Using Historic Strength to Make New Glue

In "The Mournful Sounds of Implosion," my colleague at Hope College, Don Luidens, delivers an advance eulogy for what he sees as the "pending demise" of the Reformed Church in America. "Catch her quickly; she'll settle below the horizon soon," he warns. Is it time to book the hearse, order the f lowers, and arrange a decent burial for the oldest Protestant denomination in North America? Or, to follow Luidens' image, should we plan on manning the lifeboats and fleeing to whatever port suits our fancy? I think not.

Luidens offers six "items" as his evidence that the RCA's impending "implosion" is both inevitable and explicable. While he is right about some of what has changed over the last several decades, I find that on balance his evidence is inadequate or tainted. In particular his conclusions on the denomination's disintegrating identity do not hold water: they appear to be based on the assumption that if the church deviates from what made it successful for the first couple of decades after World War II, it will be doomed--even though Luidens does not appear to like some of what the RCA did in those years, such as its rush to "suburbanize."

A careful look at data on members, money, priorities, and leadership over the most recent decades, combined with an understanding of new forces that are giving the denomination energy and an increasing sense of shared mission, show that the RCA is moving in the right direction--toward what has most often made it successful over its long history. I know few in the RCA who have illusions about our need for continued renewal. More and more of us have experienced some of it.

Has the RCA Lost its Specific Identity?

Luidens' items #1-3 ("Identity Dissolution," "Ideological Messiness", and "Theological Muddiness") all claim the RCA has lost any specific identity and thereby dissolved the "glue" essential to the denomination's survival. But then he adds: "Since the days of the fabled 'Half Moon' and her crew, the Dutch Reformed Church on this continent has struggled with her identity." I have no reason to disagree but must also observe that those struggles clearly weren't fatal. The RCA has survived, and at times thrived, for almost four centuries. It would be arrogant to claim that having lasted long means that it is guaranteed to last longer, but curiosity and a decent self-respect might make us inquire further as to what the RCA did and how, and whether this sheds any light on our current situation.

Luidens mentions little that earlier RCA generations did, such as found New York City, establish three colleges and two seminaries, develop leaders who influenced the First and Second Great Awakenings, send early Protestant missionaries to China, start a prayer movement before the Civil War that featured desegregated gatherings of thousands of people in New York City's business districts, join vigorously in the social gospel and ecumenical movements, and start a major missionary effort that added German churches to the denomination, to name a few. Might what we have done in the past have helped forge an identity we can use to this day? I think so.

As to how the RCA did it in the past, some relevant information can be found in a book that Luidens himself has co-authored with Corwin Smidt, James Penning, and Roger Nemeth: Divided by a Common Heritage: The Christian Reformed Church and the Reformed Church in America at the Beginning of the New Millennium (Eerdmans, 2006). Chapter 2 describes the similarities and differences between the RCA and the Christian Reformed Church (CRC), the authors observing that "there are many reasons why one might expect that the CRC and the RCA would be a single denomination" (19), including similarities in theology, ecclesiastical and liturgical practices, adherence to the same three confessions, a common Dutch heritage, and a presence largely in the same geographical areas.

But these, as we know and they say, were not enough to prevent the secession of 1857 that resulted in the CRC. Though space precludes my recounting the twists and turns in a well-written narrative, it seems the reasons for the schism are summarized in two of the book's passages. The first is very general: "While the CRC has historically placed greater emphasis on doctrinal purity, the RCA has been more focused on sustaining church unity. The CRC has placed importance on fidelity to theological standards, while the RCA has tended to affirm personal piety and evangelism as hallmarks of members' Christian faith" (21). The second makes reference to a spat over Freemasonry and concludes: "On this issue, as with other questions, the CRC and RCA split over how much one was willing to tolerate differences within the church body" (34).

The RCA approach to this and other issues may sound familiar. General Synods made pronouncements but let consistories decide whether to heed them. The denomination periodically found strong leaders who could bring together factions, joined in ecumenical endeavors without having to agree with all its partners, argued over whether evangelism or doctrinal consistency mattered more but did not split over it, and "following World War II...increased its theological awareness and productivity, while remaining committed to church growth, evangelism, and ecumenical fellowship" (46).

Whom should I believe? The Luidens who believes muddiness, messiness, and a lack of a stable identity will help implode the RCA? Or the Luidens who co-authored a book that describes so well how the RCA has operated for nearly four centuries with those same traits in the service of working with their fellow Christians?

