Milt Herman

OK, we're recording. Dave DeJong, Dave, go ahead.

Dave DeJong

The community of Grace. An important part, I guess, of our faith life. And I've noticed that, particularly during this time of pandemic, when we've not been able to meet with the community of Grace. It's a big hole suddenly that I guess we haven't been particularly adept at filling. And what the staff has done—Pastor James, Bergen, whoever else has been involved in it—is fine, but it's no substitute for meeting with the community of Grace. It's been a difficult year because nothing has really come in to replace that experience. And the further we go along it seems less and less important. And that’s unfortunate and I don't know if other people are experiencing this, but you stretch this out long enough and your connections with the church become more and more tenuous.

And so I think—personal opinion—the church leadership are making a mistake by not moving ahead with a plan where we can all come together again. And they can do that in various ways. They can hold the service for all those who are vaccinated. For instance, I would feel comfortable with that. I wouldn't feel comfortable going into a larger group setting. With a number of people who are unvaccinated because I think anybody at this point is not vaccinated has made a serious error with the new variance coming on, particularly that Delta variant, which is going to I think make it. Anyway, I don't want to get into that particularly, but that's what I would have to say about the community of Grace. It's been very important to us.

Going back to the the importance in the first question. A time of trial... I would say we've come through that one form of trial but it's been a shared experience. Which hasn't made it any less impactful I guess. But there we also Fay and I have come through several personal periods of trial. The first one, of course, was our son Charlie's struggle with brain cancer. And the terrible pressures that put on all of us for long periods of time. Until finally, after eight years, he died from it. I would say during that time having the church through pastor James praying for him weekly, others in the congregation, many of them, expressing that they've—you know?—their concern and their continued prayers for Fay and I and family and Charlie particularly. That was really important to us. At the time, and I would say, if anything cemented our ties with the community of Grace. It was that experience going through that and knowing that so many people were aware, concerned. And then of course, the aftermath of his death, just kind of trying to get a grip on things again. That was, that was all very important.

So and then of course we had this more recent experience with our son Eric, with his myeloma. And that's been a struggle now for… going on four years. And he's still facing some potential crises. So we started with two cardiac arrests. That was early on. Art damage. Went through two implants. And all of this, you know, stretch it over months and months. Now it's gone on for years. It's times like that, that the community of Grace and its continued support is very important.

Milt Herman

I'm not quite sure what families that don't have that at some level, I'm not sure how they can shoulder all that.

So how may I ask, how did you and Faye get started in Grace? What attracted you to Grace?

Dave DeJong

We'd been members at First Presbyterian for many, many years and acted there at several levels, and really felt comfortable until they got a new minister. And then an assistant. And the two of them became bitter enemies. And it was pretty obvious that they disliked each other. That they couldn't find a way to forgive each other and move on. And then they were going to do this building project up here and we were all in favor of it. Made an initial donation to the capital fund. It just seemed like the rift between the two leaders was just kind of poisoning, yeah? And we just decided we don't want to be part of this anymore. And that was a hard decision, because we'd really been a part of that community for a long time. So we took her absence. And then looked around at other churches.

We knew Monty and Judy. We were hiking and skiing together at the time and they had always spoken favorably of their experience at Grace. Paul Lundberg happened to be the pastor at the time. So we went to Grace just to kind of try it out and just like the feel of it. We really liked Paul Lundberg. His preaching his personality just—if anyone sold us on Grace, it was him. Roseanne became a good friend of Fey. so we decided this church has an awful lot of liturgy and it's all really quite strange if you come out of our background. We got over our initial confusion and rather liked that he didn't like it. And decided there was an important part of the worship experience. Before we knew it, we decided to take the membership class and we were inducted into Grace.

So there have been some difficulties along the way. At one point for instance in connection with the columbarium decision by the Council not to go ahead with the plan A that we were presenting. After that congregational meeting, where it was basically shot down. Crudely, in fact. One of the members said to me the following week, “Are you still a member here? After what happened last week?” I said, “Oh yeah. Yeah, just pass this.”

I guess the biggest trial for me came much earlier when John was pastor here. And there are things about him, his style, that I liked. I thought he's maybe a little bit too… what's the word? Too Catholic for a Protestant church like Grace Lutheran? But the thing that caused the most problem was the way he handled the whole Nicaraguan issue. Every time that became very painful for me personally. And if there was any reason to disengage, I guess that was the time to do it. I just lost a lot of respect for him. I don't know if you were at that Council meeting, but it just seemed like. I was a sitting duck. There wasn't anyone on the Council who was showing any kind of support at all. They all had negative things to say about that whole thing and I don't know if you remember, but it was a—

Milt Herman

I don't.

