Rev. Bastian Baan,Jennifer Zimberg, Tom O'Keefe, Kimber Martinson-Sawyer, Abigail Dancey, Emma Heirman,

Samuel Parker and Lisa Hildreth

From the West Coast to the East Coast, Taking the Scenic Route

By Rev. Bastiaan Baan

When I was twenty-one, I spent a year at UCLA as an exchange student from the Netherlands. Through a practicum at an inner-city school in Venice, California, known at the time as “the roughest place in the world,” this year became a turning point in my life. As a Waldorf School pupil, and later as a student in a conventional teacher-training program, I had been completely unaware of the lives of the twelve-year-old dropouts I met there in 1970—during the student revolutions—children who had already lost all hope in their own future. My eyes were opened.

Those encounters formed my wish to become a priest in The Christian Community. After completing teacher-training, I taught for several months at the Gandhi Schools in the slums of India, and then for seven years as a Waldorf teacher in the Netherlands. During my following two years at the seminary in Stuttgart, my wife cared for our three young children.

Following ordination in 1981, I have been working in The Christian Community, especially with young people. Since I had begun at age eighteen as a staff-member in its summer camps, these have been a joyfully uninterrupted 44 years. During this time, I have also been developing religious and spiritual themes in lectures and seminars, gathered in nine books (www.christofoor.nl), some of which have been translated into German (www.urachhaus.com).

So I will be only 63 when I come to Spring Valley, NY, to work as director at the Seminary of The Christian Community! And although my wife Æola and I will miss our four grown sons and their families in the Netherlands, I am joyfully looking forward to a new life on the East Coast, in Spring Valley: Outwardly a roundabout path, but perhaps inwardly a direct one.