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Calvin appoints alumni board members

msk23@calvin.edu — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 18:20:43 +0000

Calvin appoints alumni board members msk23@calvin.edu Tue, 10/21/2025 - 14:20

The ��Ƶ Alumni Association recently welcomed four new members to its alumni board.

Jan Bode ’72, Kim Brower ’93, Glory Emmanuel ’19, and Jeff Meitler ’16 began their three-year term of service earlier this year. The incoming group, which was approved by the alumni board, is now part of a 22-member board that hails from 10 U.S. states and one Canadian province. Like Calvin’s current student body, the board represents a breadth of geographic, ethnic, and racial diversity and includes alums from the 1970s and 2010s and every decade in between.

New alumni board members

Jan Bode ’72 is from El Mirage, Arizona. She has served for decades with World Renew’s Disaster Response Services.
Kim Brower ’93 is from Zeeland, Michigan. She serves as benefits manager for ZFS Solutions, LLC.
Glory Emmanuel ’19 is from Oakland, California. He serves as audit and insurance manager—technical accounting and reporting for Deloitte.
Jeff Meitler ’16 is from Chicago, Illinois. He is the vice president of business development for Wave Reaction.

The board is comprised of alums who work for Fortune 500 Companies and nonprofits and represent a wide range of sectors, including finance and education, medicine and engineering, and communication and business, to name a sampling.

“We are excited to welcome Jan, Kim, Glory, and Jeff to our talented team of alumni ambassadors in this historic 150th anniversary year,” said Jeff Haverdink, executive director of the alumni association. “It’s a joy to serve alongside alums who are discovering the beauty of their alma mater in new ways as they serve on the board. We see their passion for Calvin and its mission grow as they intentionally re-engage in this way.”

The alumni board’s chief responsibility is to lead the 66,000+ strong alumni association in its commitment to build community among the university’s alumni and friends, keep alums engaged with the Calvin of today, and inspire alumni to answer God’s call in life and vocation.

Tue, 10/21/2025 - 12:00

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��Ƶ's alumni board was recently on campus for Homecoming and Family Weekend.

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From classroom to delivery room: the impact of a Calvin education

msk23@calvin.edu — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 13:12:41 +0000

From classroom to delivery room: the impact of a Calvin education msk23@calvin.edu Wed, 10/08/2025 - 09:12

“I’ve seen it all.”

These are the words Stephanie Flood ‘89 shared with her grandma when she stopped by her house to pick up her son after a long shift in the labor and delivery room. Her grandma’s next words would stick with her for decades: “Stephanie, you will never see it all.”

“I never forgot those words,” said Flood. “I took that with me into every time I met a patient, every drama, every birth, every crisis.”

Those words were spoken to Flood just six months into her career as a labor and delivery room nurse. Now, nearly four decades later, the Calvin alum still hasn’t seen it all, but she’s certainly seen a lot. And she’s now sharing her experiences in a new book: When There are Two Patients in One Body.

“I wrote this book to give voice to nurses, especially those of us in Labor and Delivery, whose work is often overlooked,” said Flood. “Being a delivery nurse is far more than just ‘a great job where you get to cuddle babies.’ It is a vocation that demands resilience, empathy, and an unflinching dedication to supporting patients through life’s pivotal moments.”

Building on a solid foundation

Flood has certainly learned a lot on the job, but it was the preparation prior to heading into the unit four decades earlier that laid a solid foundation for providing 36 years of great care.

“Choosing Calvin was a decision that changed my life,” said Flood. “I think what the liberal arts taught me was to keep thinking, to never stop that. It lit a spark inside of me. It wasn’t until I went to Calvin that I really started to embrace how important learning was and thinking critically.”

Living into a calling

In her book, Flood not only recalls stories of joy and heartbreak from inside the delivery room, but also the ways these moments were profoundly formative. As these stories unfold, readers gain insight into how factors such as healthcare access, race, culture, socioeconomic status, and education profoundly shape each birth experience. Flood has seen this firsthand thousands of times over a nearly four-decade career. And it started with her own personal experience as a patient.

“I went into Labor and Delivery because of my own first birth experience and the nurse at my bedside,” said Flood. “It was a very difficult delivery, and this nurse held my hand and mothered me … and I thought she just changed my world. And I honor her in the book, and she is the reason I went into nursing.”

Inspiring wholehearted living

Now, recently retired from her field, Flood is hoping to inspire more considering the nursing profession to enter into it with their whole hearts, remembering whatever they do unto the least of these, they are doing unto God.

“I always wanted to treat my patients the way I wanted to be treated, as honestly and lovingly as possible. That was important to me and that comes directly from my faith,” said Flood. “Learn how to listen, because if you stop talking long enough to listen you will not believe what you can hear from a patient’s words and actions, their stories and interactions tell you so much.”