Dave DeJong

The loss of all that money we'd sent that evangelical pastor over a period of years. And then in 2006 Earl Tilly and Jim Calkins and I went down here just to get a closer look at it and there were warning flags all over the place and it turned out he just spent, lining his own pocket. And then I wrote to him and confronted him and said, “You know by my calculation you have stolen for personal reasons, $10,000. I'm asking you to return that now because you claimed it in a fraudulent way” and he sent me back 22 checks for 5000 bucks which I turned over to the church. But that didn't assuage everybody. What anger about what had happened? You know, I'd done my best. I was totally blindsided. But there were people who were not willing to forgive that. And it soured some relationships. Maybe not permanently, but certainly for a while and for me it was just a very, very difficult time. It was hard to listen to John preach. It was just hard to pretend I had friendly feelings. And that kind of went all the way through the next couple of years till he left. But he finally got around to it when we set up this new program, he saw how that was going. He did on the side one time say I like what you're doing. I think it's a good thing, but that was kind of late in the game I guess.

Milt Herman

How did you stuck with it, you know?

Dave DeJong

Yeah, so anyway I'm kind of wandering off the track here I guess. What I liked initially about.

Grace was their engagement with the community that was one aspect of it that attracted me, I was interested in. And Habitat for Humanity at that time. Margie Kerr was very active in that, Gordon Diamond, oh, I can't think who else but they were the ones who basically introduced me to Habitat for Humanity and I worked with them on several projects and became very involved at the construction level, particularly. And that was good. And I thought, you know, Grace Lutheran has given Habitat for Humanity space. So in supporting the program and it seemed like the members of Grace, like Margie and Gordon Diamond. Became less involved and I didn't see anybody really stepping in from grace to take their place. And I've often thought that, you know, as nice as it is, to give them the office space and I'm sure people write checks and all that, but we've not had an awful lot of direct. Couple of last projects I would have involved in Earl Tilly. One of the chief organizers, and we did as a Lutheran project. Built I think 2 houses that way.

I learned on one of those projects the difference between the various Lutheran denominations. I thought if you were a Lutheran, you were a Lutheran. But you're not. You're an Evangelical Lutheran or your Missouri Synod Lutheran. Or you’re Wisconsin Synod, Lutheran, and none of those are compatible. So I was on the planning Committee for this and we were trying to organize a day and I said I was to help organize the devotions at the beginning of the day's work. And so we're sitting around this table with representative small Lutheran churches, and I'd given it some thought I'd so I said what? It seems to me we need to go back to our churches first of all, contact the pastor, invite him to come and do one of these 10-15 minute devotionals in the morning, and then there may be others in the church too. And maybe you could talk with them and recruit them so we're only going to do this for the first five days at that.

Dead silence after I said that. One of the guys finally had the courage to speak up and say, well, well, it's really not going to happen that way. We're going to have to find a different approach and maybe we can you and I can talk about this after the meeting. I said OK, I don't know what this is all about, but that's what we're going to do and we'll find people to do it. And yeah, he said those Wisconsin guys they're not going to be part of any prayer service, any kind of worship with the evangelicals, they just don't do that. Missouri Synod don't like to do that either? I know what is this all about.

Milt Herman

Part of your education.

Dave DeJong

Yeah, but you know that was a disillusioning experience 'cause I began to understand their history there that I don't know and maybe I don't want to know.

Milt Herman

They don't want it.

Dave DeJong

When it's water over the dam? Yep, so. Let me see what else is here.

So what could we do better? Maybe it fits with decisions about the Fox gift. One of the things—this is going back a little bit. I was on the building and grounds committee that Glenn Liner and I were were Co-Chair for. I think that was a period of four years and that was when we did the capital campaign and raised $350,000. Remember that. OK, I can't give you the year we did that, but it was quite a big deal. We hired somebody who's knowledgeable in such matters that he came over and worked us through the process. But that all started because we noticed building and grounds committee; notice that there were things that just weren't happening on the building side that should have been happening years ago. There was just so much neglect. And I went to the council and said, you know we have a lot of things we'd like to do that really need to be done because we've fallen behind. We need to get caught up basically, and if you would budget $25,000 a year for five years I think we could cover most of those projects.

We don't do that. We don't do that in this church. You don't have a capital fund that you can dip into when the roof needs to be repaired. When one of your bigger air conditioners goes down and you need to come up with another 8000 bucks. Where do you go? Well, we wait for somebody to step forward. Someone with deep pockets to say oh I'll pay for that. And that's never changed. There has never been a capital fund to take care of those kinds of things. That Avenue was closed and then I think it was Russ Speidel who was responsible in large part for coming up with this campaign and helping get that through. So we raised all that money and sure enough over the next number of years building and grounds identify 10 projects and I think we got through eight of them before we ran out of money. But I thought that was kind of a strange way to run a church. Because even though the church isn't just a building, it is a building at some level and as all buildings you need to take care of them. You need to upgrade them. You need, you know, you need to do strategic planning.