I find chapter 2 of Divided by a Common Heritage the more persuasive narrative, and it seems to tell us how the RCA has survived for almost 400 years, not why it's about to disappear.

On Members, Money, Priorities, and Leadership

Luidens' items 4-6 ("Numerological Numbness," "Congregational Particularism," and "Financial Failures") all claim that practical failures make the RCA unsustainable. He dismisses the efforts of Our Call, a national effort endorsed by the 2003 General Synod, to plant new churches and revitalize existing ones (as well as working on the infrastructure that supports healthy churches) as "minimally effective" and likely to "further obscure identity, ideology, and theology."

Luidens' points on the effects of suburbanization and the breadth of membership loss over decades are well taken. But his claim of imminent demise suffers from a lack of numbers: he gives no data on membership or money save the comment that the RCA had "almost 235,000 active communicants" in the mid-1960s and about 170,000 today.

To remedy this deficiency, I used the "Orange Books" that the RCA issues each year to report its General Synod proceedings and membership and financial statistics to develop a time series on members and money from 1992 to 2008. These numbers include a significant number of years before Our Call began in 2003 as well as the five full years since. The spreadsheet is available on request from the author.

Members

The measurement of membership on which the RCA bases assessments is "Confessing Members." It also collects information on adherents, average worship attendance per church, and the number of churches in the denomination. For each year, I multiplied the number of churches in the RCA by the average worship attendance per church to get average (total) worship attendance for the entire denomination. Chart 1 below shows confessing members, confessing members plus adherents, and average worship attendance across the entire denomination from 1992 to 2008.

The numbers hardly suggest an implosion. The number of confessing members dropped by over 10,000 from 2003 to 2008, but actual worship attendance was almost exactly the same in those two years. In fact, in 2008, for the first time, average weekly worship attendance actually exceeded the number of confessing members in the RCA. The number of adherents also is at a high for the entire 18-year series in 2008, reaching over 50,000 for the last three years. This recent increase in adherents and worship attendance strongly suggests that Our Call is succeeding in increasing the numbers of those calling an RCA church home, whether they officially join it or not.

We also know that the Confessing Member statistics are likely biased downward. Churches are not assessed for inactive members. At least one large church in southern California is known to have "capped" its confessing membership numbers at a fraction of its usual worship attendance. With its usual tolerance of local variation, the RCA has left compliance to the classes. Consistent with a general point Luidens makes, many churches report that "membership" per se is a concept that matters little to some people who are active in a church, so they may not see a reason to join. New church starts that are already conducting worship, unless they are officially branches of the parent church, are not counted in membership or attendance numbers until they are officially organized and their consistories file reports.

Recent church-start information especially suggests reason for optimism: as of the end of 2008, the end of the first five years of Our Call, the RCA had approved 114 new congregation plans, ahead of the 91 projected.

Money

If the statistics on membership cast at least some doubt on Luidens' views on Our Call, the statistics below in charts 2-4 make it clear that money is not, by any reasonable definition of which I am aware, "shorter in supply" than previously, even with the drop in number of members. The Orange Books report both the total income of RCA congregations and four ways in which they use it--for RCA assessments (General Synod, regional synods, and classes), for other RCA contributions, for other (mission) contributions, and for congregational purposes. Note that on charts 2-4, the "Total contributions" line is the sum of "RCA assessments," "RCA other contributions," and "Other contributions." Some clear conclusions can be drawn from aggregate numbers, which are reported in three ways: current dollars for each year, adjusted for inflation, and adjusted for inflation but stated on a per-confessing-member basis. (My adjustments for inflation used the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers [CPI-U] in July of each year.)

Chart 2 shows substantial increases in total dollars of income and dollars used for congregational purposes over the entire period, with a modest increase in total contributions (RCA Assessments plus Other RCA Contributions plus Other Contributions).

Chart 3 adjusts for inflation but still reports total dollars. Inflation-adjusted income during the years 2004-2007 would appear to reflect some improvement from Our Call, as all of them are higher than any of the prior years. Even the total income for 2008, the year of the USA's worst recession since at least 1982, is higher than any of the years 1992-1998 and is not much off the highest years prior to Our Call.

