How the RCA and CRC differ

The Reformed Church in America (RCA) and the Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRC) are close but different. The RCA offers more room for diversity on the issues of human sexuality, and churches can even celebrate same-sex marriages. Some CRC folks have asked whether they might fit better in the RCA, but they realise how little they actually know about the RCA. So as an RCA scholar with many ties to the CRC, I have prepared this essay on how the RCA differs from the CRC in history, habits and structures.

It is remarkable that the differences between the RCA and the CRC are epitomised by the names of their respective LGBTQA advocacy organisations. All One Body sounds idealistic, biblical, Pauline, seeking union, cohesion and alignment. By contrast, Room for All sounds looser, more practical, more eschatological, Lukan rather than Pauline, assuming multiplicity, variety and space. “All one body” trades on shared identity, while “room for all” trades on active hospitality. Let me show you how these groups are typically CRC and typically RCA. (In what follows I must ignore some complications).

History

The RCA and CRC have 177 years of shared history beginning with the Dutch immigration to Michigan in 1847. The immigrant leaders came from the Seceded Reformed Church, those congregations that had left the national church of the Netherlands. At first they all joined up with the RCA, which already had English-speaking churches in Michigan.

By joining the RCA they moved into a house that was already 212 years old, with structures already in place, and with residents who valued the same doctrines but had different habits. The house had been built by the colonial immigrants who came to New Netherland from 1609 to 1664. They multiplied to a hundred congregations by 1776, all speaking Dutch, all loyal to the state church of the Netherlands; and in many places in New York and New Jersey, where the Dutch-American population held its majority, the only church in town. To this day, RCA members from New York have little or no awareness of the CRC, and this part of the RCA experience is opaque to the CRC.

Indeed, the CRC began as a rejection of this experience and of the Dutch church heritage that the RCA valued. This was because by the time of the second immi­gra­tion, after the settlement of the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815), the national Dutch church had been recast as an arm of the crown. The cabinet ran the church, radically altered its church order away from Dort, and sponsored modernist theology. Ortho­dox groups developed within the national church that never seceded. (Their immigrant descendents started the RCA congregations in Canada.) But others did, and were abused by church and state, and led the second immigration.

Albertus Van Raalte

Albertus Van Raalte and his Seceder colleagues were welcomed and assisted by the Eastern RCA. In 1850, their Classis of Holland entered the RCA, having reckoned that the RCA, despite its American habits, was true to the doctrines and constitution of Dort. But soon some seceded again to form the CRC, with its secessionist habits of separation, purity and judgement on other churches. Their numbers swelled with another secession in 1882 when the RCA’s General Synod ruled that it did not have the constitutional authority to compel consistories to ban Free­masons from member­ship. Another influx came with immigrants from the Gereformeerde churches of Abraham Kuyper’s separation, but their influence in the CRC would not develop until later and was little felt in the RCA.

The Kuyperian influence was magnified after World War II with the third immigration, which went mostly to Canada (with some to California), and mostly into the CRC. These too had to move into someone else’s house, which has become less comfortable of late. If Canadian CRCs have tensions with the American CRC, imagine how little sympathy they’d have with the Midwestern RCA, and of the Eastern RCA they would have no knowledge at all.

Habits

RCA churches were originally established on the parish model. All citizens belonged, no matter what their background or belief. Eastern RCA churches still act like parishes while CRC and Midwestern RCA churches act like congregations. Congregations gather people who share behaviours and beliefs. Congregations can move, especially out of changing neighbourhoods, while parishes are geographically rooted and are meant for whoever lives near­by. Parishes are “room for all.” Congregations are “all one body.”

The parish model has given the RCA a larger cohort of Black and African-American members than the CRC. Already in the 1950’s, as New York City neighbourhoods changed, RCA churches evolved their memberships from white to Black. A plurality of these members were Afro-Caribbean with Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian and Moravian identities. Sixty years of this experi­ence has produced a cadre of Black and African-American pastors (and consistories) who are as deeply RCA as anyone else. Since 1968, a vital African-American Black Council has witnessed prophetically to the RCA and to the racism harboured within it. The Council played a key role in the RCA’s witness against apartheid in South Africa and it helped the RCA to adopt the Belhar Confession as a full confession.

From its beginning, the RCA wanted to make Protestants, not “Cal­vinists.” Its Calvinism was for making good Protestants, not for advancing Calvinism. The RCA never developed anything like Calvinist Cadet Corps, the Calvinettes, or the Young Calvinists. Its message was “How am I right with God,” not “a Christian worldview.” Its missions in China, Japan, and Arabia set up, not daughter RCA churches, but partnered with other Protestant missionaries to start indigenous self-governing and self-defining churches. 

The RCA tends to think historically, while the CRC thinks doctrinally. The RCA values continuity and relat­ionships more than being right. And parallel to this, members belong to the RCA not because they think it is truer or better or has a unique mission to other Christians, but because they like it, or are comfortable with it, or have a history with it, or because it is respectable and has sufficient integrity.

The RCA is less Kuyperian than the CRC. Although it was RCA churches that Abraham Kuyper visited when he came to America for the Stone Lectures in 1896, the Gereformeerde immigrants were directed to join the CRC. The “square-inch” slogan is little used in the RCA.

