Even church wars have medics

“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 1991, Vander Vennen was referring to the heated theological debates over creation vs. evolution and women’s ordination that dominated the Christian Reformed Church in the 1980s, eventually leading to church splits and departures in the early 1990s.

In January 1991, Thom Zeyl was in year 11 of his family medical practice in Grimsby, Ontario. One component of his work was caring for residents in a home for seniors called Shalom Manor, established by CRCs in the Hamilton and Niagara regions. Many of the 140 residents appreciated that Zeyl could speak their first language – Dutch. As for his private practice, there were many patients who had something in common with Zeyl too: their faith.

Zeyl says he didn’t make a big deal of it at the time; after all, doctors are not pastors. But when Reformed patients started bringing up broken relationships and theological pain, he put his counselling training to work and, when appropriate, offered prayer and scripture during appointments to patients who shared his faith. More than anything, he wanted them to remember – no matter what their family members said – that “they are still loved by God. They are still loved by Christ.”

“There were polarized groups here on one side and the other. It got ugly,” recalls Zeyl. Sometimes this pain manifested with physical symptoms in his patients: higher blood pressure, muscle tenseness, loss of sleep. “When all of those things happened, they didn’t even necessarily connect it to the stress of the church wars.”

Zeyl remembers some parents telling their children, “‘Don’t come over on Sunday after your church for coffee. Your siblings can come, because they belong to my church’. . . it was so sad.”

Talk to someone

I asked Zeyl if he thinks people feeling the pain of the current CRC disaffiliations are finding Christian professionals who can help them process in the same way that he did. He shook his head.

“There are many physicians who are Christians or other good people who don’t have a Reformed background who just don’t understand all the nitpicking going on,” explains Zeyl. “They think bigger, more globally than Reformed people who get fixated on this tiny little issue. ‘I am different than you, and therefore, we can never talk again.’” Even when church members agree on 90 to 95 percent of things, Zeyl says some Reformed Christians struggle to see past the remaining fraction of disagreement, and see no other option but to split up their fellowship. Zeyl estimates that Southwestern Ontario is home to at least seven Reformed denominations.

I wanted to know if Zeyl had any advice for people like me who were too young to know what was happening in the 90s and might be looking for some insight for our present moment. He wants us to keep everything in perspective.

“This is not about you. This is about a struggle of different viewpoints and theological issues. You don’t need to feel that there’s a distance between you and God or that you’re inferior. You need to let other people do what they are bound to do anyway. You can’t prevent it and you can’t modify it.” Zeyl was emphatic on this point, even repeating it later in our conversation. “For people who have a secure connection with God, that can’t be broken. Other people’s opinion of you shouldn’t be more important than your connection, your sense of connection with God.”

Even though he says “it’s not about you,” Zeyl thinks we should tell our stories. It’s good for our hearts. Literally. “It’s very therapeutic for people, I think, to write that stuff down and even share it with others,” says Zeyl, whether publicly on Facebook or with a few trusted friends.

It’s like smoking

Finally, I asked Zeyl what people should do if they feel church conflict is beginning to impact their physical health. How do they know when it’s time to leave or if they’re coping well enough to stay despite the pain?

It took me a second to get over my shock when Zeyl bluntly compared church trauma to smoking: “I’m not trying to be heretical here, but if the church is giving you pain, if the church is hurting you, then it can be as detrimental to you – emotionally, theologically and mentally – as knowing you shouldn’t smoke cigarettes, but you continue to smoke cigarettes.”

Just as cancer can grow unnoticed inside our lungs since there are no pain receptor cells, accumulated church stress can grow into something much nastier if we don’t tend to it. Zeyl says that kind of self-examination will look different for each person and ideally, diagnosis and treatment will involve a neutral third-party professional, like a counsellor, who will notice red flags.

But Zeyl offered a list of questions to consider for self-examination anyway: “Are you feeling more distant from God? Or can you feel just as close to God? Can you continue to volunteer in the local community centre or whatever you do just as well and carry on with life? Can you put this all in perspective? Can you say, ‘No, that’s them. I understand all people’s anxieties and insecurities. I’m still going to be part of this church.’ Then that’s okay. If you are in a relationship, you have to ask, How is that affecting my partner? How is this affecting my kids?”

The decision to stay with a church or to leave will look different for each person and Zeyl is asking us to bless and release each other to whichever path we discern.

Globally minded?

After talking to Zeyl, I spent an afternoon paging through CC issues from the early 1990s. I was surprised to find a lot less about church conflict than I expected and a lot more about the Gulf War and the end of the Cold War. Maybe Reformed folks are still globally minded. We shouldn’t sell ourselves short.

I flipped back to Robert Vander Vennen’s 1991 editorial and read to the end, where he writes:

“To identify and put a name on a problem does not by itself solve it. But if we go to a doctor feeling sick and the doctor is able to put a name on our ailment, we already feel better because our sickness is not unknown. We are comforted that others have lived with our disease, and maybe there are ways of treating it. There are never simple cures for the anxiety of paradigm shifts. As with some health problems, time is a factor in healing. The tension is something we will need to live with for a while. Within the church we ask ourselves whether we want to hold on to people who confess Christ but live out their Christian faith in different ways than we do. In large measure, our answer depends on whether we see the greater threats to the faith within the church or outside it.”

Much like in the 1990s, our broken world demands our attention right now, and so do our broken churches. But we’re not navigating these crises alone; we can learn from where we’ve been. Maybe this time will be different.