My home town of Kampen is a very pretty, small town near the mouth of the river IJssel in the Netherlands. In Reformed circles it became famous because of the seminary founded there by the “separated congregations,” one of the two branches of the Afscheiding of 1854. During the time I lived in Kampen, there…
It didn’t have to happen. Nobody in Jubilee Fellowship Christian Reformed Church (CRC) in St. Catharines, Ontario, originally wanted it to happen. But on June 23, 2025, 97 percent of our members voted to leave the CRC. The decision took a long, agonizing time. Yet staying became impossible after Synod 2024 summarily put all protesting…
Synod 2025 is over. I will leave it to others to write about the gracious hospitality of Redeemer University and the warm opening ceremonies by Chatham First Christian Reformed Church (CRC), its congenial pastor Nate Van Denend and their local high school praise team. The composition of Synod – the all-white male executive and near…
We’re in our corner. There’s a thermos of Douwe Egberts coffee on the table. Today Pete is the server. Instead of Gemberkoek, we have apple pie, which Broekie pulled out of a bag and set beside the thermos. So Broekie brought the pie, though we know Corrie baked it. He hands a plate to each of us and slices the pie into six pieces.
This Friday morning, we’re back in our corner of the dining hall at Grace Manor. We usually meet at 10 and wrap things up around noon. I arrived at 10, but there was no one in sight. I went to the kitchen to check with Mary – maybe she knew something.
You may not know me or remember this, but, to my knowledge, I am the only former Banner editor who got in front of an entire Christian Reformed Church (CRC) Synod to publicly apologize. I said I was sorry for allowing two articles in quick succession that many readers judged to have gone over the…
In mid-March I had the opportunity to travel to Indonesia with a group of faculty from Calvin University. Indonesia is an archipelago made up of over 17,000 distinct islands and with a population of 250 million people, it makes up the fourth most populous nation in the world. Its people represent a variety of faith…
“Many Canadian churches are battlegrounds today between camps with opposing views.” So begins a Christian Courier editorial by Robert Vander Vennen published on January 11, 1991. Vander Vennen’s words could accurately describe this present moment in the Christian Reformed Church (CRC) too, as the denomination fractures over differing definitions of sexuality, chastity and sin. In…
One of the overpasses along the Queen Elizabeth Way in southern Ontario is spray-painted with three short words: “They all lie.” Think about it: ‘They all lie.’ This anonymous graffiti-sociologist has captured the zeitgeist of our age profoundly. This epithet identifies a spirit that is fuelled by cynicism, suspicion, anger and even contempt. This spirit…
After answering over a dozen questions and providing thousands of additional explanations for their responses, hundreds of Canadians who participated in Christian Courier’s survey of members of the Christian Reformed Church (CRC) still had more to say. Close to 300 took advantage of the invitation to respond to the final open-ended query: Is there anything…
Spring is nomination season, that time of year when church councils thank retiring members and count empty seats to see how many new officebearers are needed. This spring, however, it might be harder than usual to find members ready to take on a leadership role at church – at least if Christian Courier’s survey results…
When the motion for Edmonton’s Fellowship Church’s disaffiliation from the Christian Reformed Church of North America (CRCNA) was approved at the March 8 Classis Alberta North meeting, members of Fellowship met the news with murmurs, joined hands, smiles and tears. The motion didn’t take long: a unanimous vote, a farewell letter, a blessing and a…
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