9 comments

1. At the risk of getting a reputation as the local DEI guy in conservative Calvinism (I’m joking), I can’t agree with the point being made here, particularly Dr. Bergsma’s view on not having services in the Friesian language.

   I would not only welcome that but actively encourage it, given the immigrant context of the 1800s and later in the post-WW2 context, which is what I assume Dr. Bergsma was talking about. Immigration is difficult enough without creating additional problems for immigrants on Sunday, and preaching not only in the language but the local dialect of the language is valuable when possible. Think of the issues in Hispanic ministry in which there often need to be different churches for Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and other Spanish-speaking groups.

   Every Sunday, we have people singing from the Genevan Psalter in Korean and English, and if there were a need, I’d provide copies of the Genevan Psalter in Italian and Spanish and would try to lead the singing in those languages, which I could do with difficulty. (Even Dutch, if we had an older Dutch immigrant that wanted to sing in his or her mother tongue, though I can’t read or speak Dutch, and I’ve already arranged to help a Chinese family get a Chinese version of the Genevan Psalter since the man’s wife speaks little English.)

   I’m wondering whether there were other unstated reasons for Dr. Bergsma opposing Frisian services, or if perhaps he was thinking of the CRC’s own bad history of harassing Classis Ostfriesland and Grundy College. (The flip side of that is the Grand Rapids leadership feared having a second college besides Calvin would lead to denominational disunity.) As some of the Frisians I knew at Calvin College and Seminary would point out to me, “We’re so ‘steef kop’ that we can’t even get along with the Dutch!” That was intended as a joke about Frisian orneriness, but the ethnic differences are quite real if we’re talking not just about provincial and regional differences within a small country like the Netherlands but about very major cultural differences between countries.

   There **ARE** differences in culture, which often but not always are closely linked to race and language.

   Even in the Reformation era, there were multiple churches in Geneva for people of different ethnic groups and languages. In London, there were churches for the French, the Spanish, the Italians, and the Dutch. Even as late as the early 1900s, there were separate Reformed churches in London for the Welsh and the Scots. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, many years before becoming a Congregationalist, attended the Welsh Church in London, not Westminster Chapel which he later pastored, though he did occasionally visit Westminster Chapel.

   In the Netherlands during the Reformation era and well into the 1600s, there was an entire classis of expatriate English-speaking churches, and a whole synod for the Walloon (French) speakers.

   Let’s not act like this is only an American issue, or a “White European” issue.

   I have been asked by two different Korean churches over the years, and turned both down, to begin an English-language outreach to their communities. Nobody thought that would be anything other than a whole different worship service meeting separately from the Korean majority, but in the same building, and probably for many years, the “Americans” would be members of the Korean church under its authority until such time, if ever, that there were enough English speakers to have a separate “American” church.

   Let’s not kid ourselves. It’s more than language. The cultures are very different, and “common sense” of how a church should be run simply is not commonly shared by everybody who calls themselves Reformed, let alone calls themselves Christian. Top-down pastoral leadership and an emphasis on education and on age are stereotypes that the Koreans generally share with the Dutch, but most emphatically do NOT share with a lot of American Calvinists. Exceptions exist, but church life is very, very different, and those differences are going to create serious problems apart from very wise leaders in pastoral and eldership roles.

   Very often it is better to have two churches than try to have a single church fighting over secondary matters.

   Now as for these points:

   “As a wild olive branch grafted into the Israel of God, I have always been grateful for the warm reception I have received among the Germans (in the RCUS) and the Dutch (in the CRC and the URCNA). In those settings I have never been made to feel like a second-class citizen even though I do not speak that language that I am told will be spoken in heaven (German, Dutch, or Friese, depending upon whom one asks).”

   I’m glad that was how you’ve been received, first by the German Reformed and then by the Dutch Reformed.

   That most emphatically was **NOT** my experience growing up in Grand Rapids. “Second-class citizen” would have been nicer than how non-Dutch were too often treated.

   It was only years later that I understood the “separate development of peoples” theology that caused not only conservatives but liberals to say, “We need separate churches for your kind.”