Wed, 10/08/2025 - 12:00

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Carlos Erazo ’14, Pastor and Social Media Influencer, to give 2025 Commencement Address

msk23@calvin.edu — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 16:49:10 +0000

Carlos Erazo ’14, Pastor and Social Media Influencer, to give 2025 Commencement Address msk23@calvin.edu Tue, 04/01/2025 - 12:49

As a freshman at ��Ƶ, Carlos Erazo ‘14 was invited to speak for 15 minutes during chapel.

“I was nominated. I didn’t volunteer,” recalls Erazo. “I was terrified.”

From El Salvador, Erazo had never preached or spoken in front of that many people, and certainly not in English. “But I felt in my fear, God reassuring me ‘it’s not going to be you, it's going to be me, to be a blessing to the people who are going to listen to you,” said Erazo.

Receiving encouragement

After he spoke, unsure of how it went, Erazo received some feedback. “Pastor Mary said, ‘you did amazing,’ and that word meant way more to me than she probably thought,” said Erazo. “At Calvin, I had great teachers who encouraged me, challenged me, did little things that showed me that they believed in me.”

Over the next decade, Erazo would become a content creator on multiple social media platforms attracting millions of followers with some of his content receiving millions of likes.

On May 10, 2025, Erazo is returning to where it all started, his alma mater, to give the Commencement address to the Class of 2025.

“For me, it’s a huge honor,” said Erazo. “I want to address the idea of remaining faithful and trusting God with the rest.”

Erazo is currently the Pastor of Digital Ministries at Lakepointe Church in Dallas, Texas, a ministry serving tens of thousands of Spanish and English-speaking people in-person and online across multiple campuses. In his position, he supervises a team that oversees church online, produces a weekly podcast, coaches, shepherds, and provides digital strategy.

Discovering his unique calling

Erazo’s path to the pastorate was anything but traditional, but it was during his time at Calvin that he more deeply understood that he could be Christ’s agent of renewal in whatever sector or sphere God called him to.

“I enjoyed the Reformed theology that I learned [at Calvin]. It was extremely helpful for me,” said Erazo. “I think I discovered my passion to do ministry, to be a preacher, a missionary evangelist in a different way, and that happened at Calvin.”

So, the communications and economics double major picked up a $200 camera and tripod at a local Meijer grocery story and got to work.

“As a sophomore, I started a YouTube channel. As someone who has always been passionate about sharing my faith, I wanted to share my faith with my friends in El Salvador,” said Erazo. “This was pre-social media before the iPhone had a front-facing camera, so to record yourself was very awkward.”

The path Erazo was heading down was looking quite different than he had anticipated when he first stepped into the United States and onto Calvin’s campus a couple of years prior.

“Before graduating college, I thought I had an obligation as an international student to come here, get the best paying job I could and then go back to El Salvador to provide for my family,” said Erazo. “That was my plan at the end of the day.”

The journey begins

But Erazo says he had a conviction from God to not pursue that path, but instead to become a Christian YouTuber.

“I didn’t have 10 million subscribers, maybe not even 10,000 at the time,” said Erazo. “But I graduated knowing I need to pursue more ministry and digital media and share my faith.”

In 2014, he graduated from Calvin with a clear calling and a partner for the journey ahead, his former classmate and wife, Brooke Erazo ’14, who would help him create videos and upload the content.

It didn’t take long for Erazo to attract millions of followers across multiple platforms and for him to start receiving speaking engagements all over the world. He admits it was a busy and exhausting six or seven years.

“It was all gas, no brakes,” said Erazo. “My wife and I were known by a lot of people, our social media platforms grew, but we were not really known. We were connected, but we felt very disconnected.”

Stepping into a new season

Feeling isolated and tired, the Erazos sought refuge. They knew that started by finding a church and by trimming down everything they were doing.

“We found a local church with a congregation of English and Spanish,” said Erazo. “I knocked on the door and said, ‘whatever you need me to do, I am able to help out.’”

So, Erazo was hired as a part-time student pastor for one of the churches’ campuses. A year later, in January 2020, he was asked to take on a full-time role to help with church online.

“Brooke and I prayed, and we felt this is a new season. So, I called the pastor and said, ‘I’m in,’” said Erazo. Two weeks later, the job loomed much larger.

“Literally two weeks after I accepted the online church pastor role, COVID happened,” said Erazo. “All of a sudden, this church of over 10,000 people was all online, and we are building the plane as we’re flying.”

Inspiring the next generation

Now, a few years later, Erazo is serving as the pastor of digital ministries for the church. He also recently published a book in Spanish called “Follow Me,” playing off the words Jesus said to his disciples in today’s social media-saturated culture. He still shares content in various forms across many channels, including YouTube, Tik Tok, Instagram, and Facebook, and he doesn’t shy away from challenging and sensitive cultural topics because “if the church doesn’t disciple people, the world will,” said Erazo.

