Justin Brierley might have sent you here. This blog is my online filing cabinet. I use this to dump links, articles, whatever it is I might want to quickly find later. You will find bits of writing going back a few years. Lots of things. I’ll create some links below to some of my more organized work.
The Christian education thread is fascinating and I think has
everything to do with the transformations in the CRC through Synods
2022 to 2025.
1. The CRC has followed the broader trend (see Ryan Burge on Catholic
clergy who would and wouldn’t officiate at a SSM) of youth WITHIN the
church going traditionalist on certain key markers. Boundary markers
are always indicators, often selective but yet important.
2. There is no question that the conservative turn of the CRC saved it
from the sort of numerical institutional collapse the RCA is suffering
from. This seems beyond argument.
3. The marked difference between the thriving of CRC Christian day
schools compared to the relative and opposite performance of CRC
churches should be a focus on analysis for us. While the CRC never
gained critical mass in Sacramento to begin a Christian School
movement looking around at other places as noted in the CS thread
seems safe to say. After anecdotal conversations in Chicagoland and
Whitinsville MA (a large and a small CRC colony cluster) CS growth in
many cases has FAR outpaced church growth. CS growth is what is
fueling church growth in the Sunlight example that recently hosted a
significant conference. Why?
4. The growth of CRC-CS is complex but on the whole, as Bill H pointed
out part of a larger conservative revitilization and reaction to what
has been happening in public education in America and probably Canada
too. As Nate pointed out our schools aren’t filling up people aligned
with CRC confessional particulars but rather many who would be more
easily associated with movement conservatism and anxiety over social
changes culturally. One interesting note on the CS thread is Dawn’s
promotion of it given her outspoke criticism of the conservative pull
within the CRC. The CRC Christian schools is an direct result of
people fleeing the re-education of American (and Canadian?) children
along the lines of the new sexual orthodoxies practices and policies.
If there is an area of public life where the promotion of the new
thinking regarding human sexual diversity has flourished it is in
public education and this has motivated a lot of wall building and
spending with respect to enclosures of preservation especially in
education of younger children. That’s part of the reason Christian
colleges that are numerically thriving are small and very conservative
rather than moderate or progressive.
5. There is no question the movement around Trump is more conservative
on sexual issues than Trump himself. Trump is usually tagged as a
homophobe but Trump has never really been a culture warrior on issues
of sexual purity or traditionalism. He even removed the anti-abortion
plank from the Republican platform in 2024. In this way the TDS of the
left has obscured a more nuanced and accurate reading of how Trump
himself is being used by people often more conservative than he is and
this is true in the CRC and beyond. In my most recent conversation
with the identical twins separated by Trump I got the answer I
expected from the conservative brother who would have liked to vote
for Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio than Trump. JD Vance is another great
example. Many of these guys in terms of human sexuality are far more
like religious conservatives than Trump and have used Trump as the tip
of the spear to pursue other issues Trump himself might not be
passionate about. Trump’s a venal guy and he’s never really been a
traditionalist on human sexuality beyond being traditionally
promiscuous.
This frustrates Trump’s political rivals because he has been used by
conservatives to put together a coalition that has effectively blunted
the progressive post-war consensus like nothing else we’ve seen
before.
At the same time most public school education is controlled at
different levels than the federal government, which has been a policy
of Trumps (destruction of the Dept. of Education) putting public
education much more on the state and local level politically.
The CRC diaspora maps differently from the US right/left mapping so
we’ll see CRC red pockets in deep blue areas like Chicago and
Massachusetts. This too will tend to fuel CRC CS growth.
6. Nate’s comments about CRC CS growth and confessionalism is
important. In many places RC schools have done well too. The movement
conservative public can be pretty flexible on the confessional
questions. Fights over RC schools have been way more fierce than over
ours partly because it was not uncommon to find RC schools in places
like the SF bay community that weren’t really teaching ANY RC social
doctrine. Attempts by some conservative clergy to reign this in have
gotten a lot of press in the last few decades. “How DARE the priests
say X and Y about sexual minorities in their schools” or in Sacramento
kicking out the Only-Fans mom paying for her kids RC school tuition by
making sexy videos for paying clients.
