— Decisions —
2024 Synod of the Christian Reformed Church
Canada / United States

I would like to add my voice to the discussion (and protests) surrounding the 2024 CRCNA Synod’s acts of discipline regarding same sex marriage. As a lifelong member of the CRC I hope what I say will connect with many like me, even while I fully expect to meet objections and different perspectives from others. I’m not an authority, so I’m open to correction. I do think it’s important now for all voices to be heard, so I will try to be as open and honest and fulsome as possible about what and how I think, even if some of it might come across too strongly. I also apologize to the non Dutch and more recently joined CRC members, for whom some of what I say may seem irrelevant. I value their stories too, and I trust that they will receive mine with appreciation.

Henry de Jong, August, 2024

Decision 2024

I have a decision to make, or so it’s said in 2024. I can choose to break fellowship with family members living in a same sex marriage and with church/family who support them. Or I can bow to the call for disaffiliation and break fellowship with the Christian Reformed Church. These two choices are equally undesirable. Having to make such a choice would be terrible.

It’s true, on the one hand, that being CRC is not the only ticket. I’m strongly ecumenical in a world/history where my denomination is but a drop in the bucket of amazing grace. But I deeply value the Reformed roots and offshoots from which I have sprouted and which continue to nurture me. I would like to bloom where I’ve been planted, no matter how gnarly the stem.

Much closer in time and place are the family and friends of my lifetime, some of whom are affirming, or in deed in need of affirming. It’s true also that I could hold these more loosely, since I generally did not pick them to begin with (like my heritage). But they are a part of me that I would rather not deny. I cherish these connections, whether close or casual.

I’m being asked to affirm and to reject — to keep one (CRC or LG marriage) and abandon the other. Some consider this choice to be simply a declaration of obedience (or disobedience) to God (nothing to do with them). I see it as an overbearing demand to comply (or not) with their temporally tempered confession. I’m up against a confessional deke, masquerading as doctrine, by offside status seekers whose stories are not mine.

All of us are rooted in the same biblical story of redemption. It is this Story that grounds us, not some subset of the voluminous points of doctrine that have been derived from it. We are people of the Book, a book not of laws but of stories — stories of grace given and gratitude returned, stories of belonging in faith not by status.

Even as in Babel, that story has continued, inevitably, to diverge — you might say fracture into a thousand shards. I can live with that. I have room in my heart for a Church Universal, where differences are as strong as the faith that unites. Each story is a testament to God’s grace, and it is not my place to reject it.

Roots

I can trace my own story back only so far. Up north in The Netherlands, my people were Roman Catholic until the Reformation. Their transition then, en masse, over half a century, was turbulent but decisive. One of my ancestors, Feito Ruardi (1520 – 1602), epitomizes this turn, choosing to leave the priesthood and become a pioneering Reformed pastor.

Much later, the people in my story (and more thoroughly my wife’s in the more southerly Dutch bible belt) were caught up in the Afscheiding of 1834, choosing to reclaim their church’s orthodox beliefs and piety (after a period of liberalization) within the gradually established Christelijke Gereformeerde Kerken. Some of these went to the United States, choosing economic opportunity and broader horizons, but also freedom to (re)form, as they saw fit, a Christian Reformed Church in North America.

But that’s another story, and one that has now come into conflict with mine. For, back in the Netherlands, fifty-two years after the Afscheiding, the Doleantie picked up the call to reform, only more thoroughly (square inch by inch). My grandparents were all born into this Kuyperian movement shortly after it began and were active in the newly established Gereformeerde Kerken. With many others, they chose more active roles in politics and culture, and put Christian schools front and center. It was this generation and their children who flocked to Canada in the fifties, took up residence in the CRC and made it their own, even while, south of the border, the heirs of Van Raalte and Scholte stayed their course.

I’ve had nothing but warm regard for the American CRC folks who hosted these newcomers and with whom we have shared ministry for seventy+ years. Some of my siblings, their spouses and a daughter have gone through Calvin College (and Seminary). Half a dozen in my family have worked for the church. We’ve had our issues with the U.S., not the least being its elephant size, but we’ve been able to make a go of worshiping and ministering within our Canadian contexts and have benefited from cross fertilization.

So much for how I got to be Canadian CRC. Like I said, it’s a treasured heritage that I keep close to my heart and would rather not lose.

Community

At the interpersonal and family level, I am inspired by an analogous store of strength, resolve and regard. I have been blessed with many windows into the lives of my extended family going back a hundred years and more. My grandfathers, one grandmother, my mother, father, father-in-law, and two uncles have all written memoirs or collected stories and letters with details about life, mostly in the Netherlands prior to emigration. Giving further context is a family tree, reaching past the sixteenth century, of some five thousand ancestors and their offspring. Also at my disposal are two earlier books of stories and family trees, researched, collected and published by a cousin of my mother.

From among all of these are many highlights — stories of redemptive forces in opposition to restrictive status. The Stuit family’s steadfast faith in the face of sickness, deaths and departures for better lives in America (~1910). The good natured acceptance of my father’s two, mentally challenged cousins, Geurt and Truus — dearly loved members in the extended family. My father, as a swarthy, black-haired boy, fielding taunts of “Jew” as he walked the streets of Winschoten. The resilience of the Dutch under German occupation. The friendship of my grandmother with her Jewish midwife from Bourtange, who disappeared and was documented later to have been gassed in Auschwitz-Birkenau. The courage and generosity of my grandparents, on their lonely farm, choosing to host and to hide transient soldiers and Jews and to feed the hungry in ‘45. My mother’s mourning for the close cousin (back in Holland) who chose to commit suicide in the fifties because he was gay.