   Note that is not simple bigotry. It’s different from Southern racism, the kind we are most familiar with in the United States. It’s not saying non-Dutch people shouldn’t have a church, or that they shouldn’t have the gospel preached to them. In fact, it is saying there NEED to be churches for other groups. But they need to be separate, and the key factor is they are “for your kind.” There is, at best, a certain sort of paternalism involved. Not uncommonly, as happened in South Africa, it led to huge numbers of non-white people getting converted and becoming Reformed, but doing so in churches that were viewed as “not good enough.”

   I’ve some of what Dr. Nick Wolterstorff has said on this subject of how he became aware of his own ethnic presuppositions when attending a conference in South Africa. Dr. Wolterstorff and I never had more than casual conversations so I don’t mean to put words in his mouth — my recollection is that he was quite nice to me and thought it was great to have a non-Dutch person involved at Calvin, though he didn’t quite understand how an Italian had become more strictly Reformed than his own rural Dutch Reformed rural farming church community growing up — but it was seeing the logical conclusion in South Africa of the “Reformed paternalism” he had grown up with that caused him to rethink some of his approaches and attitudes.

   What we need to do is not to say, “If you aren’t Dutch, you aren’t much,” or to say, “We need separate churches for your kind,” but rather to say, “If people from an ethnic group are more comfortable worshipping in their own language and with their own cultural practices, unless those practices are violations of Scripture or the Confessions, let them have a church that does things the way they want.”

   The key difference is that this is not a top-down approach of the people in power saying, “we need to help the unwashed outsiders,” but rather the people in the pews saying, “let us do things the way we think works best to reach the people we know.”

   Here’s a practical example. For a Korean church, that’s often going to include a large fellowship meal every Sunday. But as a recent Christianity Today article pointed out, church kitchens are dying out in many American churches and being converted to other purposes.

   I don’t see anything in the Reformed confessions that says there’s something wrong with a fellowship meal in the church basement, and I’m deliberately citing an example many German and Dutch immigrant churches also do, but as the CT article pointed out, it’s increasingly rare in “normal” American churches.

   That sort of cultural difference ought to be at least accommodated, and arguably encouraged.

   There are many other cultural differences that have nothing to do with the Reformed confessions, but are far more significant and can cause many more problems in practical church life than whether or not to have a fellowship meal after services. Sometimes it’s just easier to have two (or more) churches and prevent the problems from starting, especially if trying to do outreach work in a community where there are many Christians but the predominant practices in that ethnic group differ greatly from “standard” WASP (or Dutch) church life.

   I can make a case that clapping hands in worship is actually encouraged by Scripture, and I’ve done that in an inner-city community where I was one of the few white people in the church. I know what it’s like to have an elderly black woman ask to use her tambourine and I could see no good reason to tell her “no” since a better biblical argument could be made for her instrument than the piano. But I would be a foolish idiot to try to promote that in a typical Dutch Reformed church, or to tell a Korean Presbyterian to shut down the dawn prayer meeting, or to criticize a German for drinking beer at home.

   Every one of those four specific issues can, and has, divided churches because of firmly held views reinforced by the church community and the predominant ethnic culture. The fight isn’t worth it.

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   • Darrell,

     In re the example I gave, everyone in the congregation had a common language: English. It wasn’t that they were unable to worship or understand the sermon. Holding a service in Friese would have divided the congregation into haves and have nots, insiders and outsiders. It would have been needlessly divisive along ethnic lines.

     Finding a way to communicate with new members of the community, is a different matter altogether. By the time these folks, in the example, were contemplating Friese services, they had been in North America for 40 years. It would have been more nostalgia than anything else.

     I’m familiar with the “no Dutch, not much mentality” but in the 40+ years I’ve been around the Escondido congregation that has been infrequent. The assumption that people assume that the Dutch have that mentality is a bigger problem than the few people who might actually have that attitude.

     It may be that the attitude in question is more prevalent in GR than it is in Southern California, which is arguably more cosmopolitan and more ethnically diverse than GR. In Southern California the Dutch are just one of many ethnic groups. In Escondido alone, which is predominantly Hispanic, we have restaurants and markets to serve just about ethnic group and if it’s not here it’s in San Diego.