Which brings up another thing. While I was still a member of the building and grounds. We suggested we do a strategic planning. I've never done one of those before, but, you know, I want to talk about the programs of the church. You know where you want to see those going and what kind of impact those future programs might have on decision to make about the building. And one summer we went through that process and met with any members of the congregation who were willing to come to church and sit down and give us their views. So we came up with a bunch of ideas organized it, submitted it to the Council. It vanished into a dark hole. Was interested, apparently. And you know that so that kind of bothered me, I just get the feeling from experiences like that Grace isn't too very forward looking. They don't. They're not leaning forward. They're maybe leaning back too much. I don't know how you change that kind of culture because it's been there from the beginning. I got to know that building pretty well and one of the things that bothered me was the—you remember these whatever you call in skylights in the front of the chancel. You remember what they were made of this really cheesy ripple-y plastic. And when we finally got around to replacing those with glass you could put your whole arm through holes at the bottom of that stuff. It had rotted away since 1960, or whenever they installed it. You know?

Milt Herman

Today what I'm here hearing you say is now with this Fox. That a lot of that can be redone, and the two surveys that have gone out to the congregation that you guys. I'm sure that both of them, the results from that when we get through with this conversation, I'll be glad to share some of the thinking is much different now. I think we're going to finally get stuff accomplished along all those lines. How's that?

Dave DeJong

That the thinking has really changed?

Milt Herman

Appears to in the results of the survey.

Dave DeJong

And after we spend the money 20 years down the line down the road. Are we going to go back to the same? We don't need a capital fund we don't need—

Milt Herman

I don't think so.

Dave DeJong

Strategic planning we just—

Milt Herman

This is a sizable gift. That big chunk of that can be left in an endowment thing we don't—we can't touch. You can spend all the spin off but we can't touch it. That really has to be part of it.

Dave DeJong

Sure, yeah. Yeah, I can see that that is going to make a huge difference. Hopefully the Council will be less reluctant to come up with the money that the building requires for basic maintenance and improvement, yeah. So I think I've heard that one of the first things they're going to do is replace that lighting system.

Milt Herman

It's being replaced right now.

Dave DeJong

Is that? See, that's what was, I think, our number ten goal. We recognized way back then that this was totally inadequate. Yeah, and we even hired a church architect from Portland, Oregon to come out? Some guy who was associated with Grunwald guild. He came up, showed him what we had talked about. You know what the options were? They went back to his drawing board and came up with a total plan.

Milt Herman

A lot of lighting, particularly when you talk about lighting plans.

Dave DeJong

Drawings part. Just lighting, and he'd been doing this in Portland churches for quite a while, so he was an expert. And he came up with his plan. We paid him $3000.00 for his effort. We went to the Council, presented it to them. And it disappeared into another dark hole. We don't have money for that. It wasn't a—I want to say it would have cost 30,000 to do it back then. Although if we had hired him to be supervising the whole thing, it would have cost more I guess, but I don't remember it doesn't matter it just, you know, left another question mark in my mind. What do these people want?

Yeah, the Fox gift. I've thought about that. The first thing that comes to mind is it's going to be controversial. Any decision you make is going to have some people saying, “You're not putting enough here. You're not going to spend enough there.” And so to try to keep everybody happy is going to be totally happy. It's going to be difficult, but the Council seems to be taking a very slow, deliberate approach to the decision. I personally don't think a final decision needs to be made right now that's going to determine for all time what happens to that money, I just think this is going to be a progressive thing. You maybe make a decision first of all how to divide this into maybe two piles of money. One for us and one for everybody else. How are you going to spend it? And you know you could go right down the middle and say, “Right now, let's just think in terms of 50% or whatever our needs are to expand the programs of the church to take their building issues. And the other 50% we’ll use a variety of other ways. Social concerns will get a nice bump in their budget. We'll look for other causes that we can support. And in all of this, we'll spend only the interest that comes in. We're not going to spend down the principal. That wouldn't be a very smart idea. So you don't really have two and a half $1,000,000 to spend, you only have whatever interest that can come up with and then it seems to me that that reduces the problem enormously. Instead of a couple million you have—I don't know—50,000 a year whatever that comes up to be if you decide, here's where half of that goes. Here's the other half. And then you begin to build your list of priorities and that's something you do.

I don't know. You could have a five year plan maybe. And then every year you have specific goals under the five year plan that you want to meet. The only way you can really handle this flow of money over the years is with a special committee. Just like with the endowment fund.

