James Calvin Schaap

It began when Cletis Moermon died quite unexpectedly of a heart attack. He had not been a I member of Faith Church but had stopped in for | worship often enough—always in his satin joggers. For Cletis, church was just one stop along the way on a Sunday morning constitutional that, on sunny mornings, took him out of the guarded confines of the Oak Glen subdivision he'd created.

Ven will I zing?" It wasn't a request. The voice over the phone—disembodied, since neither Ray nor his wife, Claire, had ever met the manóasked the question baldly. Whether he was capable of singing had apparently never entered his mind.

Romy Geerlings put his feet up on the hassock and picked up the remote before he said a word about what Rosalee had just told him, quite casually, a moment before. He took an audible breath, meant itself as a reply, and then asked simply, no spin at all, "Church tonight?" "Ascension Day," she said, her back to him, piling the newspapers and magazines on the shelf beside the TV. It was unlike her to say it that way, as if it were a mandate.

November, 1994 Dear Harry, I read, quite sympathetically, your editorial in Reformed Worship 34 (December, 1994) this week—sympathetically because I know the heart that created it longs to be gracious and inclusive, not to hurt. There is nothing unrighteous about such goals.

That it happened when it did, no one could have guessed. Who'd expect a worship war midsummer—the time when things aren't really rolling along in church with much steam? That it would happen, however, could have been predicted by anyone with even a little bit of foresight. The "praise and worship" brouhaha had been fomenting for almost two years, and all that energy finally blew the cork off the unsettled peace otherwise registered on the faces of the Prince of Peace Fellowship worship committee.