not inspired, and we don’t have records that tell many of those kinds of stories. Still, we have some. What follows is an attempt to tell a story–not just of names and dates, but of how God has worked through this church’s first 100 years. In our culture, this is not a natural way of writing, so you may need to read between the lines.

Speaking of culture, the book of Acts was written in a world just as culturally shaped as our own. People tend to think about culture the way a fish thinks about water: they don’t. It simply surrounds them, exerting a powerful, often unseen influence–shaping how they speak, think, prioritize, and form relationships.

This book also traces how historical events and cultural shifts have shaped life at Lee Street. We do not exist in a vacuum; we are formed by both our culture and our past.

Speaking of the past, it is easy to look back on church history with disdain. It is certainly popular in much of academia, and there is much to critique. Some argue that our society was built on racism and that the church stood by, that it failed to be a prophetic voice. Wars have been waged, decisions driven by fear and power, people abused, and wrongdoing concealed. Was the church shaping culture, or being shaped by it? Often, we view the past with contempt. C. S. Lewis called this “chronological snobbery”–the assumption that we are more enlightened than those who came before us. (He also said we need to read old books to expose the blind spots of the present.)

But Scripture teaches that all have fallen short of the glory of God–not just those in the past. Just as God remained faithful to his often-unfaithful people in the Old Testament, so he remains faithful to his church today. To focus only on the church’s failures is to miss the full picture. God has also used his church to bring about immense good. This, too, is true of Lee Street Christian Reformed Church.

We can err in the opposite direction as well, idolizing the past as a better time. We owe much to those who came before us–despite their flaws. Looking back at Lee Street, I see people who seemed more dedicated, organized, and disciplined. Church stood at the center of their social life. But was that wholehearted devotion, or simply conformity to a subculture? Likely some of both, depending on the person.

William Faulkner wrote, “The past is not dead. It’s not even over.” Much of what we experience today is best understood in light of what came before. You may read this book and simply enjoy the story of Lee Street Christian Reformed Church–especially if you have roots in this church. You may gain insight into why things are the way they are. But I would urge you to read more deeply: to see how God has worked through a church that sometimes acted out of fear, sometimes followed tradition unthinkingly, and sometimes mirrored the surrounding culture. And also, to notice where people chose love, pursued truth, shared the Gospel, and cared for one another.

Have you ever stood inside a cathedral? Its walls rise to a high, peaked ceiling. It is a space set apart–a place where people gather to meet with God. Such spaces often feel timeless; someone 500 years ago could have stood where you stand, experiencing much the same thing. There is also a sense of being removed, if only briefly, from the chaos outside.

This central space is called the nave, from the Latin navis, meaning “ship.” It is the root of the word navy. This is no accident. The church has long been understood as a vessel–an ark. Traditional church architecture in much of the West, including Lee Street’s building, reflects this idea. Just as God preserved Noah and his family through the ark, he preserves his people through the church. And like the ark, it is not always clean or comfortable–but it is the means God has chosen.

God uses his church–its strengths and its failures–to accomplish his purposes. And he does the same with individuals. Just as he calls his church to repentance, obedience, and a future filled with hope, he calls each of us.

Lee Street’s past is not dead. It is not even over. Neither is yours.

I hope this book inspires you to praise God for what he’s done in his church, but I also hope it inspires you to be a committed part of the church that God uses to preserve his people.

David Bouwkamp

Lee Street Christian Reformed Church Centennial Team

Wyoming, Michigan

I sat in the balcony for the Sunday service at Lee Street Christian Reformed Church as youth leader Beth Meekhof announced from the front that the day was set aside to celebrate youth ministry. The boys in the Calvinist Cadet Corps and the girls who were members of GEMS Girls Club–both longtime ministries of the Christian Reformed Church–would help lead the service and, in the process, be honored for their place in the life of this nearly 100-year-old congregation in Wyoming, Michigan. Also, during this February 2025 morning service, there would be a look at something called New City Kids. Employing students from nearby Lee High School, New City Kids aimed to reach out to young people in the neighborhood–to teach them to play musical instruments, mentor them in their studies, and help them grow into competent, fully functioning adults in the complex and challenging world of the 21st century.

For more than a year, I had been researching the story of the congregation for this book on Lee Street’s 100-year history. As I learned through conversations with scores of people, the Lee Street story–in the face of American church life that has been on the wane–is one of persistence, many ups and downs, and substantial obstacles, some met with success and some not. Most Sundays, I sat in the balcony and watched, taking notes and, as best I could, joining in the worship.

As that morning service began, the Cadets and GEMS gathered by the altar. Many wore uniforms. Their faces–hopeful, yet awkward in being the center of attention–gazed out at us. The mixed melodies of their voices rose and fell as they prayed, recited Scripture, and sang. As their sounds lifted to the dark wood rafters, I thought of how I had grown captivated by Lee Street’s story over the past year–a tale of a hardy, working-class congregation weathering decades of change.

In this long, narrow sanctuary, with its stained-glass windows, high-peaked ceiling, and polished brick walls, countless services had been held, hundreds of weddings celebrated, and innumerable funerals conducted. In this gathering space, lives had been changed; relationships cemented and broken; sermons preached that tugged at hearts and captured imaginations; and music of many kinds performed with unbridled praise and passion. Certainly, this is a story shared by churches everywhere, but Lee Street has its own particularities and flavor–its own sinew and grace drawn from many sources. The church has its own profile, its own steadfast power–its own grit and gristle–that we will see unfold throughout its history.

