It’s all about the approach: Mayor takes lessons learned at Calvin into new role
David LaGrand, mayor of Grand Rapids, Michigan, gives the keynote address at an Executive Breakfast Series event held at Calvin University in February 2025.
On January 1, 2025, David LaGrand ’88 was sworn in as the mayor of Grand Rapids, Michigan. In doing so, he became the first Calvin University 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.”