What’s Being Lost?

Various Christian Reformed congregations are beginning their forced march toward denominational disaffiliation, and various individuals find themselves on the way out of a job or leadership position. Both are seeking, among other ends, to avoid the tender mercies by which the 2024 Synod would have them retrieve their dwindling chance of salvation by repenting of God’s newest least-favorite sin, any affirmation that same-gender couples might live in covenanted, church-sanctioned relationships.      

In the dissidents’ voices can be heard everything from outrage to exasperation to frustration to bewilderment. Sometimes a sarcastic note, as above. Others are relieved or downright joyful at finally being free from having to deal with (to their minds) a smug self-righteous cabal.

With many, however, there is also sorrow and regret, lament over what is being lost, over what happened to the church that had nurtured them, that had quickened them to the very view of the gospel for which they are now being ostracized. Matt Ackerman caught this well in his recent “Letter of Resignation,” and Heidi DeJonge, further along in the process, in her meditation on “making memories.” Then there’s Meg Jenista’s post yesterday, marked by balletic grace compared to the heavy tromping to follow.

Nurture

My own mind keeps circling back to that word “nurture.” In my own case, the deep nurture of 110 church services a year plus weekly catechism and Sunday School. Of Christian schooling K through college. Of Calvinist Cadets and youth group with the grand annual fete of the Young Calvinist convention. Of junior choir, teen choir, all-city boys’ choir, high school choir, and Radio Choir to provide music for the Back to God Hour. 

We chafed at this level of saturation back in the day, especially the grind that made Sunday a “day of stress and madness.” Most of my grad school friends were astounded at my account of these things, although those reared Catholic nodded (grimaced?) in recognition. One Jewish friend, born to radical leftie parents, saw some similarities; a red-diaper baby, he spent summers at “Commie camp” in New Jersey.

The What of It

But in retrospect I’ve found that the what-and-the-where of this nurture redeems the how of its instillation. Many readers here, along with others, have named the better features of the what. A sense that the Reformed tradition is deep and strong enough to endure doubts and questions—actually, to invite questions so as to make its theology speak afresh to new challenges. The sense that the world really does belong to God and so deserves curious, good-faith investigation. The understanding that “righteousness” in Scripture means “justice,” and that justice entails more than God beating the hell into us, absent the intervention of Christ—it means fairness for all people, also non-Christian people, and our obligation, our invitation, to work toward social structures and not just personal soul-measures that make for full human flourishing. A political activism that demands a seat at the table without unseating people of other faiths or none. 

These principles, put into practice, long made the CRC something of an anomaly on the American Protestant scene. The church took the Bible—all the Bible—more seriously than many progressive and mainline believers, and it took the mind and society more seriously than most Fundamentalists, later “Evangelicals” who are now not-so-covert Fundamentalists again. 

The Counterpoint

To be sure, there was—and is—much in the CRC weighing against these impulses. The church was founded in a split from the Reformed Church in America, after all—the one of 1857—and it secured its future in the early 1880s when, coincidentally with the upsurge in immigration, the RCA came out for local option on the matter of secret societies while the CRC demanded a uniform ban across the denomination. (Dum-da-dum-dum!) Further back, its original leadership, and long its model of faithfulness, was the Secession of 1834 from the Netherlands’s national church. 

Yes, these separations are lamentable, the pious refrain has echoed down through the years. But the very act of splintering shows vital concern for the truth and the collective courage to maintain it. Peter DeVries caught the sentiment perfectly in The Blood of the Lamb when a Dutch immigrant father answers his son’s complaints about endless schisms: “You can’t split dead wood!” Doctrinal fidelity and dogmatism, no difference. Theological orthodoxy as the spirit of Christ; no life of faith without the truth. First things first. And last. 

Ethos

A good explanation of recent developments is that these contrary impulses remained in balance over the years but that changes in organizational structure and modes of communication (think television and social media) have disrupted the balance or sidelined the people in charge of maintaining it. The hostile version regnant in recent synodical meetings is that a smug elite of denominational leaders had gone a-whoring after woke gods, and that Synod was enabled by a most gracious Providence to intervene just in time to rescue things from perdition. 

In the aftermath I rue most the loss of the ethos of faith as I came to know it, the atmosphere in which the edicts of catechism and education take root, struggle, bear fruit, get tested by blight and storm, and come up again, perhaps transformed but stronger for the fray. The ambience in which theology is made real on the long march of life.

Notably, that’s a communal venture, ground zero of “the communion of the saints.” It is a theater whose sets are framed by doctrinal documents but whose drama is built up out of shared experience, webs of memory, doughty loyalty. Synod has pushed the sets to the front of the stage, obscuring the action and highlighting the harshest words. Gaze rapt on them, ye faithful. All logos of a shriveled sort, no ethos but of suspicion and judgment.

Losing the Jokes 

The single most haunting sentence I’ve heard in talking to people about changing denominations is attributed to Barbara Wheeler, past president of Auburn Theological Seminary: “Nobody in the new room is going to get your jokes.”

It’s haunted me because of the two critical functions jokes serve. They invoke a group’s deep habits, quirks, absurdities. For old-school Midwestern CRCers like me: red jello at the meal of the week, dinner at Sunday noon, with a side serving of roast dominee. Making the bed before you check out of the motel. Peppermints during church, their number and flavor maybe reflecting your degree of orthodoxy.

But jokes are also built upon contradiction. They expose our hypocrisy, deflate bombast, find the best things hiding in the overlooked corner. Put theologically, they point out our very halting process of sanctification. They spotlight the juxtaposition, as our pastor put it in one sermon, of the clouds and the clods evident at Jesus’ transfiguration. We profess such noble ideals, claim such pure truth, inflict such pain, live so much by disregard. How do we not melt down in rage or hopelessness? By refracting it all through the prism of humor to then live another day. 

Perhaps that’s why Peter DeVries is a leading CRC theologian, as Paul Schrader is its iron prophet. And that’s why at the eventual dinner with new denominational comrades my heart will shrink when they ask, Peter who?

So much conversation will be needed to weave a new ethos, and in time the old one will fade away as my generation crosses to a brighter shore. Some of the tribalism that is the cost of this steeping will go away too. Fine. The rising generation has not shared the deep steeping anyway; they are steeped, for sure, but in something else and their own new clan. May new circumstances refine that into its own gold. 

Header photo: Oakdale Christian School, Grand Rapids, Michigan, circa 1930