It all seems so much easier now, since the mid fifties when I was born into this modern world. But there are still choices to make, work to be done and loved ones to uphold. My father played organ for still burgeoning ‘Canadian’ churches as soon as he landed, and was upbraided for ‘serving mammon’. Much later he championed the developmentally disabled for Friendship Groups in visits to many Ontario CRC churches. He then continued this kind of work as development director for Salem/Shalem.

During that time, our daughter was born with Down Syndrome and we’ve now been living with her love and her quirks for thirty-eight years. That’s been no small thing. In other times and places she might have been institutionalized, but there was no question for us. We chose the person over passing on the problem.

In 2016 we witnessed and celebrated the same sex marriage of our nephew, fully eleven years after legalization. They now have a legally adopted son and worship with us and more of their family members in our church. We chose to embrace them fully, in spite of the family tension that ensued.

Clashing Stories

These are just a few stories from within a deep history, among thousands that circulate within the CRC and its diaspora. Such stories are shared and heard variously with gratitude, appreciation, misgivings or dismay — but more generally with the equanimity befitting a community that is permeated by family and friend connections and a shared sense of what we’ve been through together. We’ve been willing to leave space for differences, confident that what we’ve had and hope to keep in common is stronger than the quibbles.

This seems now to be at risk. An American cultural civil war has become the dominant story, sweeping nuance to the side, and inserting itself into our American dominated CRC. The culturally distinct Canadians within the CRC now find themselves trapped within this narrative.

Among the Dutch Canadian CRC folk, even those like me who were born here, the occupation of the Netherlands by Germany from 1939 to 1945 is a strong and living memory. That indigenous trauma runs deep and is multi-generational. We don’t like being occupied, so, you’ll have to forgive us now if we’re getting a little jumpy.

My congregation and my classis have been nicely minding their business (and paying their shares) all the years that I’ve known them. Now they are patrolled and controlled by foreign forces. We’ve been delegating synod to do things on our behalf and now it’s turned on us (HAL like), superseding centuries old confessions, making up rules and sending out edicts.

Canadian CRC

This is happening on both sides of the border, and I feel for the U.S. minority that is being disciplined. It looks like there isn’t much hope of future CRCNA synods backtracking. On their own, I think CRC Canadians, would be working this out differently, so I think, now, that it’s time for Canada and the U.S. to go their own way in the CRC.

I’m not suggesting this as a progressive looking for an easy out, but as an orthodox, Reformed, Kuyperian Christian. Our story has space for all of this, including social justice wisdom (SJW) in a world where ‘progress’ (along who knows what path) is relentless.

In the orthodoxy, I also experience (and expect) piety, of the kind that has prevailed through much of Christian history and was rejuvenated by the Afscheiding and Doleantie (among many other awakenings). This is the foundation that connects me to Christians everywhere and throughout time. I feel this kinship with my wife’s family, even though their story bypasses Kuyper and lands solidly in Gereformeerde Gemeenten, Free Reformed and Netherlands Reformed territory. The more traditional, rural CRC churches as well as those departed to the United Reformed Church also feel like faith family to me, in spite of our differences, never more so than when we get to sing together. We’re joined by a conservative mindset and a biblical faith (echoing in from generations back).

In social justice, I experience love, of the kind that has been percolating up (here and there) from biblical faith for millennia, right back to the years of Jubilee and the cities of refuge. This is a natural fit with my Kuyperian (and Dooyeweerdean) world and life view, which directs me to engage distinctly and constructively with all aspects of life. So I consider the passionate social justice advocates in our midst to be my allies.

I do not consider these two ways of being Christian a polarity, even though, increasingly, many do. For myself, I cannot imagine one without the other, though I do see congregations leaning heavily one way or the other. This too is ecumenicism, a mutual witness within our denomination (and beyond) of diverse faith stories. I’m good with that.

It’s in this way that I’d like to continue; a diverse Canadian CRC and preferably the whole of it, unencumbered by American polarization and domination, and free to continue as they were, ministering in their own contexts as best they can and letting things work out widely (Gamaliel like) in a spirit of grace. These ministry stories are at the heart of it — not the politics of church governance or of social justice posturing.

I would like to continue in fellowship with traditional Christians and congregations, even if they still balk at same sex marriage. I would like to work alongside of others who are affirming and welcoming, even as they keep pushing their secular, intersectional, critical theories and ever-expanding acronyms. We need each other and should continue to bear witness to each other. I do not want to be part of a denomination (or even congregation) that is based on a narrow affinity of thought regarding sexual identity ethics.

The way seemed open and wide (if a bit rocky), till recently. But now people think they are hearing a menace of marching boots and a growl of barking dogs and they are spooked. As much as CRC synodical discipline is not so maliciously intended, it is also simply impotent, lacking in force and probably illegal to boot. No one need stand in line waiting to be shunted left or right — synod has never been given this power. So now let’s simply step out of line and continue writing our own stories.

These stories are so much larger and varied than the kerfuffle over same sex marriage, which has been legal here for twenty years. In our Canadian, cultural milieu, Synod’s reaction is the canary in the coal mine. It brings into focus what many have been protesting for years; the growing dissonance between the American and Canadian ways of doing things, and the power imbalance.

I’ve been willing, till this summer, to let CRC bureaucracy put SALT on the table, for the sake of good order and being good neighbours. But now that the CRCNAAA ecclesia has thrown down its gauntlet (with intimations of more) I am going to stand firmly with those who call for a Christian Reformed Church of Canada.

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