As Erazo prepares to return to Calvin’s campus in May, he is hoping his words will inspire others to be faithful in following Jesus.

“Your identity as a follower of Jesus is to be faithful and that’s good news. Obviously, there’s a place for hard work, endurance, boldness, and courage, but ultimately you want to be faithful.”

Wed, 04/02/2025 - 12:00

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It’s all about the approach: Mayor takes lessons learned at Calvin into new role

msk23@calvin.edu — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 17:28:17 +0000

It’s all about the approach: Mayor takes lessons learned at Calvin into new role msk23@calvin.edu Wed, 03/26/2025 - 13:28

On January 1, 2025, David LaGrand ’88 was sworn in as the mayor of Grand Rapids, Michigan. In doing so, he became the first ��Ƶ graduate to assume this specific role.

A mayor’s role, in essence, is to manage various aspects of a city, everything from preparing and planning a budget to issuing administrative decisions and minor regulations. What a mayor accomplishes during their term is typically what they are remembered for. Addressing the “what”—the city’s needs—is important to LaGrand. But he believes the “how”—the approach to doing so—is what will actually lead to the city’s flourishing.

Providing space for many voices

“If there’s one thing I want to do in the next eight years, it’s actually getting all of us in the habit of thinking government is not something that happens to us, government is something we do together,” said LaGrand.

A way LaGrand is doing that is by hosting Mayor Mondays, an in-person gathering held in various locations around the city that provides a weekly opportunity for the community to have open discussions around the topics that matter most to them.

“I want to be someone who helps all of us frame and envision how to live in a community where we actually listen to and value each other equally, which is really hard,” said LaGrand. “But guess what? I think that that’s the central calling of being a follower of Jesus Christ—to figure out how to absolutely instantiate those kinds of values.”

Prioritizing posture in solving problems together

LaGrand says that housing, justice, infrastructure and neighborhood development are a few of the key issues he’s hoping to work with the community to address in the coming years. But he’s aiming higher than simply trying to make headway in these areas. Again, he says it comes back to the way in which the problems get addressed.

“Our politics right now are defined by a lot of self-righteous dynamics on the left and the right. If you listen to people on both sides, they’re so busy reinforcing their own biases and being so sure they are right and demonizing people who disagree with them because it’s sort of a drug, it can feel good, it can feel self-affirming,” said LaGrand. “But it breaks down on human contact. It’s really hard to hate somebody in person. It’s a lot easier to hate someone in isolation. So, if we can spend more time with each other, I think we can fight that mechanism. But we have to figure out how to do it. Because if we can’t deeply and profoundly disagree with each other about things without imputing malice, we’re done, it’s a necessary precondition for democracy.”

Practicing values learned at Calvin

Figuring out how to do this well is a top priority of LaGrand’s and he’s grateful that his Calvin education was a pivotal training ground equipping him for this very task.

“I always say that I think Calvin is grad school for being a Christian. It’s the place where you get to spend four years thinking about how does being a Christian going to integrate with the work you do for the rest of your life,” said LaGrand, who also earned a juris doctorate after Calvin. “For me, this [my time at Calvin] was easily the most important part of my education. I mean law school is a credential, but Calvin is where I got to spend four years thinking about vocation. And the ability to do that is priceless.”

LaGrand is now hoping that training will pay off for the city he is entrusted with leading.

Seeking renewal here and becoming a model to follow

“Forty percent of this country doesn’t believe anything the government says right now. And I’m not saying we’ll be able to solve this in the United States of America. I’m just hoping we can solve it in Grand Rapids,” said LaGrand. “God puts us into places, and we can try and do things in the places we are. So, we are all in Grand Rapids, so we can figure out how to do this here as a response to a national challenge and maybe that’s a scale we can wrap our brain around.”

Because as LaGrand mentions, while Grand Rapids can’t solve the country or world’s problems, it can provide a model for what participating in government with civil discourse looks like. And that can have ripple effects.

“States watch what other states are doing. So, the stakes for Grand Rapids doing great things are that other cities may copy us,” said LaGrand. “There’s an opportunity for us to have outsized influence, but the way to have outsized influence is just to do better. If we can figure out how to live in a community where we actually value everyone’s voices equally regardless of whether you think they work as hard as you, whether you think they’re as smart as you are, whether you think their lived experience is as important as your lived experience—figure out the list that makes you feel better than other people and try and burn that list—if we can live and model that out in ways that work and make sense, we can be an example.

“If we can make Grand Rapids an important part of the kingdom of God, then we’ll be in a beautiful place.”

Wed, 03/26/2025 - 12:00

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David LaGrand, mayor of Grand Rapids, Michigan, gives the keynote address at an Executive Breakfast Series event held at ��Ƶ in February 2025.

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