If charts 2 and 3 cast some doubt on Luidens' view, chart 4, which adjusts for inflation and puts the numbers on a per-confessing member basis, is much more damaging. Total income per member rose from $926 in 1992 to a peak of $1,538 per member in 2007 before falling to $1,328 per member in 2008. Total income and amounts spent for congregational purposes from 2003 to 2008 were above the same levels for every year prior to 2003, the start of Our Call, and total contributions were above all previous years by 2005.

Most surprising, though it is not evident from the charts, is that other mission contributions by congregations (i.e., for projects and groups outside their walls) took a sharp step up in current and inflation-adjusted dollars beginning in 2005 and stayed there, with an increase even in 2008. These contributions the last four years are 50 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars per member above their highest levels before 1998-- perhaps a sign of higher commitment by many RCA members. But are congregations neglecting the RCA and simply tending their own nests? I think not, if we look carefully at the priorities of Our Call and, I believe, of most members.

Priorities

The purpose of Our Call was not to add as much revenue as possible to the denominational offices. It was to start new congregations, to revitalize existing congregations in every way and, beginning in 2008, to help give the RCA a genuine multiracial future. Denominational staff structures and programs have been reconfigured around the priorities of Our Call for these purposes, and churches customarily pay part of the cost of programs like church multiplication. Luidens claims that mega-churches of around 1,000 or more members typically have little interest in aiding denominations, but only fifteen to twenty of the RCA's 933 congregations fit that description in 2008 and some of them have been very supportive of the denomination both financially and in other ways.

It is clear that Luidens is simply wrong when he claims RCA financial resources have been shrinking: they have been growing. A nd his dismissal of Our Call as a positive factor in our membership, financial picture, and priorities seems simply inaccurate.

Leadership

According to Luidens, the RCA's polity is falling apart, its presbyterial system is ineffectual, and the "rule of elders" hasn't worked. I don't think everything is great in this regard, either, but a look at General Synod presidents, the General Secretary, and the laity over the last two decades paints a clear picture of an ongoing renewal, not a collapse.

Let's begin with presidents. (Full disclosure: I am a past president of the General Synod.) From 1956 through the election of 1991, with only one exception, General Synod presidents would alternately be elected from an eastern state (most often New York) in one year and a non-eastern state (often Michigan) the next. Most, judging by the names, were Dutch. Luidens' premise that the "rule of elders" used to be strong has to be doubted for this era: what elder could fancy himself a national leader when, during this 36-year stretch, clergy were elected 97 percent of the time, the exception being the legendary Elder Harry DeBruyn?

This pattern changed abruptly beginning in 1992, when Elder Beth Marcus, the second in a string of eight straight non-eastern presidents (1991-1998), became the first woman elected president, and the former system of alternating by region, probably aided by the decisions of a small group, fell apart. Then, in a sharp reversal, six of the eleven presidents from 1999 to 2009 were from the East; only two of the others came from Michigan and one each from California, Colorado, and Iowa. Two were elders (one male, one female); one was the first woman pastor elected; several were Dutch and one each was of Asian, Hispanic, and African- American descent.

If Luidens is right in his reasoning, the RCA should be in big trouble: there seems never to have been a period in which the Dutch "ethnic identifier has lost its potency" so decisively at the level of the top leadership, and the election of six presidents from a declining region tells us something has changed radically. I discuss that something, which I consider positive, in my section on our "new glue" below.

As to leadership of the RCA's denominational staff, Wes Granberg-Michaelson has been the General Secretary since 1994. His hiring and Our Call are to me further evidence of a fairly sharp discontinuity in the RCA in the early 1990s relative to the earlier post-World War II era, but one consistent with the church's long-term history. Granberg-Michaelson is widely believed to have been hired because the denomination wanted a visionary leader as its General Secretary. He considers himself (and I believe is considered by most others) as evangelical, ecumenical, and strongly supportive of social justice initiatives, and his background is quite varied.

While at least a few influential Eastern clergy are opposed to a strong General Secretary on principle and believe our polity vests authority for major changes only in assemblies and elected officials, Granberg-Michaelson's leadership and Our Call seem to have widespread support. This fits RCA history: some eras are shaped heavily by strong leaders, while in others the leadership seeks mainly to keep the waters calm. Lack of strong leadership for the denomination now would be unusual given the combinations of opportunities and threats faced by mainline Protestants.

