The CRC is debating church discipline. How far will it go? 

Can we be strong and weak? Many would reject this as unrealistic, but it’s a paradox that provides hope for the leadership complexities facing the church today and the Christian Reformed Church (CRC) specifically. In his book, Strong and Weak, Andy Crouch explores this paradox and provides a helpful framework for flourishing leadership. A framework that I think the CRC should take seriously as the denomination discusses how to discipline officebearers (pastors, elders and deacons) who do not comply with synodical decisions.  

From June 12-18, 175 delegates from across Canada and the U.S. will gather at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for the annual CRC synod. One of the reports received by this body is from the Task Force to Develop Church Order Procedures to Discipline Officebearers. 

This task force and the original overture, or formal request, that sparked it, focus on the scope and exercise of authority in the CRC. It asks for “Church Order procedures to discipline officebearers, including disaffiliation of a council or classis initiated by a major assembly.” It’s a good matter to consider. The church bears and exercises the authority of Jesus Christ, and how authority and power is exercised is a very live conversation in the wider world and in church circles.

Authority and vulnerability

Crouch observes that God intends flourishing. This is the ground of creation, the meaning of shalom, and the purpose and end of Christ’s saving work – universal flourishing. But there’s a paradox in true flourishing, writes Crouch; it involves both authority, which he calls “the capacity for meaningful action” and “vulnerability [which] involves risking something of real and even irreplaceable value.” And it is in Jesus where we best see the wonder of flourishing, both his commanding authority and his glorious vulnerability.

Crouch helps us grab hold of this paradox by introducing a two-by-two chart, showing some of the false choices about authority and vulnerability. To experience vulnerability without any meaningful capacity to act is suffering; to have no authority and no vulnerability is apathy and abandonment; and to have all authority but no vulnerability sounds like the best deal and is what we mostly desire, but it is idolatrous and exploitative. These three are not places of human flourishing. Crouch argues it is only when meaningful authority is paired with exposure to meaningful risk that flourishing is found. “What we truly admire in human beings,” writes Crouch, “is not authority alone or vulnerability alone — we seek both together.”

A wise and loving parent is a great example of how authority and vulnerability come together. A parent who has no authority and no vulnerability is an absentee one. A home with parents who are all vulnerability but no authority will raise a spoiled, coddled brat. Parents who are strict and authoritarian with no relationship vulnerability will have eventual rebellion. It is the parent holding both authority and vulnerability who creates the conditions for a flourishing family.

Wisdom for the CRC

How does this help us understand and respond to the task force on discipline? The task force aims to sort out how the authority of Christ gets exercised in discipline by classis (a regional gathering of churches) and synod. Readers of the report may sense the genuine tension since the language and tone work in two different registers. The primary tone is quasi-legal and procedural – precise, carefully hedged, institutional language reflecting its church order focus. Running alongside is the quieter but present pastoral voice that seeks to maintain warmth and gentleness, urging “love, care, and patience” and warning against using the church order “as a club.”

This tension is native to the origins of Protestantism. The early Reformers protested the hierarchical authority of the Roman Catholic Church, leading them to locate discipline within the context of the local church. As the report reminds readers, emerging Reformed polities, like that of Dort, sought a middle way “between hierarchy and congregationalism.” 

“The Church Order of Dort leaves some unanswered questions. It contains a certain ambiguity or tension between a leaning toward federation (a more congregationalist model) and a leaning toward stronger central authority (a more hierarchical model),” says the report. The Reformed tradition grew, carrying this real ambiguity, accepting the vulnerability of uncertainty.

The task force report acknowledges this tension within the CRC: “We have not always seen eye to eye on these matters.” While there is precedent for classis and synod exercising discipline, there is no principle for these bodies to do so. This is not indecision but the wisdom of the Reformed tradition. Refusing to resolve the tension and accepting the risk of uncertainty honours the agency and work of local churches doing the quiet, mostly hidden, painstaking work of bearing witness to God’s Kingdom.

For all its attempts to assert Reformed theology and maintain covenantal language, the practical purpose of the task force’s report is to resolve this tension by emphasizing the church’s authority to act and by giving classis and synod clearer tools to intervene, discipline, depose, and declare de facto disaffiliation. It all has the look and smell of a bishop but robed in Reformed terms. It’s what other Reformed denominations have rejected as “synodocracy.”

High authority

Place the report’s recommendations back in Andy Crouch’s matrix: this report is high authority. What’s conspicuously absent, despite the rhetoric, is a matching real vulnerability. And authority without vulnerability, says Crouch, is the essence of control.

If the leadership of Christ that brings flourishing embraces vulnerability, what does that vulnerability look like? Crouch says it is the willingness to bear burdens and expose ourselves to risks that others may never see or know. The second is sacrifice, the choice to enter the broken places of our denomination and our own heart.

Could synod confess that it erred? That when it elevated its interpretation of Heidelberg Catechism Q&A 108 to confessional status in 2022, without following the usual process of requiring confessional changes to be affirmed by a subsequent synod, it went too far? Could synod admit that restricting the gravamen process to tight timelines has not fostered unity? The report outlines structures of authority, but can we instead learn to “clothe ourselves in visible symbols of vulnerability,” as Crouch puts it?

Risks worth taking

The time we live in is messy and frightening; our instinct is to minimize risk and uncertainty, to secure the boundaries. Something feels like it is dying, but if the life of Jesus leads our way, there is redemption to be had by embracing the risk. In Acts, with the church facing a messy and frightening tumult, it too embraced risk: Peter crossed boundaries to meet with unclean Gentiles to find a surprising, unforeseen work of God. When it feels like something is dying, instead of policing the boundaries, couldn’t we instead wonder what of the Spirit may be struggling to be born among us?

Without the vulnerability of trust, all we are left with in the church is procedure. Perhaps this is where we are at. But we need to remember that procedure is scaffolding, the shell that remains when relational and spiritual capital is drawn down. Procedure can gain compliance, but it cannot create communion; it can control boundaries but cannot create unity; it can resolve ambiguity, but it cannot discern the leading of God.

I hope synod does not accept this report. Or if it does, that it begin a conclave and elect our first Archbishop.