The Perfect Storm to End the CRCNA As We Know It
The Decline and Loss of My Denominational Home
In today's video I turn my focus to my own denomination, the @CRCNA.
The wedge of change in assumptions about sexual morality has come to my denomination and it will do to it what it has done to the mainline denominations that I've been talking about recently. The only problem is that it comes at a point in time that it will shatter it.
I begin with a paper written by a friend of mine, a retired minister and church planter from the Seattle area who's been tracking CRC growth/decline demographics and trends for years. He calls this "the perfect storm".
The @CRCNA peaked in membership in 1992 and has been in a decline ever since. Snapper's thesis is that this is a terminal decline
Snapper sites 4 elements each of which alone are sufficient to end the @CRCNA as we know it but together make its demise as a foregone conclusion.
The four elements are the end of the baby boom bump, unresolved conflict in the CRCNA over women in church office, the conflict surrounding the human sexuality report https://www.crcna.org/sites/default/files/human_sexuality_report_2021.pdf, and the conflict surrounding American/Canadian bi-nationality.
The @CRCNA tries to address these challenges with what Snapper calls "the church order model" which is three deliberative assemblies, the local church council, the regional classis and the bi-national Synod, seeks to find communal responses.
This model hasn't proven to be effective in resolving differences and conflict in the past and there is no indication that this is going to change. The most visible leadership structure of the denomination is really only there to lead cooperative ministry efforts supported by the organic church. I call this the CRC sy-board (Synodical Board). They mostly oversee agency ministries not the church itself.
Some comfort may be taken by local members of the @CRCNA that these changes impact the denomination but not their local church. That is partially true. Many churches have these divisions within themselves and are simply able to avoid them until a test case arises.
There are currently two advocacy groups active in the @CRCNA pushing on the human sexuality issue. All One Body has been around a few years now advocating for LGBTQ inclusion. https://www.allonebody.org/
Recently another group has been formed to advocate for the @CRCNA 's current position on human sexuality. https://www.abideproject.org/
They recently posted a video with Dave Beelen, my former pastor and mentor who has a long history with this project.
The story around the end of the @CRCNA is of course just one example of the cultural and religious sea change we are all in the midst of. In some ways that's the subject of all my videos.
God doesn't need the @CRCNA and since it's my denominational home I lament it's decline and inevitable dissolution. At the same time I'm not pessimistic about the CHURCH itself and its future. Wineskins change but God is at work.
It's interesting you bring up the unresolved conflict of women in office. I was in the CRC for a time and found the decide to not-decide option didn't really resolve the tensions. While a complementarian, I'm not militant about it and was initially at ease with the arrangement of allowing each council to determine for itself how it wanted to operate. But as I interacted with others at classis I found this to be functionally and even relationally disruptive and came to see it as unsustainable. One example, is that someone actually angrily left a table a group of us were sitting at over lunch when I simply mentioned being a complementarian after they finished a lengthy criticism of that position not knowing I was one. The spirit of mutual acceptance, while noble, is overly optimistic as most people are not as in high in openness as is required for that sort of arrangement to work well over the long-term. I imagine trying for the same sort of decide to not-decide path on the sexuality matter would be even more disruptive.