I cannot argue with Luidens when he suggests that the RCA would benefit from more effectual leadership by elders (and deacons) since I made a similar case in my presidential report to General Synod in 2007. I believe Luidens underestimates the extent to which the RCA, in the post-World War II period, collectively cultivated exactly what he, I, and many others claim not to want. That is, the denomination often taught lay leaders to manage the church just as they did their other organizations; allowed or even encouraged clergy domination of our classes, regional synods, and general synods; and accepted the idea that many if not most of our members might have low commitment even as others centered their lives on the church. These measures worked, albeit with some negative consequences, in an era when most people expected to join a church as a matter of course and when the mission frontier was seen as somewhere far overseas.

We all know this system has been shattered over the last twenty years. A number of the most vital churches I have visited have gone through conflict or sharp declines in attendance or both at the beginning of their revitalization efforts. I suspect Luidens and I are having this exchange in no small part because both of us recognize the damage of some prior practices, but we do not agree on what the RCA could do about it or what replacement would be best. Is the recent era of change the final evidence of a "shallow combination of inertia...and stubborn persistence" or "a carbon-copy of frontier American evangelicalism, indistinguishable from that of countless other church groups" that Luidens fears? Or is the RCA returning to its real roots? I think the latter.

The RCA's new glue

I share the view that some of what used to glue the RCA together no longer does. But unlike Luidens, I believe a glue of new identity--not generic but distinctive--is already setting up. In part this is happening as the RCA replaces decrepit old structures with new ones that already are showing some vibrancy.

1. The RCA's rich new array of options for training ministers of Word and sacrament compared with twenty years ago offers real promise for generating leadership attuned to the nation's demographic future and the mandate of the gospel.

2. The RCA is on the cutting edge of creating small, coached clergy networks that offer support and encourage accountability and continuing education, funded by Lilly grants, in an era when lower-level judicatories often do not provide the framework of support that used to be present.

3. In the last five years General Synods have had near-revolutionary changes that encourage delegate interaction and give every delegate a voice and vote on major issues, partially replacing a system of advisory committees that had given much more power to those familiar with the complex polity connected with synods.

4. The denomination has just completed a decade-long process of considering the Belhar Confession from South Africa as a permanent addition to the Standards, the first in over 400 years. This year the delegates voted (with about 70 percent in favor) to ask the classes to approve the Belhar as a permanent new Standard, with classis votes scheduled this year.

5. Some rapid change in unexpected places has eroded a traditional fault line. Both conser vatives and liberals now talk about what they've learned from visiting Christians in A frica, Asia, and Latin America.

6. Several foreign churches have sought partnerships with the RCA, and one major multicultural congregation in San Francisco left the Presbyterian Church in America to join the RCA. That congregation has already set up another one in Denver. It appears sometimes others see strengths in us that we overlook ourselves.

Conclusion

I sense a coalescing by a majority in the RCA around several principles. First, we have a strong collective sense of being called to follow Christ in mission to the world, with the mission field stretching from our backyard outward. Second, we take seriously Christ's admonition that we should love one another so that the world may know we are his disciples--that we accept what some others see as "messiness" in the service of working together on a shared mission. Third, we take theological discussions seriously. Fourth, we know that Christians who are different from us have a lot to teach us. And finally, we are called to be a multiracial denomination even though that has been relatively unusual in American society. Granting the different contexts the RCA has experienced historically, I think these principles represent us in the past at our best.

I do not wish to ignore the parts of Luidens' analysis that correctly point out how much the RCA has changed and how hard that process has been, nor how much work remains. But I believe that the denomination is revitalizing itself faster than most realize. This changed RCA is likely to last because its revitalization comes from an inside movement grounded in new realities and drawing on our long-term strengths--especially a seriousness about working with our fellow Christians within a relational structure and with some reasonable but not overly rigid boundaries.

The RCA ship as we knew it in 1970 or even 1980 indeed lies imploded on the ocean bottom, never to return. And about that sinking I would endorse a slightly amended version of Luidens' view: blame has been "placed on individuals, groups, and policies; some of it" has been "personal and nasty, and much of it" is "dead wrong." Many in the post-World War II mainline Protestant denominations expected to remain in elite staterooms on a never-ending cruise. For the end of that era we can use diagnosis but not recriminations.

But I wouldn't suggest that you look for the current RCA vessel where the old one sank anytime soon. Why would you find the living among the dead?