     We do support a Spanish-language PCA church plant in Escondido that is serving our newer neighbors. Even then, English is becoming more commonly spoken and English ministry to the children and grandchildren is becoming more important every year.

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     • You hit the nail on the head with this comment, and the cosmopolitan nature of Southern California:

       “I’m familiar with the ‘no Dutch, not much mentality’ but in the 40+ years I’ve been around the Escondido congregation that has been infrequent. The assumption that people assume that the Dutch have that mentality is a bigger problem than the few people who might actually have that attitude. It may be that the attitude in question is more prevalent in GR than it is in Southern California, which is arguably more cosmopolitan and more ethnically diverse than GR. In Southern California the Dutch are just one of many ethnic groups.”

       When a community was founded by a certain ethnic group for that ethnic group and deliberately excluded outsiders for over a century, it’s going to have long-term continuing effects. Towns like Holland were named that way for a reason. Well into the 1950s, local ministers were lobbying against bringing new factories and businesses to town because they would attract “undesirable elements,” i.e., non-Dutch people. Don’t believe me? It’s been years and I no longer have copies, but I’ve seen the articles in the Holland Sentinel archives. As late as the 1990s when I lived in Holland, I got lots of jokes that I wouldn’t have been allowed to live there a generation earlier, and they weren’t talking about my interracial marriage (though that would also have been a problem). Some of the local history buffs would recall how the business-minded people among the Dutch leaders succeeded in defeating the exclusionary policies advocated by the ministers that would keep factories and economic development out so “de Kolonie” would remain for “our people” and not attract “uitlanders.”

       Here’s a specific example given in class by a professor at a secular college in West Michigan. (Not going to be more specific on the college or the town, other that that it was not Holland.) He was a Methodist who had lived in the community for decades and may have grown up there. He told a story in class about one of his new neighbors who had moved in and asked another neighbor where to find the local Roman Catholic parish. (This was long before Google Maps or smartphones, and trying to read street maps to find addresses obtained from phone books is not always easy.) That neighbor, who was a member of one of the Dutch Reformed denominations (most likely CRC or RCA), told the new neighbor that he wouldn’t tell him where to find the Catholic church because he didn’t want to risk going to hell. That Dutchman had always been polite, but cool, to the Methodist, but the level of hatred toward Catholics was off the chart. That new neighbor talked to the professor and said, “What kind of neighborhood have I moved into?” The result was a long talk between the Methodist and his new neighbor about what it meant to live in a mostly Dutch neighborhood in a community where the Dutch dominated local business, government and community life.

       I could tell personal stories of how I was treated, and how my friends and business colleagues were treated, that are far worse than that.

       To be fair, it’s not just a Dutch problem. I’ll cite my own family immigration history to a mining region in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan where the Irish were the mine bosses because they spoke English, and they imported Scandinavian and Italian workers to do the dirty, dangerous, and backbreaking labor. The result was three separate towns — one for the Scandinavian Lutherans, one for the Italians, and one for the Irish. There were TWO separate Catholic churches because everybody understood that Irish and Italians couldn’t go to the same church. Of course, the Lutherans were outside any possibility of salvation due to being Protestant.

       These sorts of things were normal in an earlier generation in the United States. Ethnic hatred between Irish and Italians, despite both being Catholic cultures, is legendary. Religious animosity fed the fires of ethnic hatred in other cases. None of this is new — in New England of the late 1600s and early 1700s, the English Puritans often couldn’t get along with the Scotsmen despite their shared Calvinism, not because of church polity, but because the Scots were considered uncivilized barbarians prone to brawling and domestic strife. Later on, as the various American colonial governments figured out that “brawling Scotsmen” were great to have on the frontier to fight battles against the French and Indians, German immigrants followed behind the Scotsmen to “civilize the frontier.”

       I don’t think the Dutch attitudes were particularly unusual in the 1800s. The difference is that the Christian schools, which whatever the theory may have been were in practice just as much ethnic schools as any Italian or Irish parochial school, preserved both the good and bad parts of Dutch immigrant culture by preventing “Americanization” of the second generation. Once the second and third generation were able to speak English well and take leadership in community life, the well-known realities of the Protestant work ethic made the Dutch leaders in business and government and community life rather than a despised minority.