The Protestant CS area has long been Evangelical (looser on
confessional lines like infant baptism) and the preservationist pull
on our schools, plus the structure (parent-board-owned and operated)
has allowed that flexibility, unlike in the church. The dynamic being
clearly seen in RC schools (the Orthos haven’t grown to this level yet
allowing them to just ride the Homeschool movement which is a piece of
this too) makes this a decidedly Metagelical phenomenon.
The Christian Smith Notre Dame First Things piece is an interesting
artifact in this whole question. Why won’t Notre Dame be more
confessionally RC? As I noted before AGE is an important aspect of
this and the dynamics at the college and especially graduate levels
will be very different from elementary and high school levels on terms
of parental control and motivation.
While CRC churches are struggling CRC schools were ideally located in
many respects to ride this wave, and many of them are.
Last point.
We are probably, slowly, seeing the evolution of the new metagelical
elites in America.
As noted in a previous posting for the liturgical-sacramentalist
traditions strict confessional flexibility is an asset not a
liability, to a point.
We’ve already seen that as a politician you can do anything you want
in your public life and your priest or bishop won’t cut you off from
your sacrament. Joe Biden and JD Vance get served regardless of their
politics or policies. Pete Hegseth could get in trouble with his “Doug
Wilson church” in a host of ways Biden and Vance never would, or even
Putin for that matter.
It’s interesting how different paradoxical nuances intersect to create
particulars out in the real world. CRC particulars have created a
“sweet spot” for numerical growth of our schools but not our churches.
The CRC’s confessional rigor and polity helped it avoid the RCA
debaucle, but the RCA flexibility helped it for while take advantage
of other Evangelical dynamics when it was growing swiftly among
conservative evangelicals (church growth RCAs didn’t require Infant
Baptism, see the ARC) until all of that growth fled when the
Evangelicals couldn’t overcome the RCA constitutional polity.
There’s a lot going on here. pvk
Ryrie opens up his book with Bonhoeffer who suggests that part of what led to the invisibility of religion and the obsession with the political was the inability of the church to prevent the Holocaust.
We are proceeding towards a time of no religion at all: men as they are now simply cannot be religious any more … Those who honestly describe themselves as ‘religious’ do not in the least act up to it, and so when they say ‘religious’ they evidently mean something quite different.
Ryrie, Alec. The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It (p. 32). Reaktion Books. Kindle Edition.For the Christians who formed the backbone of the civil rights movement in the United States, it became a point of principle to play down their religious identity and to forge broad alliances that paid no heed to faith.
Ryrie, Alec. The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It (p. 33). Reaktion Books. Kindle Edition.
I did some commenting on his video before I left for SouthEastuary. https://youtu.be/ymTiWayr9TY?si=_RD7fx75bAd4vtp9
The moderate/left EEEEvangelical elites have been in the sort of collapse the CRC-Exiles have been in. Here Kaitlyn Schiess who’s become something of a darling of this crew in getting confronted about wanting her values to be manifest in the political realm but NOT wanting to identify as a dread Christian Nationalism has to do a bit of backtracking.
