Eight decades of CC

When the first forerunner of Christian Courier was published in 1945, I was a four-year-old in the Netherlands, newly liberated from Nazi rule. The Hunger Winter was only three months behind us, and my first memory was of terrifyingly loud noises overnight. Only much later did I learn that the scary racket came from squadrons of Allied bombers on their way to Germany, flying at one hundred meters in an effort to avoid radar. Probably four years later, an uncle showed me a bomb crater where one had been dropped in a farm field nearby.

This was the background for my family’s move to Canada in 1950, when a massive wave of postwar Dutch emigrants had begun to cross the Atlantic to find a better future in Canada. The first few came in 1946, and by 1950 there were thousands making the trip. Of my father’s family’s 12 children, four came to Canada and two moved to Brazil. Many of these were large farm families, with no future for their sons in the plundered Netherlands. Overnight, ties with family, friends and neighbours were left behind, with the knowledge that this was permanent. Only letters kept up the connection, with telegrams, delivered in person to one’s home, generally representing bad news like a death in the family.

Settling into a new land with a foreign language, strange customs, and nothing familiar in sight was traumatic for the newcomers. It was to relieve some of this situation that an Ontario newsletter called Contact started coming out in 1949 in the Dutch language. The hope was that the immigrants would feel some sense of connection through the printed word. A smaller publication, The Canadian Calvinist out of Edmonton, had existed since 1945. It was in English and was aimed at earlier, first and second generation immigrants who had come between the two wars. A merger between the two resulted in an all-Dutch newspaper – Calvinist Contact – for the postwar contingent.

Hymns and horses

My early memories of church in Canada come from Orangeville, where we formed the sixth family of a tiny Christian Reformed Church (CRC) congregation that met in a Presbyterian church. The pastor was home missionary Rev. Gerrit André, who not only preached but also played the piano for the English hymns he made us learn almost from the beginning. His favourite was “I Love to Tell the Story,” which we sang almost every week. Rev. André must have been an energetic man to run these one-man services.

I have vivid memories of what it took to get to church during the winter: a horse and cutter (sleigh) for parents and maybe the two youngest ones for the first mile, while the rest of us ran alongside until we reached Jan de Wit’s place. A fellow immigrant, de Wit had the use of a bigger two-horse sleigh which took us over unplowed roads to the paved highway. Here, both families’ cars – ours was a 1934 Chev – were dug out of an ancient barn, the horses stabled, and off we chugged to Orangeville.

Other CRC congregations no doubt saw similar beginnings. In our case the congregation moved to the town of Erin for a short period before becoming the Acton CRC, which exists to this day. Acton had a huge tannery, among other employers, and the church went where the jobs were.

I don’t know when, or even if, my parents began subscribing to Calvinist Contact. They were readers and encouraged us to read as well, with books a regular birthday gift. My husband and I took out our own subscription eventually, and Calvinist Contact became part of my life over the years. As a fledgling writer I began submitting stuff to the paper, which accepted it all. I suspect I wrote some opinionated letters to the editor as well, since I was asked to join the paper’s Editorial Advisory Board, probably around 1980.

Language battles

Calvinist Contact was a thriving publication with something like ten thousand subscribers when I was first active with the Board. Sadly, that number was already declining year by year in the 80s, and I remember us discussing how the paper might survive if readership fell below five thousand. It was Stan de Jong who first investigated the possibility of a charitable foundation to put a financial floor under the paper’s finances. Stan was the money man; Bert Witvoet was the editor. The advisory board set no policy; that was Bert and Stan’s responsibility. But as a board we freely offered advice on various topics concerning the paper. CC had offices in St. Catherines, Ontario, with paid staff. They paid expenses for us on the advisory board to attend meetings twice a year at first, then annually, and we met at the office after first going out for dinner together on Friday night. The meeting continued all day Saturday.

One huge topic of discussion in those years was the paper’s Dutch language. Bert Witvoet and Stan de Jong, among others, feared the loss of subscribers if they should begin to include some English. This was not an imagined concern: some immigrants, my father among them, were determined to retain their Dutch heritage and language both in the church and in their reading material. I’ve had the sarcastic thought that they feared God spoke only Dutch. Most CRC congregations were fighting the same battle.

Integration

Calvinist Contact consisted of news, meditations and other serious content, but also humour. Columns like Arie en Katrien in Canada were popular because they reflected the everyday concerns of immigrants, including the sometimes embarrassing faux pas of someone trying to speak a new language. How do you buy a chamber pot, a then-common household necessity, when you don’t know the word? A brassiere? How do you tell people your age when you can’t pronounce the difficult th and r sounds? One often-told tale concerned a Dutchman telling his friend that “I am dirty and my wife is dirty too,” a possibly apocryphal story that nevertheless provided a rueful laugh. A lot of gesturing went on, similar to my experience when I now try to communicate with the Somali grandmother I helped sponsor, who has only a few words of English.

At any rate, at the advisory board meetings I began to push for English language articles. We lived in Canada; my generation was the one who was beginning to integrate into Canadian society.

It seemed inevitable to me that CC’s readership would similarly evolve into an English-speaking body. Reluctantly, it was agreed to begin inserting a few pages of English content in the centre of each CC. And, over time, this content expanded until the entire paper was in English by 1985.

Probably due to financial constraints the advisory board was finally disbanded. My memories of those meetings are fond, partly because they represented an intellectual outlet for me at a time when I was buried in motherhood concerns. I think back to Rev. Jacob Kuntz and his thoughtful, kind way of saying something. Rev. Nick Knoppers,who came all the way from Edmonton. Ineke Parlevliet, who contributed much content to the paper over many years. Every person there added something to the discussions, and I hope we helped contribute to a better publication.

For the future of Christian Courier, I hope it continues to be divinely blessed; that it pursues news of Christian activity around the world and across denominations; that it promotes peaceful, non-partisan discussion amidst sometimes acrimonious strife; that it continues to provide contact, not just between Dutch immigrants but between all those who try to follow God’s purposes for our lives.