       Yes, I’m well aware much of this may sound very strange to people in their 20s or 30s. The theological collapse of the Christian Reformed Church brought with it a level of race-based ethnic guilt that led lots of liberals to take a “hug a minority” approach. Conversely, in conservative circles, men like Dr. Godfrey have been known for decades for being “more Dutch Reformed than the Dutch Reformed.” I can speak from personal experience of being invited to fill some of the strictest and most conservative pulpits in the URC back in the 1990s by elders who wanted to “prove that you don’t have to be Dutch to be Reformed,” and I guess they decided I was the most non-Dutch person they could think of to prove their point.

       Most Dutch Reformed conservatives have long since figured out that it’s more important to be Reformed than to be Dutch. If they’d figured that out back in the 1930s or 1940s, the history of the CRC and OPC might have been very different.

       Again, Dr. Clark, I’m glad you weren’t treated the way I was treated growing up in Grand Rapids. However, I don’t think it’s irrelevant that by the time you were dealing with the Dutch, you were a seminarian at Westminster Seminary and a member of the RCUS, and then later on, you were regarded as a Reformed minister who was entitled to respect based on your office and ordination.

       The Dutch, to their credit, respect the office of the minister much more than most American evangelicals, and I think you likely benefitted from that respect.

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2. One of the challenges I see as a distant observer is how Black history is equated with Black Church history. Also not all Black Church traditions are created equal. So there’s the problem of uncritically accepting everything just because it comes under the name of “church” – it risks collapsing the external administration of the covenant of grace into the internal administration of the covenant of grace.
   A better focus for such events would be to highlight how God preserved the gospel within the American Black Church while welcoming all ethnicities to see and learn from God’s own doing. It could also have encouraged people to consider the ways in which those churches can be revitalized in keeping with the faith of it’s predecessors where the faith is on its knees. From my own experience in Africa whenever a church re-describes itself in terms of legitimate oppression and suffering in the past, it slowly loses it’s faithfulness. This is what has happened with denominations in Africa that started as a response to segregation and colonialism but who ended up being defined by their response. Many such churches are in fact now theologically liberal and Barthian but the laity are none the wiser. All they know is that the pastor performs the socially expected duties even though they may long for redemptive historical preaching. They don’t know what they long for because they have not had a taste of it. I hope that despite the complexities of the Black Church and Korean churches and presbyteries, they would integrate other ethnicities. I know it sounds naive. But self-elected separation is not the picture God wants the church to display to the world.

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3. Something I left out about the very xlnt RC-US that I belonged to up in Sacramento some years back= I was truly amazed at the Christian Brethren there that I loved and befriended so well there…several at LEAST were former convinced & convicted Baptists, and they encouraged me often to follow their route! Not always easy for a sincerious Particular Baptist, yet they duly MORE than grabbed my attention! I love those warm hearted brethren the most!✝️📖
   I shall continue to study!✝️🇺🇸🙏👍🩷

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4. Just read your article a second time, Dr Clark, and truly enjoyed and agreed with you much! I’ve been in various churches in 45 years, from the Fundamentalists, to Baptists, to RC-US, back to Particular Baptists, and now more w/Reformed again. It doesn’t really confuse me, even if it sounds so. I’m just trying to be as Biblically sound and as close to our Lord as I can be these final years!
   I’ve found that it’s understandably pleasing to be fellowshipping w/like minded souls, both Biblically AND logically (common sensibly ?). I enjoyed your last paragraph as I’ve truly trusted and enjoyed my German, Dutch, Hungarian brethren the most thru RC-US. Just obvious to and for my liking, as well as my fave Christian Fellowships! Ala the likes of Pastor Frank Walker-=CRC-US outta Sacramento! I miss them the most!🥲 Now being in Northeast Los Angeles, I’m just trying to serve Him the best these last late years of life. LA is a different world.🤔🙏

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5. The PCA Mission To North America Permanent Committee has issued this statement re the dinner.

   Steve Dowling and Irwyn Ince have issued this statement.

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6. So WHO authored this post: Meghan Admiraal or Dr. Clark?

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   • Laura.

     I did. Megan manages the website. It was a temporary error.

     Reply ↓

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