Struggles in the Reformed Church in America: How Did We Get Here? By Matthew van Maastricht

The Reformed Church in America, like so many other Christian denominations in the United States, is in a season of conflict over understandings of human sexuality and the place of LGBTQ folks in the life and ministry of the church. Underneath this, however, there are additional issues. There are issues not on the surface right now; but if not addressed, these will continually plague our denomination or whatever its successor might be.

The question of how we got here is a complex one, with no simple answers. Indeed, I am apprehensive to write about this, as this is an ongoing question. Therefore, in this introductory piece, I will not so much give definitive answers as historians need some space to be removed from events to adequately examine them. Instead, this will be an exploration, a view in a mirror which sees parts, but not the whole.

The Reformed Church as a volkskerk

The Reformed Church in America (RCA) traces its birth to 1628, when the first minister arrived in New Netherland from the Netherlands to complete a consistory (adding a minister to the elders and deacons). To understand the RCA, it is important to consider the mother church in the Netherlands. Not a state church, the Netherlands Reformed Church (NHK) was a public church. It was a privileged church, but it was not under the control of a monarch, nor was everyone automatically a member. While the arrangement was not like the religious landscape in the United States with a separation between the church and state, it could be seen to lean that way.

The NHK, as a public church, was a volkskerk, a people’s church. That is, it was desired for this church to serve the whole republic (later kingdom). This meant that the NHK was a broad church, with as much diversity in the church as there was in the society. Of course, it might be thought that, being Reformed, a church order was the piece of regulation that held them together. However, before 1816, the Reformed Church did not have a single church order for the whole church. It was not an order that held them together, but it was a confession faith (what we know as the Belgic Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism), as well as a common ethnic identity and national narrative. With the struggle for independence against Spain and the struggle for their faith against the Roman Catholic hegemony, a powerful mythology was able to form. It was a combination of a common confession of faith and a common narrative that helped hold them together in the absence of a single church order, or a hierarchy (or even a General Synod, as no national synod met in the Netherlands between 1619 and 1816—some would say that no true General Synod met until 1951).

There was, then, great diversity within the church and it functioned as a “big tent” type of church. While the RCA gained independence from the church in the Netherlands in the eighteenth century, this identity as a volkskerk remained in the DNA of the denomination. Throughout its history, this theme has shown up time and again—the RCA has chosen to remain a broad church with wide arms.

And it is this value that is one of the causes of the struggles today. Indeed, the RCA has welcomed certain American evangelical-fundamentalist elements into the church, in line with the broad arms and a place for everyone. However, those elements do not have broad arms (and in some cases do not even share our confession), and are now the ones leading the charge to withdraw from our ecumenical relationships (of which the RCA has a long and significant history), to change our mission philosophy (where we also have a long, significant, and life-giving history), and to change the governance to a hierarchy—a monarchy of sorts rather than a republic of sort. It is these American evangelical-fundamentalist elements that have very narrow arms and a selective embrace. And thus, because the RCA has broad arms, we have embraced elements that do not have broad arms and are at work striving to narrow the embrace of the RCA.

Fear of Decline and Growth

There have been two, somewhat contradictory but related fears which have driven much of the narrative of the RCA over the last couple of decades. First, there is the fear of decline. As other Christian churches and denominations have seen a decrease in membership and participation in the United States, the RCA is no different. During the era when program-based churches were the norm, the RCA, like other denominations, established a sizable program apparatus. This program apparatus is costly and is assumed to be necessary and permanent. As numbers go down, the costs to maintain the apparatus go up, and fears of sustainability increase.

While there were not only two discrete paths available, there are two general paths that were possible. The first would be to lean into the RCA distinctives, not to the end of exclusivity, but rather to have something somewhat unique to offer the world. The other path would be to flatten any nuances, rebrand ourselves to be as generic as possible so as to appeal to as wide an audience as possible.

This is often the choice that companies have to make, as well. Some choose to continue doing what they do well, offering what they have to the world, offering something unique and valuable. This is not the path which often leads to rapid and exponential growth, but rather slow and steady. Others choose to make their products as broadly acceptable as possible, which often means removing any nuance, uniqueness, or distinctive in order to be as generic as possible and universally acceptable.

The RCA, largely, took the latter path. Rather than trying to think about what a continental Reformed witness has to offer the contemporary United States, the denomination, as a whole, seemed, at least, to jettison those distinctives in order to grow quickly. This, of course, is not to say that change and adaptation is bad, quite the opposite. However, change and adaptation ought to be deliberate. And so with the broad embrace of the RCA, the fear of contraction helped contribute to the change in the trajectory of the RCA.

On a related but different theme, with the fear of contraction, there was a massive church planting movement that was begun in the RCA. This, of course, adopted unReformed theologies which then influenced the identity of the church plants that were established. There was a lot of optimism in terms of growth. With all of this, then, there was an unfounded assertion that there was a shortage of ministers, both existing and looming. It was this assertion that introduced a new ministry designation of commissioned pastor. While a comprehensive discussion of this ministry designation is beyond the scope here, the important piece is that the commissioned pastor designation allowed for an authorized path for people who do not have theological education and whose education and formation was not overseen by the RCA professorate to serve as pastors of local churches.

The point here is not to debate the efficacy of commissioned pastors, but to see this as part of an increasing fragmentation of the RCA, not only culturally but also theologically.

The Current Situation

The current tension is over human sexuality and the place of LGBTQ folks in the life and ministry of the church. However, broadly, there is not a common foundation on which to discuss this (or other things, for that matter). How do we talk about hermeneutics when a significant number of folks in the denomination are fundamentalist inerrantists? How do we move forward when complementarianism has somehow gained a foothold in the RCA and there is pressure to move backward? How do we talk about how the church should deal with disagreements when we do not have an understanding of how God desires the church to function?

The conflict, then, is over the place of LGBTQ folks in the life and ministry of the RCA. At another level, though, there are related disagreements and tensions, which amplify the dysfunction related to the disagreements related to human sexuality, and extend beyond it.

Matthew van Maastricht is the pastor at the Altamont Reformed Church in Altamont, New York, and a Reformed Church polity and standards teacher.