Author’s Note: What follows are memories of one who has been in and about Evangelical Covenant churches all of his 80 years. Aside from consulting confutable memories, there has been no searching of archives for facts.

I was young, but not too young to figure out what was happening when scandal disturbed our bucolic Iowa farm community. A well-known young man had secretly married a divorced woman. I learned quickly that divorce was taboo, expected far away in Hollywood but not where we lived. It didn’t help that the man’s family had deep, founding roots in the Mission Covenant Church, or that he was part of our extended family. The couple stayed married to one another and part of that community the rest of their lives, eventually well-respected and admired, but they seldom appeared at my home church other than for weddings, funerals, and other obligatory events.

When I arrived at North Park Theological Seminary in Chicago in the early 1950’s, divorce was a hot button topic, stirring opinions right and left—one side proclaiming, “The Bible says. . . ,” others declaring, “But the Bible also says. . . ,” on and on. The source of those arguments was a promising seminarian who had informed seminary and church leaders he would marry a divorced woman, an unheard-of infraction of propriety if not actual rules that must surely block his being pastor of a Covenant church. In those dorm room discussions, most assumed he would move to a more liberal denomination, as had others who were unable to accept restraints of Covenant theology and practice. However, his great desire was to serve in Covenant churches, thus the dorm room discussions, pale reflections, I suppose, of heated confrontation in ministerial boards and seminary faculty meetings.