We want covert Christian Internationalism. Smuggle Jesus in without anybody seeing under the guise of “it’s just universal right and wrong…”
Those principles were, as President Roosevelt put it in his ‘four freedoms’ speech in 1941, freedom of speech and of worship, and freedom from want and fear. America sought these freedoms, he insisted, not only for itself but ‘everywhere in the world’.11 Beside that stirring, universal vision, Eliot’s ‘new Christian culture’ looked particularist, unambitious and downright parochial. It was Roosevelt’s America which popularized an ingenious new label for what the Allies were defending: not Christian civilization, but Judeo-Christian civilization. Under other circumstances, conscripting Judaism into a supporting role in a Christian drama might have been crass, but at this moment it was an inspired move. It of course directly defied Nazism’s murderous obsession with Jews and Judaism, and – against some trends in liberal Protestant theology – firmly asserted that Christianity had Jewish roots. But it also made it clear that this newly imagined Judeo-Christian civilization was irreducibly plural. It was a broad-based alliance, which, by going so far as to embrace Judaism, also made it obvious that Christians of all kinds would be part of this united front. It is true that President Roosevelt said in 1942 to two of his staffers – one a Catholic, one a Jew – that ‘you know this is a Protestant country, and the Catholics and Jews are here under sufferance.’ But he was joking, in his sawtoothed way, and they knew it. America was by then fighting for a world of religious freedom, and if America’s collective religious imagination as yet only extended to Protestantism, Catholicism and Judaism, the point still stood.12
Ryrie, Alec. The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It (p. 25). Reaktion Books. Kindle Edition.
Canada is of course the elder brother compared to the prodigal American son who rebelled. Nothing like a prodigal son triggering the defensiveness and re-activating nationalism by re-electing an Orange man.
Ryrie (who is a Brit) points out that it was finally Roosevelt who won the day on this cementing American hegemony. It was OUR universal empire of the four freedoms that scolded Uganda in keeping up with gay liberation OR ELSE…
Trump is the most ironic character here in that his nationalism is an abandonment of the quiet Empire America has been running all along. Western Europe is sort of like the Ukraine of the 1990s not quite knowing what to do with momma Russia has to pull back. Hungary figured it out quickly though.
Americans, like the Brits before us just found the Empire too expensive to keep. Unfortunately Empire is sort of a way to allow limited wars and avoid the sort of powder keg that WW1 was with competing regional powers.
The religion of the empire is going away with the empire. What will happen next? The reversion to older root stock is a reasonable expectation.
The true irony is that rather than some Brit in a pit helmet the true conservatives today wave rainbow flags in blue hair and rainbow vestments of mainline churches. https://youtu.be/tDPMcdd7F0A?si=x_fGzPlExge9hVai
pvk
https://roddreher.substack.com/p/fish-who-know-what-water-is
https://roddreher.substack.com/p/first-thoughts-after-midwestuary
https://jimfield.substack.com/p/the-estuary-effect
https://jimfield.substack.com/p/notes-from-midwestuary
https://morefullyalive.substack.com/p/dispatches-from-across-deep-divides
https://terimurphybothworlds.substack.com/p/midwestuary-2025-part-4-three-magic
https://www.furtherup.net/p/the-conference-of-misfit-souls
https://www.rigelthurston.com/p/gargoyles-at-the-belongapocalypse
https://substack.com/home/post/p-171515304
Sea change, vibe shift… Whatever you want to call it. It’s done. It’s time to start building the next CRCNA. If we don’t then it’s done.
I still think the CRCNA has a lot to offer the North American church. It’s time to start putting it together.
We need:
1. A new kind of network.
2. A new circulatory system.
The CRC “network” was a hub and spoke network. You can find the diagram in an old Yearbook with Grand Rapids at the center and then spokes or rays going out in every direction in the US and Canada. That made sense for the 20th century. Institution required concentrated buildings, offices, staff, publishing houses, schools, seminaries, etc. Lots of brick and mortar.
After THE war the CRC had a diaspora where CRC churches were planted as satellites and those made up the nodes of the circulatory system. It helped the CRC indigenize a bit in North American soil. The Canadian experience was also a refugee effort where refugees from war torn Europe got a chance to thrive, build, heal.
Synods 2022-2025 severed the “head” of the denomination and the hub and spoke system. The HUGE denominational brick office building was sold. “Offices” consolidated into “Thrive”, pre-war collective ministries (CRWM, CRHM, BTGH) have been reshaped, consolidated and in some respects retooled, spun off, or resolved in one way or another. This is a hard process, but it is the way of institution. Institutions are there to facilitate what the ministry needs and the culture affords but disruption happens to institutions and they must adapt.