Just in a very general way, what I see is as a way to do this—I think you know this gives us an opportunity to do not only things within the community. You know, ongoing programs. Habitat for Humanity comes to mind. We could support them at a higher level. We could try to put together church builds with Grace supplying the money to buy the land, for instance. Or a portion of the land, a portion of the total price. And then invite other churches to come in and be part of that. But then there may be other things too. We've done things in Africa and there are good causes there. We could push some of the money in that direction. We've been active as you know at least—maybe not on a church level, but members of the church in Nicaragua. And you know, we're basically pulling out of that and closing that down, but there are many, many opportunities, as you know, to do things. During the time on the trips that I've gone down to Nicaragua, over time, I've met people who are part of church groups that do this all the time. Every year they have members of the church going down to build something, you know, to yeah, most of it seems to be, you know, to work on housing, to work on schools. Things like that in tiny communities that just don't have resources, you know, what it's like in some of those villages they just don't have anything and I think it would be a wonderful idea if we could somehow support them and help them with all this money that's coming. You shouldn't sit on it. To benefit other people.

Milt Herman

Yep, that was what the Fox family intended. That's why they gave it to us and there's a good team working on. You know you feel that the church is actually working within the parameters and fulfilling the church’s main mission statement as long as we've all known about the mission statement, heard it so many times, we read it many places, I still have to read it, but I do not have it memorized. I think that one of those questions alludes to that.

Dave DeJong

It is, yeah, let me read it. Yeah, I was going to ask you. Read it a minute 'cause I think it's been amended isn't.

Milt Herman

Let me. OK. If they're trying to. Yeah, but that's gonna have to be a congregation wide vote in September, right? The current one reads, “We proclaim and celebrate the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” You know, I like it 'cause it starts out with we not a few of us or me or the pastor. Or it's we, we proclaim and celebrate the Gospel of Jesus Christ through word and sacrament, so that a community of believers. Is created and trained and nurtured and sent in the mission. And I don't know, I feel like that's what we're doing. You know, when I read the new one that they're proposing right alongside this, there's just a tiny bit of difference in the Council. I've been on the Council, I think Over the 45-46 years or… And I was President one year. Sometimes that I'm aware of, we've tried to modernize, update, expand, whatever change, alter the mission statements, nothing worthwhile that's come out of any of those discussions. But that would substantially really change this. So and again, I don't know where this kind of change or not. I don't think it needs to be changed personally. Anyway, as it stands today, do you feel like Grace is fulfilling that mission statement? For the most part?

Dave DeJong

Yeah, well. It seems like we’ve been talking in recent years, more and more about diversity and inclusion in terms like that. I don't know if talking about them or putting out a statement about them is going to make much of a difference over time. Simply because. I don't think we're going to—we have any hopes of attracting a lot of people from other ethnic groups, I don't think we're going to see anything more than an occasional. And they're the largest ethnic group. And I don't even know how that would happen. We tried it a couple of years ago with what was his name? I want to say... oh, but it wasn't.

Milt Herman

Yeah, the other pastor was actually a Lutheran pastor, yeah?

Dave DeJong

Yeah he was. He was. He was, you know, Hispanic himself, so he was able to communicate at a level that a non-Hispanic person could. But he was not able to move as far as I know, many people from wherever they were certainly not out of the Catholic Church which has really solid support, I think, from the Hispanic community and not from these smaller evangelical churches. At a practical level, I'm not sure that's going to change.

And when you talk about diversity, or, you know, on a sexual level, I don't think we will be attracting a lot of LBGTQ.

Milt Herman

Yeah, yeah. No, I don't think so either.

Dave DeJong

But having said that, there may be some importance just to get on record that we're not opposed to those things, and we support the whole notion that, in spite of these differences, we're all God's children.

Milt Herman

We all have a place in the choir. Something I said. All God's children, as inflation require, yeah.

Dave DeJong

So if the mission statement is going to be amended it ought to be amended in that direction in terms of just… with inclusivity. And I think that may be long overdue. The Lutheran churches have long tended to have kind of a nationalistic flavor to them, you know they're German or Norwegian, or you know they're our kind of people and that you know gets communicated in subtle ways. People who are not Norwegian, German, whatever they pick up those subtle clues and they know that's what we're dealing with.

Milt Herman

We’re human beings when it comes down to it.

Dave DeJong

Yeah, maybe, but.

Milt Herman

You know?

Dave DeJong

That's all I would have to say on the subject. I don't have any problems with the mission statement as it stands, but I think maybe there's room for saying a little more and…. Taking that next step because a generation ago we wouldn't even be having this conversation. Yeah, you know it's got to start somewhere and the next generation may be much more comfortable with that whole notion than we are at this stage.

Milt Herman

They are, and they have a seat in our family.

Dave DeJong

And that's… Looking back on it, that's the way it's been with all of these thorny issues somehow or other, they seem to over time get resolved, maybe not satisfactory, you know? For everybody but they do, kind of, worked out over time. I remember when divorce was a major issue. Yeah man, oh man, anybody who's divorced remember that horror? Yeah, you know.

Milt Herman

They're out of their culture altogether, basically, yeah.