Amanda Bakale can still picture the first time she saw a woman step up to the pulpit to preach, her long lavender skirt swishing in the silence of the sanctuary. “I remember the movement of her skirt,” Bakale recounts, years later. “Not a suit, but a beautiful, flowing skirt. And a body that looked like…
I am writing at a time of lament in the Christian Reformed Church (CRC) about the immediate firing of our most recent Canadian Ministries Director, Darren Roorda – the fourth consecutive person to leave this position under a cloud of frustration and anger since 2000. It’s also a lament about the health of our denomination’s…
In 2006 I began my service as the Director of Canadian Ministries (DCM) for the Christian Reformed Church, a position I held until 2012. It was a tremendous honour and privilege to serve the Lord and his Church in that way, while at the same time being the most challenging and frustrating calling of my…
Each morning for weeks, we wake to a minor civil war just outside the bedroom. A fierce food fight at the hummingbird feeder. It lasts all day. Six or more are at it. No tolerance for the other’s existence. No matter that food is in abundance; no matter that each can have a private spigot;…
Maybe the answer seems immediately obvious – of course we do, we fight all the time! So much, in fact, that schism is one of our chief contributions to the broader history of the Christian church. But do we know how to fight well? I don’t mean tactically, or strategically. Instead, since I believe everything…
I was recently involved in discussions among evangelical church leaders as to whether our churches could continue to work together. The focus was same-sex marriage, which seemed to us a convenient peg on which to hang broader questions of sexuality. The jury has not yet returned a verdict. When I say these leaders were “evangelical,”…
Decades before the first woman was ordained in the Christian Reformed Church (CRC), groups of women (and some men) with a vision for the full expression of women’s gifts were at work, opening a path toward leadership. For me and other Edmonton women, that journey began in 1983 with informal house meetings and grew into…
On July 7 it was announced on the Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRCNA) website that Rev. Dr. Darren Roorda had been dismissed from his position as Canadian Ministries Director by the Canada Corporation – the Canadian section of the governing body known as the Council of Delegates (COD). The news release recounts his…
When he first dreamed of a multicultural church plant movement in the Netherlands, Theo Visser was regarded with pity and curiosity. “There wasn’t even a word for church planting in Dutch!” he says. But no one could have imagined where that dream would take Theo and his wife Rieneke over the next two decades: from…
Before the Christian Reformed Church’s (CRC) annual June Synod for 2021 was cancelled in late February, there were at least 58 formal responses to the Human Sexuality Report (HSR) on classical agendas (not including 15 responses specific to Neland Ave CRC). Generally, 12 were for “fully adopting” the HSR, 15 asked for “more time,” and…
During the 1930s, when Hitler destroyed Germany’s democratic institutions and turned his country into a Nazi superpower, he used the force of his government to spread Nazi lies to the rest of Europe and around the world. Goebbels, his propaganda wizard, made sure that all his words and images were tailored to exploit the differing…
For a Christian, imagination is not the sole domain of the artsy and literary types. The imagination is every Christian’s home country. Survival is insufficient, as Star Trek’s famous quote tells us. We must all explore beyond the visible and the known to somewhere better. So let the writers’ circles have their creativity training in…
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