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Info about Dave's service, livestreaming, and recording

Lynne Baab • Thursday April 23 2026

Info about Dave's service, livestreaming, and recording

**** I will take this post down at the end of April, so make a note of the info about recording if you want it. ****

The in-person service will be held Saturday, April 25, 2 p.m. Pacific time at Bethany Presbyterian Church, 1818 Queen Anne Ave N, Seattle, 98109. The challenge with our church is parking. Parking on Queen Anne Ave is limited to two hours on Saturdays. You’ll have to drive through the neighborhood to find a spot and walk back, so allow time. Mercifully, the weather should be lovely.

The service will be live-streamed. If you look at this link, you can that see his service is already listed on the page.

The service will be recorded and available on this webpage. It can take a few days for the recording to be uploaded.

I wrote a bio of Dave which will be printed on a separate page and inserted into the bulletin for the service. I’ll paste it in for you.

Our beloved Dave Baab

by Lynne Baab

Dave was born in Wooster, Ohio, 20 minutes after midnight on New Year’s Day, 1946. He was the first baby born in his county—the county’s first Baby Boomer—so he got his photo in the newspaper.

Dave’s father, Hubert, was a machinist who taught himself engineering. Later in his career, he designed expandable vehicles, like bookmobiles. Hubert was a gentle, kind man, always affirming to Dave. Hubert became a Christian in his forties at a Billy Graham crusade and served for many years with the Gideons. Dave was profoundly influenced by Hubert’s kindness and affirmation, as well as his model of service and consistent Bible study every morning.

Dave’s mother was an erratic woman who was always mad at one or another extended family member. She undoubtedly had an undiagnosed mental illness. Her unpredictability and grudges left Dave with a lurking anxiety that always broke my heart.

Dave went to Ohio State University for undergrad and dental school. When he graduated in 1970, dentists were being drafted, so he joined the Navy to avoid having to be on the ground in Vietnam. He spent two years off the coast of Vietnam on an aircraft carrier, the Enterprise, doing dentistry and listening to fighter planes taking off.

He came to Seattle in 1973 to pursue specialty training in periodontics. I met Dave in 1975, right as he was joining the faculty of the University of Washington Dental School. I was 23 and he was 29. We married the next year while I was on staff with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. Because of Dave’s focused area of knowledge, an IVCF staff person encouraged us to consider becoming “tentmaker missionaries” in a country closed to most missionaries. Dave got a job at the dental school in Shiraz, Iran, and we moved there in the summer of 1978. The Iranian Revolution was just beginning to boil, and we had (scary) front row seats. We left in January 1979, right before Khomeini returned from exile, and went to Israel to wait out the trouble in Iran. By a miraculous relational connection, Dave was offered an 18-month position at the dental school in Tel Aviv. Our son, Jonathan, was born there.

By another miracle, Dave was offered his old position at the University of Washington, and we returned to Seattle in 1980. Our son, Mike, was born in 1982. Dave taught at the Dental School until 1994, with one wonderful research year in Linköping, Sweden. He went into private practice for the last 13 years of his career.

Dave drew all his life, including many illustrations of teeth and dental procedures for students and patients. In 1998, at 52, he took his first watercolor class. As Dave approached 60, he got terrible arthritis in his hands, and I could see that I needed to become the primary wage earner. I left my associate pastor role and got a Ph.D. at the University of Washington so I could apply for teaching jobs at a seminary. To our surprise, the job I got was in Dunedin, New Zealand.

In our decade there, Dave was the poster child for a healthy, balanced retirement. Oddly, the arthritis never affected his painting, so he was able to paint a lot. He sold his paintings at the Otago Art Society and volunteered in their shop. He biked all over Dunedin and joined a tennis club. He volunteered 15 hours each week with the New Zealand equivalent of IVCF, working with international students and dental students. Dave had always been a serious student of the Bible, and he loved helping students learn to lead Bible studies. He was so happy in New Zealand.

In January 2015, he got a virus that turned into pneumonia and then into a chronic lung disease.

After we returned to Seattle in 2017, Dave painted a lot, rode his bicycle around the neighborhood, volunteered in a variety of places, and studied the Bible for an hour or more each day. His lung disease slowly progressed, and in November 2024, he needed oxygen supplementation. In fall 2025, he began having a lot of hip pain, initially identified as bursitis. No treatments worked. Right before Christmas 2025, an MRI revealed that the pain was caused by prostate cancer that had metastasized into the bones of his spine and hip.

We’ll miss new art from Dave. I have more than 500 images of his watercolors from the past 25 years, so we can all continue to enjoy his art that illustrates my Bethany devotionals and my blog posts. Ask me anytime for a jpeg of one of his paintings that you particularly like, I’ll give it to you, and you can print it.  

So many of us will miss Dave’s kind heart. He was a good friend to many, and he had a great sense of humor. Grieving with me are our two sons, daughter-in-law, granddaughter, and our extended family. 



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