Weaving through it all, however, has been one central thread: learning about, being shaped by, and following the sometimes grueling yet enduringly certain kingdom path of Jesus. Joining Christ and bowing before a sovereign God has been the soul of this church. To be sure, things have wavered, and times of toil have often left members weary, even desperate. Yet this place has endured. It has lived out its mission in many ways, in a neighborhood that has been transformed again and again by ongoing demographic change.

During that youth-focused service, as I looked on from the balcony, I was reminded of an enduring theme: intergenerational resolve–a commitment to the future. I thought about how one group of Lee Street men and women has captured and lived out the story of the Gospel and then passed it on. It is like a heavenward relay–an onward march of fathers and mothers sharing the grand story of salvation with their sons and daughters, who in turn do the same. There is power in this process.

Not surprisingly, this was a theme Steve DeVries, one of the Lee Street pastors, touched on that morning when he spoke with a leader who would be helping start New City Kids in the months ahead. Later, we will see how this innovative program–with sites in several U.S. cities and connections across the globe–promises to help lead this multiethnic church, along with several other ministries, into the future.

For now, this is what was said about New City Kids:

“We are very excited to be starting the program here. It is all about working with young people and finding ways to share important principles and values with them. One of the program’s core values is inviting everyone to go on an innovative, joyful journey with Jesus.

“We are all invited to go on a journey with Christ–not just once, but day in and day out–with Jesus, who is Jubilee, the King of an upside-down kingdom.” “This invitation includes everyone–children, teens, and adults. Nobody gets left out.”

“At the heart of New City Kids are loving, supportive relationships that take place within highly structured programming. Hand in hand, relationships and programming make up the content and structure of what we do together.”

The remarks were brief but important, and DeVries went on in his sermon to flesh out what had been described–that journey with Jesus, especially as it applies to youth. When it came time for him to preach, he spoke about the Shema, a prayer found in Deuteronomy 6:4–9, which centers on parents passing down their faith to their children. A central prayer in Judaism, the Shema, he said, calls on us to listen and attend to the oneness of God. It especially urges parents to devote themselves to teaching their children about the faith.

The passage reads: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one…”

Striding comfortably across the stage on this Sunday set aside to honor the young, DeVries said, “This passage asks us to be patient with our children and to speak to them again and again.” Passing on one’s faith–that is, one’s deep beliefs in and awareness of God–was the heart of his message. A generational process of speaking, again and again, about the Reformed approach to worshiping the Lord was his aim.

“As this passage says,” DeVries said, “talk to your children when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.”

In preaching on the Shema–a prayer Jesus also affirmed–DeVries spoke of the groundwork for faith that begins early, as parents share what they believe, seeking to fill the hearts and minds of the young with the compelling story of life with Jesus. As the youth grow older, he said, they can pass on what they have learned to their own children.

As DeVries preached, I thought: this is what has been happening at Lee Street for nearly a century. Seeds of the Gospel have been planted by fathers and mothers, and as their children grow, faith takes root and flourishes. Certainly, there are tangles and thorns; things that bloom can also wither. But when tended well–when families persist, and children hold on–a strong picture of a faith community emerges.

A church that began in a cramped mission building in 1926 and endured years of depression, war, and immense social change can find itself still standing–preaching, praying, and ministering–its rugged, soul-filled story continuing to unfold in a world still marked by uncertainty and change.

Let’s give Steve DeVries the last word before we return to the beginning of this place. These are words he offered in his sermon as I scribbled notes in the balcony:

“Of course, all of this is true only because God joined in the human project when Jesus Christ was born,” he said. Late morning light slanted through the stained-glass windows, brightening the sanctuary with a glow that, I think, has filled this space for years. “Jesus was the perfect image bearer of God and gave his life. We all hope–families and their children and all of us–to become image bearers as well, so that we can live into what God wants us to become.”

Becoming–sometimes in the grip of hardship and often warmed by the grace of God–is what it is all about. This also touches on a central theme of this book: joining Jesus in the human project. From the start, our goal is to offer a strong sense–through these stories–of the many ways Lee Street members have connected with Christ over the past century.

In the book Practicing the Way, author John Mark Comer outlines three steps for connecting with Jesus: “First, you come and be with Jesus; gradually, you begin to become like him; eventually, you can’t help it–you begin to do the kinds of things he did in the world.” Lee Street pastors preached on this book for several months in 2024, emphasizing ways to embrace the life Jesus lived and revealed.

While those sermons spoke to the church today, these steps also help us understand how Lee Street members across the decades have joined in the work of bringing the kingdom of God to bear in their own contexts.

From the late 1920’s on, we will meet a cast of characters who helped bring a little bit of God’s kingdom to life on earth. We will see how following Jesus has taken different forms, yet how the underlying reality has remained the same. However one names it, the people of Lee Street have followed, connected with, and shared the Gospel–at home and abroad.

We will see how an ordinary church, in an urban neighborhood on the edge of Grand Rapids, has shared the good news with friends and families–and, in the process, done some extraordinary things.

A Son Buried Far Away tells the story of Pastor Holwerda's son, killed during WW II. Because of its length and detail it didn't make it into the book, but it's a story that is important and a fitting tribute.  A Son Buried Far Away

Copies will be available online beginning September 26.