African American, Republican, rap artist, Navy veteran, Pentecostal — Calvin junior Cheryl Brown has spent her life coloring outside the lines. “I never know what’s expected,” she admitted.

Brown is fervent in her convictions, even inexplicable convictions like, “I love Commons Dining Hall! I love the setup in Commons. I love the food. I’ll root for Commons ’til the day I die!”

Her anomalous story began when at the age of 11, Brown moved from her native Pontiac, Mich., to rural Virginia and began attending Thomas Road Baptist Church, home perch of one Jerry Falwell. “The pastor people love to hate,” she said, “but I owe a lot of my foundation to him.”

To get from her country neighborhood (“my neighbors were cows”) to the children’s ministry at Falwell’s church, Brown rode the bus. “Falwell spent a lot of time and energy focused on his bus ministry,” she said. “From sixth grade to basically 12th grade, the buses would come out — and yeah, they would entice us with candy. So, you know, it’s like, you bring a friend to church, you get an extra piece of candy. If you’re good on the bus, you get an extra piece of candy. You remember your Bible verse, you get an extra piece of candy.”

Then her family was separated, and Brown and her sister went into foster care, and still the buses kept coming. “The bus ministry kept in touch as much as my foster parents would allow,” she said, and she remains grateful for the church’s persistence: “You can talk about Jerry all you want, but thumbs up to that ministry.”

From foster care, Brown moved to the Presbyterian Home, a large foster home in Lynchburg, Va. “It was awesome,” she said, despite the fact that she was alienated from her family. “I’ve always known who I was, and I’ve always known God loved me. I’ve always felt adopted because this is what my brothers and sisters told me,” she said, laughing at the common childhood gibe. “Now I realize I was adopted all along. I was adopted by the Father.”

While in the 10th grade, Brown began teaching for the bus ministry. She also began rapping for God, inspired by a Christian rap group. Following her 1990 high school graduation, Brown joined the Navy. “A couple of my uncles went into the Navy, and I remember seeing them in their uniforms. They seemed so happy to be serving their country and so proud, and that’s what I wanted. As far back as I can remember, I knew I was going to go into the Navy.”

Brown was stationed for two years in California and for another two in Wales. The Navy brought her experiences other than military exercises, however, including the stillbirth of her son and meeting her father for the first time, six days before he died. Overall, Brown said her Navy career was a personal and spiritual nadir: “It made me decide that God needed to go his way, and I needed to go my way — even though I still loved Him.”

In 1998, Brown, now living in Michigan, rededicated her life to God. While teaching driver’s education, she was urged into the next phase of her life. “I was constantly telling my students that you need to go to school. You need to have something you’re going to do. In the midst of me lecturing them, I would get the question, ‘Well, Miss Brown, where did you go?’ So, finally, I started researching different colleges.”

During her research phase, she clipped an advertisement that listed items to pack for college and taped it to her refrigerator. “One day, when I was really praying and just seeking the Lord’s advice on where I should go, I went into the kitchen, and the piece of paper had fallen off my refrigerator. And I picked it up, and it said ‘Calvin College’ on the opposite side of the ad. I started researching this school.”

She liked what she learned about Calvin’s theatre department. She avidly read the college’s service-learning home page “because my pastor is really into service learning.” She visited. “Then I finally applied, and for some unknown reason was accepted, and here I stand — or sit,” she said.

She had a hard year: “My first year, I was so leaving Calvin,” she said. “Being a nontraditional student is really hard, a lot harder than I thought.” Her adviser, theatre professor Michael Page, talked her into staying. Brown confesses to a similar crisis every school year, and Page, she said, remains a stalwart support.

“I tell her she has an enormous amount to offer,” Page said. “She has energy. She has passion. She has ideas. She wants to reach out to the community. And she’s very committed to what she does.”

Brown is now committed to her role as a worship apprentice, one of the students who plan worship for a variety of campus services. “I didn’t want to because I barely went to chapel myself,” Brown said. “I’m Pentecostal, and that chapel is — not. There were times I went to chapel and left and went into the hall and worshipped, so I could dance around and speak in tongues.”

After encouragement from Cindy de Jong, Calvin’s coordinator of worship, Brown plunged in. “It was honestly one of the best decisions that I made, because it has been really, really awesome. And I encourage students, staff and faculty to attend chapel because you just never know when God is going to speak to you. There have been times when I have gone to chapel and have been so touched by what the speaker has to say.”

Brown, who plans to pursue community theatre after Calvin, has acted in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and A Prayer for Sudan. She helped coordinate last spring’s Love First Fashion Show 2005: Struttin’ to Heal the World, which benefited Haitian health care.

Though she helped manage the media for Calvin’s commencement and attended the recent Republican convention (where she accidentally offered Michigan gubernatorial candidate Dick DeVos one of his own campaign stickers: “I’m terrible with faces,” she explained), Brown remains low-key about her political leanings. “I don’t inflict my beliefs on others,” she said simply.

“I hate the phrase ‘people person,’ but she really is,” Page said. “She relates so well to people across ethnicities, age and all of it. She’s a source of bringing people together through her energy.”

Brown returned the compliment, and lavishly: “I’ve been very grateful for the people who are around me — people who know my true desire is to walk across that stage. Actually,” she said, “I’m going to dance across that stage. So they help me through my little things, just as I help other students through their little things. It’s such a big circle.”