The hub and spoke model was key to the circulatory system. Children of the diaspora were enculturated at Calvin, Dordt, Redeemer, Trinity or Kuiper and then sent out again. Christian Day schools had their part. These institutions survived the CRC baby bust by attracting like minded evangelicals and others from the surrounding localities. They may in some cases feed all the way back into the churches but that flow has been insufficient to help the churches adjust to the baby bust.
Focus
Church growth, revitalization, and planting is all dependent on discipleship and leadership development. The amount of growth the CRC will receive will be directly related to the number and quality of Christian leaders it grows. Leaders are grown not in schools but churches. Schools will have their roles but churches must be the primary focus of this growth.
Ideas
I think we need leadership incubators. I think they need to be decentralized but connected. Initially I’m thinking to start at least Sacramento, Tucson and Florida because these three areas all have some momentum in different aspects and a lot of church planting experience. Other clusters around the US and Canada can certain step up and try to build one.
These won’t be centrally planned or built from Grand Rapids. Grand Rapids itself might have one develop from its churches, but they will tend to be either Classically based or something created by a cluster or smaller network of churches.
1. Classes and local clusters will initiate their own leadership incubators.
2. They will develop their own profiles, create their own plans, raise their own funds, collaborate and partner with and through denominational networks and institutions.
3. Participants are not drawn only from the denomination but also from other surrounding churches. Denominational entities that collaborate with these incubators will help re-circulate new leaders throughout existing networks in the denomination. While some portion of the new leadership will be ready to plant new CRCs in the US and Canada around and beyond the incubators other leaders that perhaps aren’t church planters will go into other CRC churches and bring what they learned to those churches helping them do better with evangelism, discipleship and leadership development.
4. These new leaders will impact the existing institutional infrastructure of the denomination over time and the cumulative impact should be to revitalize the CRC for the current context and help it to keep updating itself as conditions change. Most of these incubators are likely to be in areas of early cultural change which will help the entire denomination prepare as changes filter through the cultural matrices.
As the number of “incubators” grow, and other clusters and classes begin to implement even some of what is learned in other places we should see in 20 years a marked change in the vitality of the denomination.
Interested to hear your thoughts. pvk
https://www.thebanner.org/columns/2020/05/the-banner-s-mission-and-role-part-1
https://www.thebanner.org/columns/2018/02/mirror-and-forum
https://www.thebanner.org/columns/2020/06/the-banner-s-mission-part-3-vision-values
Part 2 is missing.
The Banner shifted with Kuyvenhoven and this was the shift now referred to as the “post-war consensus”.
The name is imperfect but the dynamics are quite evident. Everyone felt the cultural shift, the last major vibe shift before this one perhaps.
Look at the pushback the Bananer received. Pretty tame stuff by Internet meme standards. Anyone who has been on the internet and gone to adulthood has seen FAR worse than The Bananer” every dared to deal out. Now President Spoelhof working hard to confiscate all the paper issues to shield young CRC impressionable souls…
Calls to expel the students, calls for church discipline. Any of us old enough to remember, or remember our parents stories understand the “climate” of the CRC in those days.
Those who created the Bananer (partly because of the pushback) became cultural heroes within the CRC. They were the new young leadership who would blaze the trail for the application of THAT vibe shift for that generation.
It’s a different world. Many interpret what happened at Synod as “we’re going back to those days…” but really? Hardly. There’s not putting THAT back in the bottle.
That’s why I had Rod tell some stories.
Synod 1955 could hardly imagine Synod 2025. Even the CRC “conservatives” have no problem working with women. They might be complementarians but they’re not instituting the Handmaid’s tale. https://youtu.be/dVLiDETfx1c?si=Y1Ak_LL4ngJF6QiI
The CRC today would be difficult even for my grandparents to understand.
