Chuuurch!

I grew up playing all kinds of quirky games to pass the time on family road trips.

One that was almost certainly unique to our family was to notice a church building, wait until it was out of sight, and then ebulliently declare, “Christian Reformed Church! Christian Reformed Chuuurch!”

Once in a while, it actually was a CRC congregation, but most of the time the building belonged to some other denomination. The onus was on other family members to pay attention and contradict the plucky one who staked the claim:

“Nice try, but that was a Presbyterian church” or “Clever move to wait until we turned the corner, but we all saw it was the Baptists.” The idiosyncratic geographic distribution of Christian Reformed congregations meant this was a viable game in places as disparate as California, Florida, Michigan, and Ontario.

I have no recollection as to why my parents turned this into a game (likely desperation with two fidgety boys in the back seat), but a side effect was highlighting our identity. WE were members of the Christian Reformed Church, and these were OUR people. Encountering a CRC during our travels, and pointing it out, was a celebration of what we shared with these strangers. Shared faith, shared theology, shared culture.

Even as a kid, I knew that my denomination was not the largest or most glamorous. We were part of a small branch of Protestant Christianity, largely overlooked by national headlines and unfamiliar to most North Americans. But it didn’t matter; we knew who we were and we were proud of it. Maybe the game caught on because we implicitly recognized the need to stick together with other members of a “small fish” denomination in a big religious pond.

My wife and I recently moved back to our home state of Michigan after four years living in Colorado. CRCs are few and far between in the intermountain west and we attended a church belonging to another denomination. Back on “home turf” though, it didn’t take long for me to reflexively start playing the game again. “Christian Reformed Church! Christian Reformed Chuuurch!” I recently announced to my puzzled wife. Except, this time, I found my declaration didn’t evoke feelings of belonging or togetherness, but separation and sadness.

The last three years of CRC synod decisions regarding the confessional status of a narrow definition of “chastity” make it clear that I am no longer welcome. That’s because I think churches can welcome committed same-gender couples without compromising adherence to orthodox Christian faith. As a heterosexual male, I have had the luxury over the years of choosing whether to engage with the denominational debate on homosexuality. I could easily join the CRC congregation down the road from my new house and fit right in, as long as I kept my opinion to myself. 

But why return to a denomination that now demands uniformity on a matter of conscience? One that has explicitly ruled out my eligibility to be a lay leader in my congregation because my views? The CRC will always be part of my heritage, but I’ve found it is no longer part of my identity.

Feeling excluded hurts, but I guess I’m just feeling a tiny bit of the alienation my LGBTQ+ friends who grew up in the Christian Reformed Church felt all along.