By Marigold Quenby, Transportation and Fellowship Desk

MILLER'S CROSSING — The white 15-passenger van parked behind Pine Hollow Fellowship has a cracked dashboard, a sliding door that only opens if you lift and pray, and a radio that has played the same AM farm station without interruption since the fall of 2003.

The tuning knob snapped off during a youth retreat that October, somewhere between a gas station and a campground nobody can quite agree on the name of. The volume knob survived. The station did not change, and according to church records, it never will.

"We've tried everything," said trustee Harlan Bixby, 71, who has driven the van to roughly 400 church events. "Pliers. A butter knife. A nephew who knows electronics. One year we just unplugged it, and the van wouldn't start until we plugged it back in. We took that as an answer."

The result is a youth group with an unusual set of skills. Students at Pine Hollow can't always name the books of the minor prophets in order, youth leaders admit, but nearly all of them can give you this morning's price for feeder cattle, the five-day forecast for three counties they have never visited, and a full explanation of why the corn crop "looks good, but could use a little rain."

"I didn't grow up on a farm," said Kaylee Marchetti, 16. "I grew up in a cul-de-sac. But last summer on the way to camp I heard the hog report and said 'oh, that's down' out loud, and everybody nodded like it was normal."

Youth pastor Devon Ruiz-Hargrove said he has stopped fighting it. "I used to bring a phone and a little speaker so we could have worship music on road trips," he said. "Now the kids shush me during the grain markets. We had a whole devotional last week about the parable of the sower, and three of them corrected me on planting depth."

The station's morning host, a man the youth group knows only as "Big Wendell," has become something of a beloved figure. The students sent him a group-signed card last Christmas. He read it on air between a tractor auction listing and a reminder about fall fertilizer.

Not every member is charmed. The women's ministry, which borrows the van for its spring trip to an antique mall, has asked for "literally any other station" for six years running. Their request is currently on the agenda of the building committee, behind a new mop sink and a 2019 proposal about the bell.

The church has budgeted twice to replace the radio. Both times, the money was quietly moved to the youth group's mission trip fund after a student pointed out, accurately, that the van gets better mileage than anyone expected "for something that old, if you don't run the AC."

At press time, the youth group had placed second in a county 4-H livestock judging contest it entered by accident, and Bixby had begun drafting a letter asking Big Wendell to give Pine Hollow a shout-out during the noon markets.