Our Story:

History | Values
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Wassink is Dutch. Windmills, klompen shoes, tulips. I (Tom) grew up in Holland (Michigan) which is near Zeeland which is near Overisel and Drenthe and Graafschap and which was settled by the Dutch Reformed Calvinist revolutionary Reverend Dr. Albertus C Van Raalte in 1847 in the middle of nowhere (Michigan) to escape religious persecution in the Netherlands. For all his revolutionariness,

however, the Dutch folk who came along, and their descendents—at least my family—stayed true to our social/behavioral heritage: quiet, staid, and proper. One conversation at a time, no matter how many at the table; don’t get too excited (things will get worse) or too sad (you’re not dead yet); clapping and shouting only when your team (Go Blue!) wins, and quiet tears only at funerals as you eat jello salad and sliced ham on a white bun (crying for the deceased, not the food).

Mellman is Jewish. Adey grew up in Skokie, Illinois, a center of Jewish culture on the north side of Chicago. She went to Hebrew school, threw her sins into the Chicago river on Yom Kippur, was bas mitzvahed at 13, and was sure the plane was going to crash when the stewardess told her that the delicious bologna in her one-bite-left sandwich was from a porcine leg that had once put its weight on a cloven hoof (ham from a pig for the goyim out there). And Adey’s family, like Tom’s, was true to its social/behavioral heritage—boisterous, affectionate, animated and expressive. With 10 people at the table, there were five conversations, all at once, each louder than the next, a symphonic crescendo of kosher passion. With five people at the table, there were six conversations; with one person, four (the math was puzzling, but you get the idea): “THAT’S WONDERFUL! . . . THAT’S AWFUL! . . . OH MY GOD! . . . HOW CAN THAT BE!!!! . . . WHAT DID YOU DO?!?!? . . . YOU’RE AMAZING!!!” Talking, hugging, crying, laughing, and kissing.

So when Adey and I met, it was somewhere between peanut butter and jelly and matter-antimatter: wonderful complementarity that produced a lot of energy. And 5 children. And now a church. We came to Iowa City in 1999, from Evanston, Illinois. While in Evanston, I went through college, medical school, and then residency training in psychiatry, and Adey trained and worked as a counselor and as a staff pastor for the Evanston Vineyard. Both of us would say that we “came to life” spiritually during our 18 years in the Evanston church, and some of that experience is what we’re hoping to reproduce here.

It was a University Hospital fellowship for me in psychiatric research that drew us to Iowa City. We came intending to stay two years, which soon became three, then a decade, and that now is stretching to ∞ and beyond! We fell in love with Iowa City, Coralville, North Liberty and all the surrounding communities; the Ped Mall, the University, the farmers’ markets; the arts and the artists; walks in the Grant Wood hills covered with blue sky; and the vibrant diversity that an urban city surrounded by gorgeous farm land brings. We thought, This is it: We are home.

We also, over time, became connected to a group of folks who shared a vision for church. Church not as a place where you dressed nicely, behaved well, and pretended life was good so that God would like you—church not primarily as religion—but church as a group of humans desperate to make God the center of our world, or to find our way to the center of His.

By 2001 the “church’ was big enough (15? 20? (half kids? (all kids?))) to start Sunday morning meetings. For the first six months, we met at Mercy Hospital in a basement laboratory classroom in the education wing next to the morgue. We wandered labyrinthine hallways trying to find our way to the “sanctuary”. We sang songs to God as the recently deceased were wheeled past the window to go meet Him for real. We grew as a community. And 6 months later, with much gratitude to Mercy for providing a temporary home, but with much rejoicing at finding a new one, we began having Sunday morning services at the Robert A. Lee Recreation Center in downtown Iowa City, where we’ve been ever since and where we will remain until we have our own facility.

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As a community, we’ve come to have two main goals: 1) To encounter God, and then from that encounter to go out and 2) Bring the world around us to life. Now, this isn’t easy! God is not encounterable like a person, and even when for a short time he was, most people missed him: He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. And then our world—Oy! So much destruction and brokenness on grand and personal scales—and so much of it self-inflicted—it’s a world surprisingly resistant to the life it so desperately needs. And we’ve only been at this as a community for whatever-year-this-is minus 1999, which probably isn’t that long.

But we do our best. To aid in the encounter, we remove obstacles: churchy words; behavior codes; happiness codes; dress codes; wrong-headed distortions of God’s communication of himself to us; and hunger. Not world hunger (at least not yet), but Sunday morning I-didn’t-have time-to-make-breakfast-because-I have-to-go-to-church hunger. And weariness. Not weariness from single-handedly trying to fix a recalcitrant world, but 10:00 am weariness: Church starts at 10:00? In the morning? For weariness we serve coffee: steaming hot, fair trade, Pure Vida brand, strong, gratis. There’s also decaf for those who slept well, OJ for a sugar rush, and hot chocolate for kids (well okay—hot chocolate for our sugar-addicted youngest son Caleb). And for hunger—bagels. Garlic bagels, salt bagels, poppy seed bagels, everything! bagels, and sugar-cinnamon for the chil- . . . sorry—for Caleb. Topped of course with cream cheese—plain, garden veggie, bacon and scallion, and strawberry for (you guessed it) Caleb. Yes, Caleb eats strawberry cream cheese on a cinnamon and sugar bagel as he drinks his hot chocolate in church on Sunday.

But I digress.

In addition to removing obstacles, we build bridges. Not bridges to Ketchikan (8900 citizens short of nowhere), but bridges to God. Bridges of prayer, of song, and of thought. The Golden Gate Bridge of the Bible story. Bridges built on Sundays, in small evening groups through the week, in morning prayer meetings, and in many quiet, individual, alone moments. A favorite image for church that we come back to often is the sycamore tree of Zaccheus. When he couldn’t see Jesus because of the crowd, there was the tree waiting to lift him up above the madness so that he could lock eyes with the Divine, bring the world around him to life (in the form of a nice tax rebate economic stimulus plan), and then go have dinner with God.

We give ourselves to the world around us in myriad ways. We serve dinners at the Shelter House, build with Habitat for Humanity, serve at the Free Medical and Free Psychiatric Clinics, help single parent families with moving, provide spring and fall cleanup services to elders, and send a medical missions team three times a year to impoverished colonias in Mexico. We helped clean Iowa City after the tornado (2007) and the flood (2008), Parkersburg after its tornado (2008), and Lake Charles, Louisiana, after Katrina (2006). We give out reusable grocery tote bags, compact fluorescent light bulbs, and advocate for the environment. And more.

And the best thing is that we do it all together! “Community” has become something of a buzzzword, but we really do like being together and we work hard at making it work. We welcome in anyone who is interested in seeking God with us. We’ll use any occasion to throw a party that involves food and fun. And we provide lots of opportunities for getting to know each other and living life together. We have groups that meet in the morning, afternoon, and evening (though none at 0200 yet); groups for singles, couples, teens, students and families; groups that focus on spirituality, game playing, personal prayer, and food. We talk about and practice humility, openness, serving, saying sorry and forgiving.

Well, I’m kind of running on at this point, and this section has turned out to be longer than I anticipated. The problem? To quote the friend of a famous Prince of Denmark:

These are but wild and whirling words.

And the solution? Rather than throwing more words on the fire, you could take the advice (loosely translated) of one man trying to describe Jesus to another:

Umm . . . Maybe you should just come and see for yourself.