Two years ago, the Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRC) clarified its stance against homosexuality. Last week, the denomination clarified its expectations for churches whose LGBTQ-affirming teachings contradict that stance.
At its 2024 Synod, the CRC instructed affirming congregations to repent, retract any divergent public statements, and comply with the denomination’s beliefs on sexuality going forward. Pastors, elders, and deacons at affected churches have been placed on a limited suspension.
The move was really useful by an advisory committee and approved by synod delegates in a 134–50 vote last Thursday.
Many saw the discipline as a chance to revive affirming churches back into compliance with CRC teachings and confessions, which hold that each one same-sex sexual intercourse is sinful.
Yet at the least 28 churches—including a number of the denomination’s most historic—may opt to go away as a substitute. They have a yr to undergo discipline or disaffiliate.
“There was no desire for anybody to be faraway from office or disaffiliated from the denomination,” said Stephen Terpstra, senior pastor of Borculo CRC in Zeeland, Michigan, and vice chairman for this yr’s synod. “The desire, at all times, is discipleship, that we could be reunified, that we might see repentance.”
The Christian Reformed Church includes 230,000 members at greater than 1,000 churches within the US and Canada. The denomination has roots in Dutch Calvinism, and its synod takes place at affiliated Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which welcomes LGBTQ students but officially upholds CRC teachings on sexuality in its policies.
After experiencing tensions inside their very own body and watching divides strike fellow denominations, leaders deliberately tried to avoid acrimonious debate.
Synod president Derek Buikema, lead pastor at Orland Park CRC in Illinois, concluded the six-day gathering with a “humble plea that we could be gentle with one another” in a sermon on the strength of gentleness.
The theme also got here up within the remarks of leaders who find themselves out of line with the CRC on this issue. Buikema’s voice cracked when he introduced Trish Borgdorff, a member of Eastern Avenue CRC in Grand Rapids, to “speak for individuals who feel like they need to go.”
“I don’t come to you with a spirit of ‘us versus them’ but more to spotlight the truth that here we’re together, serving the identical God, loving God’s people, in our desire to further his kingdom,” said Borgdorff, whose congregation became LGBTQ affirming in 2022 and plans to go away the denomination. “And someway we see all of it very in a different way.”
Borgdorff, like many leaders on either side of this issue, has deep roots within the CRC: Her church dates back nearly 150 years, and her father, a Netherlands-born Calvin grad and CRC pastor, was once executive director of the denomination. Yet faced with the choice of the synod, Borgdorff said her church couldn’t “repent from a call of God,” which “puts us in a really difficult situation.”
The CRC does have a process for individuals who consider something in its confessions contradicts Scripture. CRC leaders sign three Reformed confessions—the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Canons of Dort—and in 2022, the denomination clarified in a footnote that the Heidelberg Catechism’s teaching that “God condemns all unchastity” includes homosexual sex, in addition to adultery, premarital sex, extramarital sex, polyamory, and pornography.
At least 18 churches publicized their disagreement by declaring themselves “in protest” of that teaching. They argued the CRC should allow differences in biblical interpretation of unchastity.
Last week, nevertheless, the synod decided that churches who adopted the “in protest” status would also fall under the discipline process and be required to comply with the confessions.
“It’s okay to send a protest. The issue is whenever you say our whole church, our whole council, goes to take exception to the confessions,” said Cedric Parsels, reporting from the synod for the Abide Project, a bunch that upholds the CRC’s historic view on sexuality. “‘We are going to place an asterisk next to our name of CRC. We can only be CRC mainly on our terms .’ That’s a significantly different approach.”
Parsels worries that allowing churches to stay in protest would damage the CRC’s unity across the confessions. But he still sees quite a little bit of theological and confessional agreement throughout the CRC.
“We’ve had three synods in a row where a supermajority has charted a specific course. We are a confessionally Reformed denomination, and we would like to embrace that, we would like to pursue that,” he said.
Paul VanderKlay, a CRC pastor in California with a large YouTube following, similarly recognized the problem over the difficulty in addition to the denomination’s direction forward.
“As is true for a lot of Protestants denominations,” he told hundreds of viewers, “questions on same-sex marriage and these sorts of things have hit the Christian Reformed Church hard. Unlike many denominations, at this point the Christian Reformed Church appears to be maintaining a standard track.”
The discipline process is directed at “churches who’ve made public statements, by their actions or in any type of media, which directly contradict the synod’s decision on unchastity.” While openly affirming churches are a small a part of the denomination overall, their disaffiliation could mean the lack of $1 million in giving to the CRC, in keeping with one estimate.
Churches which have violated the CRC’s LGBTQ stance but wish to undergo the method to remain must “publicly declare repentance to the classis and retract all public statements and instructional materials that contradict CRC teachings on chastity” and “commit to abstain from ordaining individuals in same-sex marriages or relationships inconsistent with traditional Christian sexual ethics.”
Their leaders are prohibited from advocating against the CRC’s teachings regarding same-sex relations, even in a private capability.
