Our common faith

In early June, an unanticipated water-main rupture caused a Calgary-wide state of emergency. Later that same month, at the Christian Reformed Church’s (CRC) Synod 2024, another rupture occurred that everyone saw coming, but one that poses far-reaching challenges for the Canadian CRC. Synod 2024 decided to adopt a traditional, non-inclusive position on human sexuality and also decided to make it a confessional issue with a limited timeline for “discipling” membership into conformity. Whether you cheer or lament Synod’s unambiguous direction, the future of the Christian Reformed Church is very foggy. Especially for those in the middle: churches, pastors and members holding to a traditional sexual ethic or perhaps uncertain, yet knowing the CRC has changed, sensing something has been lost, and wondering what room remains within the restrictions set by Synod.

For all its clarity, Synod has left big questions in the Canadian CRC: do we have the needed infrastructure capable of holding our diversity and handling difficult questions? Have our institutional practices become an impediment to the ministry of reconciliation in Canada? Are the political dynamics of our American neighbours seeping into the groundwater of the church?

Last month in CC, Syd Hielema wondered if this might be an opportunity for the CRC in Canada to call a time-out, to reflect on whether our binational structure is past its best-before date, to consider other ways to deliver the goods of supporting God’s mission in Canada.

I have no prophetic mantle to see through the uncertainty to what a Canadian CRC might look like. And it’s good for all of us to avoid dreams of an ideal community. “God hates visionary dreaming,” writes Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Life Together, noting that the one “who fashions a visionary ideal of community” eventually becomes the destroyer of it. Anyone seeking after a perfect and pure church, composed only of members whose behaviour is deemed to match their profession of faith, will be disappointed because, well, I’m in it. You too.

Instead, Bonhoeffer writes that “we enter into that common life not as demanders but as thankful recipients.” He’s talking about a posture, a way of participating in the life centred on Jesus. Church is where we receive Christ, learning and growing in the life that is Jesus. The CRC has spent so much time and energy on the institutional form of church only to find it cramped, not large enough to steward the complex time we face and the grand life of the gospel.

Whatever institutional form the CRC may take in Canada, here’s a bit of wisdom from church history: establish a rule of life of shared postures and practices. How we live our common faith is a critical matter. Postures are the dispositions, the distinct manner in which we participate in the life of Jesus; practices are the collective wisdom in this shared way of life, those habits and daily skills that help us inhabit Christ’s life in our particular time.

While we hold the tension of our differences, what if the CRC in Canada lived an embodied form of unity through a shared way of life in common postures and practices? This is not meant to diminish truth or do an end run around doctrine. Rather, it understands knowing as doing; it’s confessional subscription in an embodied manner.

Perhaps we can begin with a few postures and practices emerging from our Reformed confessions.

Hospitality

Dear to the heart of the CRC are the opening words of the Heidelberg Catechism: “I belong … to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ.” Justification means acceptance – a space has been made for you, me, and this curious mix of others through the work of Jesus Christ. We don’t get to choose who the Spirit brings into God’s family, so we embrace others in gracious hospitality because they share in Christ and bear witness to the wide grace of the gospel.

Years ago Calvin Seerveld wrote that “evidence for the fact that our church is all but dead as a genuine community alive to biblical reformation is the continuing presence of obvious polarization into left and right, ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’. . . .” Hospitality resists the antagonisms and divisions of our day to create the space where the long obedience of discipleship can take place. Synod set up walls at a moment when we need more tables. Can our differences, cradled within the posture of hospitality, then become a midwife to a deeper fellowship in Christ?

Patience

God’s providence invites a confident patience. Real tensions are, indeed, held together in God’s sovereign hands – both “rain and drought, health and sickness, prosperity and poverty” (Heidelberg Catechism Q&A 27). Patience calls us to live under the wisdom of God’s providential and which promises to make sense of the polarities.

Patience is the Spirit’s super-power, allowing us to engage in what David Bennett calls a long disagreement in the same direction. This is what healthy communities do, says Alasdair MacIntyre; people of a tradition keep the conversation alive about what is essential to the vitality of that tradition. Synod acted hastily, putting a period where a semi-colon was needed. The argument around human sexuality in the CRC remains among people who are committed to the bible as our highest reference point for our faith and life. Can we not, then, patiently continue the conversation?

Providence-grounded patience teaches us to be still and wait. This is a time of incredible churn in the church, with much that is murky. “Like a weaned child with its mother” (Ps. 131) we can be still, to rest in the presence of Jesus and leisurely listen for the Saviour’s voice, to wait for the Holy Spirit to reveal a way where there is no way that can then order our shared life and cope with our diversity.

Humility

If ever there were a people with a strong accent on sin, it’s our Reformed tribe. At its best, this sober theology leads to a posture of genuine humility, including a wise recognition of the mixed nature of the church body. It’s a readiness to take our place alongside those we might otherwise cast out, a glad participation in the fellowship of sinners Jesus calls his own.

Our posture of humility finds its deepest source in Christ’s own humility (cf. Phil 2). This divine vulnerability reveals God’s true self and provides the basis for unified life. “Have this mind in you.” Have the mind of Christ: not doctrinal points but an embodied knowledge expressed in humility. Have this mind so that we are able to esteem others more highly than ourselves, so that we might seek the interests of others instead of our own (Phil. 2:3), so that we might be a community which seeks out and serves the flourishing of all sisters and brothers in Christ’s body.

The architecture of our faith

This is a vexing time and, while we navigate the turbulence ahead, we’re wise to strap ourselves into a common rule of life, an architecture of faith to align our lives and ministries more fully to the harder, beautiful work of living all that which unites – Christ and his grace.

Hospitality. Patience. Humility. While we still strain out differences regarding the Human Sexuality Report, isn’t this a way of life we can share together in Christ? Probably not the stuff of mission statements and inspirational conferences. But maybe – just maybe – these are the simple acts of faith that keep us together in the way of Jesus.