At a church just outside Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Tuesday (Feb. 18), 33 ministers from the Christian Reformed Church in North America stood up to read aloud a declaration, officially accepting ordination in a rival denomination, the Reformed Church in America.
Having stated they will abide by the creeds and confessions of the RCA, each of the ministers was then offered a loaf of bread as a symbol of fellowship and welcome.
The group ordination ceremony — the first of its kind — is one of the more public signs of an ongoing split in the Christian Reformed Church on the part of churches no longer willing to abide the CRC’s firm stance on sexuality.
The ministers are not moving alone. Since June of last year, 26 churches have informed the denomination that they intend to disaffiliate from the 1,000-church body based in Grand Rapids, according to a CRC spokesperson. Most of those churches have declared themselves open and affirming of people who identify as LGBTQ and their lifestyles. Not all are moving to the Reformed Church in America. Some ministers have sought to be ordained in the Presbyterian Church (USA) or the United Church of Christ.
The 33 ministers in Tuesday’s ordination will all be absorbed into the North Grand Rapids Classis, or regional group, of the RCA. The North Grand Rapids Classis will hold another group ordination of CRC ministers in May. Read more»
Yonat Shimron | “Christian Reformed Church Losing Ministers Over LGBTQ Stance 33 Christian Reformed ministers took oath to a rival denomination as church split deepens” | February 21, 2025
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I’m in a solid, unswerving CRC church just outside GR and we are committed to that purity. I have emailed many churches when I’ve seen their diversity flags, asking them to exegete 1 Corinthians 6:9-11. I’ve never received a reply. 1 John 2:19.
Exactly what J. Gresham Machen said should happen (but didn’t) in the PCUSA. It means the apostates have decided that the faithful are serious.
Were the loaves fresh and handmade? Were they all the same style? Could someone bring artisan fare, and someone else a bag of dinner rolls or Wonder Bread? Sure, they may as well institute a new ceremony or “sacrament” to accompany their new moral standard and another gospel.
Where do the CRC and the RCA land on the spectrum of mainline, borderline, and sideline (NAPARC) communions?
The RCA is mainline. Clark has described the CRC as borderline, which seems like the best fit/description.
Hi George,
Sorry to delay. I meant to get to this earlier.
I agree with Brian. I would class the CRC as a borderline denomination but one that has reversed direction. In 2008 it seemed pretty clear that they were headed toward the RCA and from there to the main line. Today, however, it looks as if they have reversed course for the better. It is very encouraging.
The RCA, however, seems to be essentially now a mainline denomination. Their decision to force conformity on LGBTQ issues signals that pretty clearly.
George, it’s hard to place the CRC and RCA “on the spectrum of mainline, borderline, and sideline (NAPARC) communions.” Neither of them historically fit well on that spectrum, though recent developments have changed that, and I agree with Dr. Clark’s evaluation of the current situation.
An important factor here in the RCA is that Jonathan Gerstner, who before his personal issues and before that his decision to leave Canada and go to D. James Kennedy’s operations in the PCA, used to describe the RCA as a body with half of it living and vital and half of it a dead, decaying and rotting corpse. Gerstner (and his father before him) was advocating “reconquista before it was cool.” It’s no secret that I was a supporter of that approach, and deeply saddened by what happened to him.
The reason Gerstner believed reformation in the RCA could work is that while the “Old RCA” on the East Coast has Dutch roots but has been mainline for a very, very long time, the rest of the denomination looked very different. The East Coast RCA followed the trajectory in the 1800s that was typical of immigrant denominations in “Americanizing” by jettisoning its ethnic heritage, and in the process of doing that, abandoning its doctrinal heritage.
What made the RCA trajectory different from other immigrant denominations (German Lutherans are probably the best parallel) is that in the 1800s, the RCA became the place where recent Dutch immigrants went if they wanted to learn English and Americanize WITHOUT losing their connection to being Reformed, while the CRC was the place to go for Dutch immigrants who wanted Christian schools, strict confessionalism, and maintaining Dutch ethnic heritage and (often) the Dutch language. The result was that a lot of theologically conservative Dutch immigrants who wanted to learn English and Americanize ended up in the RCA and not the CRC, less because of theology and more because of a different approach to culture and “Americanism.”
For the CRC of the 1800s and early 1900s, being Reformed and being Dutch were closely intertwined. Yes, there were exceptions even early on — LaGrave Avenue CRC in Grand Rapids was started specifically to be an English-speaking church — but they were in many cases exceptions that proved the rule.
Now it must be said in the CRC’s defense that in the late 1800s and the first half the 1900s, “Americanism” was often a code for lowest-common-denominator “civil religion.” The CRC had legitimate reasons to oppose that and I’m not defending the decision of people to join the RCA. What I am saying is that attacking American culture looks a lot different today than it did during World War I when some Christian Reformed pastors got into serious trouble, and even had their churches burned down, for refusing to let American flags in their churches based on the regulative principle. That’s nothing like the modern evangelical attacks on secular American godlessness.
What made things interesting was that most of the new Dutch immigrants of the 1800s and early 1900s didn’t move to the historic centers of RCA strength on the east coast, but rather to the Midwest. That led to the RCA having rapidly growing churches in places like Michigan and Iowa which were far more conservative than the denominational leadership in New York and New Jersey.
The result was that in Grand Rapids, there were RCA churches like Seventh Reformed which for generations were far to the right of most churches in the CRC. People upset with Christian Reformed liberalism, even as late as the 1970s and 1980s, might say, “I can’t put up with this anymore,” and join the RCA. Why? Because the conservative-liberal line ran THROUGH both the RCA and CRC, not so much BETWEEN the RCA and CRC.
The RCA, by the 1950s, ended up being virtually two different denominations — an East Coast RCA of dying liberals who may or may not have had a distant Dutch background and a midwestern RCA of second- and third-generation Dutch immigrants who were far closer to their theological heritage and a fair number of broad evangelicals, with a relatively small number of first-generation Dutch immigrants in Canada and elsewhere.
Gerstner and others believed the best approach for RCA conservatives was to wait, let the liberal churches die, and train pastors to fill vacant pulpits and make moderate RCAs into conservative RCAs. He viewed what later became the YRR movement, and more traditional “New Calvinist” men like the pastor of University Reformed Church of East Lansing, Mich., as the future of the RCA.
The RCA “agree to disagree” model blew up over homosexuality. Many of the leading conservative RCA churches left over that issue. Seventh Reformed had been thrown out years earlier and is independent, but most of those ex-RCA churches joined the PCA.
The CRC faced the same fight and seems to have had the opposite result.
Time will tell what happens next.
Wow! Utterly rank disgusting!😡👎/✝️📖🙏🇺🇸
Now I’m not in the habit of being overtly negative, but in this case I would say that there are such things as blessed subtractions. To those in the CRC on the side of ecclesial purity: stand and quip yourself like a man.
Amen and AMEN!✝️📖🙏👍😊