It could be that I have no place in the commemoration, but something in me says that I do. The two of us hail from the same background, although I was never, as he was, a farm kid from northwest Iowa. But we were and are generational members of the same ethnic and religious tribe. We know and own the same culture markers--views of the Sabbath, the importance of Sunday worship, the sacraments, just two of them; we both have a Dordt diploma. Both of us have families who came to America from the 19th century Netherlands.
I honestly have no memories of him--of his reputation, yes, certainly, but of him, none. If I hadn't seen his pictures on the obits I picked up on the internet, I wouldn't have known what Rev. Tony Van Zanten looked like.
All of that having been said, I knew of him, knew, greatly, of him, knew him as a man who'd given his life for inner city ministry, mostly in Roseland, Illinois, a place largely abandoned by another band of 19th century immigrant Dutch, who found the Great Migration of African-American refugees from the American South too difficult to handle and therefore pulled up stakes and left for distant western and southern suburbs of Chicago.
Except Rev. and Mrs. Tony Van Zanten. They didn't leave. They came to Roseland precisely because of the people from the Great Migration. They came because a couple Iowa farm kids--Tony, from Rock Valley, his loving spouse Donna from Kanawha--decided somewhere in or around a stay in Harlem that inner city ministries was for them. They stayed. They put down roots. They loved and were loved.
Rev. Tony's death reminded me of a story that was, in all likelihood, vintage Tony Van Zanten. I wrote and directed a theater piece that told the history of the denomination in which both of us--all three of us, all four of us really, my wife too-- held membership, a theater piece, if I may say so, that was dearly beloved by a generation just a bit older than my own, a generation of the same tribe. Because it was so loved, the denomination determined to keep that theater piece around historically, so they found a place for a performance that could double as a stage for a video of the entire show--a high school performance hall on the west side of Chicago.
Must have been a strange performance to witness because every few minutes the stage director would move the cameras or tell the cast to do the scene over again to get it right.
That one-night event--staging and shooting--was very well attended, even though it was neither fish nor foul. But if you have access to a video of the show sometime, it's difficult not to notice that when the camera pans the crowd it picks up a row of four African-American men, maybe the only black faces in the crowd that night. Honestly, I didn't even notice them until I saw the video.
I got a letter from Rev. Tony Van Zanten sometime later. I may still have it, although a flood took out lots of those things from file drawers. I remember being shocked to read the return address was Rev. Tony because even though I don't think I ever met him, I most certainly knew of him. We had many mutual friends. During most of my life, few members of our tribe were as beloved as Rev. Tony for his peculiar and successful ministry.
The letter--handwritten--was maybe three pages long. It explained how he'd picked up four men from Roseland Christian Ministries, and told them he wanted them to come with him to this performance of sorts happening across town. He explained that he didn't tell them much about what they were going to see, but the five of them had hopped in the church van and made it to the performance hall in time to see the whole thing.
He wanted to see what they would think, he told me. He wanted to take four inner-city men along to the history of the very white CRC just to see what they would think.
When it was over, he was thrilled, he said, because they loved it--not because of its spiritual content or because it offered a full gallery of music with which to sing along, although those things were part of its success.
They were taken by the story, he said, because they never, ever presumed that the white members of the denomination that sponsored Roseland Christian Ministries were ever, ever poor. They had no idea. They only white people they knew, Pastor Tony told me in that letter, were, by their estimation, unimaginably rich. They had no idea that once upon a time they were dirt poor.
That note stays with me, not simply because these four African-American guys really liked the show but because the show had presented an image of the white people they likely knew best as church people of limited means, almost half of whom had died in their first winter on Lake Michigan.
He was thrilled because the story on stage had shaken them into a new and broader vision of members of Rev. Tony's church, and that's what Rev. Tony wanted me to know--that a show about Dutch immigrant ruffians, cultural inquisitors who loved nothing better than theological fencing, had made them readjust their perceptions of the white folks who came to Roseland Christian Ministries.
In all likelihood, that letter was swept away in the flood, but it's stored deeply in my heart, a story I've never told.
Rev. Tony Van Zanten died on December 15, just a couple of weeks ago.
There are hundreds of Rev. Tony stories. I have just one, a story I've never forgotten.
Should you care to visit his funeral service, there's a live stream available here.
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