A New School, an Old Mission

Last weekend, the Zuni pueblo welcomed old Anglo friends, ex-missionaries, teachers, and volunteers, as if the mission in the heart of the village were a holding a reunion. 

And it was, all those smiling friends and guests showing up to dedicate a brand new school.  For more than a century the CRC has been among the Zuni, a pueblo people whose history far predates Plymouth Rock.

With generous grants from foundations and long-time friends of the mission, as well as a hefty contribution from the Zuni Christian Reformed Church, Zuni Christian Mission School has joyfully replaced the “temporary” buildings used since a devastating fire of unknown origin destroyed the school in 1971.

What stands on the same ground, handsomely anew these days, is a dusky, two-story adobe-style building whose lines and color make it seem very much at home at the center of the village.

The completion of the state-of-the-art elementary school building marks the conclusion of Phase I of a $10.8 million dollar capital campaign designed to give the mission a new face, even though its task hasn’t changed.

The Zuni Mission has endured—often just barely--through world wars, economic depressions, personality clashes, and nearly immeasurable changes in the rhythm of life among the Zuni people. 

On Sunday, Pastor Mike Meekhof, who with his wife, Arty, has served the mission for 21 years, told a church full of visitors and friends a lesson he had to learn himself while breaking up a fight between two students:  “Hurt people hurt people,” he said, “and free people free people.”

All weekend long, the school’s new doors were open, just as the old ones had been, to a pueblo community that ranks among the nation’s most poverty-stricken.  Zuni Christian is a “mission school” because most of the students it serves—and the families from which they come—are not believers in Jesus Christ.

The long and often difficult story of the Zuni mission is one of the most incredible sagas in the history of the Christian Reformed Church. 

Remarkably, and by grace alone, the mission has survived, like the Zuni themselves, one of the continent’s really unique cultures.  Among the pueblo people of North America, nothing like Zuni Christian Mission School exists anywhere.

And this year there’s a startling and beautiful new school to welcome the kids. 

In a kind of folk fest dedication, dozens of Zuni mission veterans, some in their nineties, all of them players of an incredible story, smiled and even shed tears in grateful, heartfelt thanks for what was, what is now, and what, by God’s continued grace, is yet to be at the very heart of an ancient New Mexico pueblo.