A Coalition Church

The second immigration Seceders who found the RCA acceptable still valued purity, so the two very different church experiences had to develop the RCA habit of being a coalition church. For the next 150 years the maintenance of this coalition defined the RCA in a way unknown to the CRC: balancing East and Midwest, old colonial Dutch and new immigrant Dutch, public church and secession church, parish and congregation, mainline Protestant and Pietist evangelical, openness and purity, etc. The leaders of the RCA were those people who could manage this coalition by means of relationships, and relational skills became important in RCA leadership. 

After 1850, the RCA coalition managed the tension between two discourses: acceptance versus purity. (I thank Professor. John Coakley for this insight.) The tension was tested by debates over the World Council of Churches and divorce. But with the human sexuality debate the tension could not hold and the coalition failed, leading to the departure of almost 250 congregations. It’s worth noting that very few of these joined the CRC. Despite a shared conservatism on human sexuality, the RCA seceders are used to more freedom, and would not have easily fit in the CRC’s more unitary body.

With so many churches having left, the RCA as an aggregate is suddenly less conservative, for now at least. Indeed, the RCA has many more “open and affirming” pastors and congregations than the CRC: 298 pastors and 44 congregations have rostered with Room for All, and a great many more do not consider the sexuality issue church-dividing. Only a few of RCA Canadians consider it “confessional.”

Structures

One great difference between the RCA and the CRC is that the RCA has a constitution and the CRC does not. No RCA synod can make any ruling that is “settled and binding.” Only the constitution is settled and binding. 

For example, the General Synod has a policy against same-sex mar­riage, and this policy is observed by General Synod staff and its agencies, but this policy does not bind the next General Synod, nor does it bind regional synods, classes, or consist­ories, which are free to fol­low that policy or not, provided they are satisfied that they observe the Constitution. My consistory in Brooklyn, despite the General Synod policy, had full discretion to approve the same-sex marriages that I performed, and the classes have full discre­tion to ordain and install LGBTQ pastors. This local discretion under the Constitution frustrated those who wanted to enforce the General Synod policy against same-sex marriage on all churches and pastors, and it was a cause of their departure.

Another difference is that RCA has regional synods. These superintend the classes and are courts of appeal. The eight regional synods are Albany, Canada, Far West, Great Lakes, Heartland, Mid-America, Mid-Atlantics, and New York. The RCA has them because the national Dutch church had them. They are diverse and their programs vary greatly. Two RCA general secretaries have tried to scrap them as obstacles to “alignment.”

Classes are more powerful in the RCA. The Constitution reserves to the classes anything not specifically assigned to another assembly. RCA classes do everything CRC classes do, plus ratify constitutional amendments, practice discretion relative to synodical policies, and hold the credentials of ministers. Ministers are members of classes, not local consistories. Stronger classes make the RCA less congregational than the CRC but also make more room.

The RCA has consistories, not “councils,” including ministers, elders, and deacons. Consis­tories hold full title to church property. Deacons have been included in RCA consistories since 1628, but not in classes or synods, as their ministry does not include “spiritual government.”

The RCA has more judicial restraint than the CRC. There is no cross-judicatory discipline, and ministers and consistories may not be charged by anyone beyond the membership of their own churches and classes. Synods are strictly courts of appeal. RCA synods have no power to intervene in the discipline of classes and consistories—no RCA synod could tell a classis how to discipline one of its consistories, nor try to discipline the consistory itself. This judicial restraint was a frustration of recent RCA seceders.

Women have been ordained in the RCA as deacons, elders and ministers for over 50 years, which means for 50 years women have been seated as delegates and served as officers at all levels of RCA assemblies. For a while there was a “conscience clause” that allowed ministers and elders not to participate in services of ordination and installation of women, but that clause is now revoked.

The RCA is in full communion with American Presbyterians, Lutherans and the United Church of Christ, and also has a full-exchange agreement with the CRC. The RCA is a founding member of the World Communion of Reformed Churches and the World Council of Churches. The Regional Synod of Canada is a full member of the Canadian Council of Churches.

Beginning in 2018, under pressure from those who were threatening to leave, the RCA began to consider restructuring as a way of holding the denomination together, and a process of restructuring began in 2021. It proved to be too late, but the restructuring process continues anyway. It is now motivated by the desire of core staff and current leadership to remould the RCA with a vision and mission focused almost exclusively on church-planting. The Restructuring Team will make its recommendations to the General Synod of 2024, and if these pass they go to the classes for two-thirds confirmation, and then ratification by the General Synod of 2025.

The proposals are drastic. The RCA will imitate the tighter, centralised structures of the “networks” of churches that have left. It will be a hard sell, judging by the resistance to the first draft at the General Synod of 2023. If it passes this General Synod it will still need two-thirds of the classes to approve it, which will mean voting themselves out of existence. Is this likely? Who knows? I doubt that many CRCs will want to join what used to be the RCA.

How long will there be denominations as we know them? There will be congregations, and ordained office-bearers, and they will need some structure of mutual accountability, which is pretty much all that the RCA has been, and ultimately not much more, despite the exertions of its visionary leaders. The CRC has always idealistically assumed that it must be more, and that puts it more at risk. Should a denomination be “all one body,” or is it better to offer “room for all?” The choice might be yours.

A longer version of this article was first published by Reformed Journal.