Kuyvenhoven felt the shift and adjusted. He did so dramatically with “burning the wooden shoes”. That cultural regime ruled between 1980 and 2024. Not a bad run.
Why the shock that it ended? It’s always a shock.
A dominant coalition, if not THE dominant leadership coalition in the CRC has been displaced and its trajectory has been forked. The Banner was the biggest symbol of that for this Synod and perhaps the last element demonstrating this transition.
I respect Chong for resigning. He didn’t seem able to “read the room” at Synod. After Synod did what it did he could see and adjust.
What will The Banner become?
The truth is that 99% of what has come through the Banner over the last decade wouldn’t have difficulty with the revised mandate. The question was increasingly “tone”.
This puts The Banner in a very difficult position because it has been reinforcing the 1980 to 2024 tone with its readers and now if there is a shift they threaten to alienate the most loyal and faithful readership they have.
The most glaring challenge, however, is the question of what place does a monthly magazine have in the overall strategy of the CRCNA?
When The Banner was put under the ministry share umbrella and became a “every household” magazine it was changed. It appeared to be a subtle change but actually it was a foundational change. Almost all analogous denominational magazines have died. The Banner was supposed to replace the promotional mailings that agencies and ministries had been sending to households.
Chong’s point to Synod (both through his spoken presentation and the COD “right of comment” statement in the Supplement mostly crafted by him) was “The Banner needs to have independence from the Institution to be the voice of the people.”
This was a classic 1960s counter-culture vibe-shift posture where the journalist, the youth, the activist stands up to the Institution, to speak truth to power, etc.
What was missing was that over the last 2 decades many in the denomination felt that The Banner (and The Network) was more akin to Pravda, the mouthpiece of the Communist party in Russia. The “people’s” voice (of the conservatives, and now the young conservatives) were suppressed BY the institution. The blocking the ad from Abide and taking the ad from Better Together was just validation of their suspicions.
There are dark inverted ironies here where the revolution is now conservative rather than “progressive”. I personally think all these labels are near worthless but they’re the lenses we see through today.
The Banner imagines itself to be a “kitchen table” with Archie, Edith, Gloria and Meathead when we’re living in Everything All At Once. https://youtu.be/wxN1T1uxQ2g?si=wOYR0tZFwtQSs6ld
Now the really difficult work begins. Finishing off an already toppled regime is one thing. Figuring out what to do next is on an entirely different level.
Kuyvenhoven got to “follow the script” already well worn by a broader, unified culture. “Keep 20 steps behind the mainline, add some neo-Calvinism, you’ll be OK.”
There is no script for the CRC to follow, really. People will look to the PCA, or some other post-progressive ideas.
There is no HJ Kuiper right now, which is a good thing. As many here have noted Kuiper and Vanderploeg were gone before many now in CRC pulpits were born. Kuyvenhoven class Banner editors (Canadian, moderate-progressive) had a pretty amazing run. It’s hard, however, to not remember John Suk’s journey. https://faithisntwhatyouthink.blogspot.com/2022/10/is-yahweh-god-who-never-was.html
I came into Synod not asking “Should Chong still be the editor? Should we adjust The Banner mandate?” but rather “What really are we doing with that thing?”
Part of the problem with what passes today for CRC Conservatism is that they don’t have too much of a template beyond “we should undo the post-war consensus.”
Fill the Banner with what exactly? Sermons? Devotionals? Movie reviews?
More Rod Hugen if you ask me. 🙂
But the question is serious. Imagine the CRC decided to buy a retired commercial airliner so that it wouldn’t have to pay United or Air Canada to shuttle people to our meetings. We’d howl at the silliness of that.
We are awash in communication. If you want to listen to “CRC Voices” there is no end of places from here, to Facebook, to Twitter, to the RJ, to Abide website, to substacks, etc. etc.
Today I wanted some news about the Democratic mayoral primary. Do I go to the NYT? Is it still a “city paper”? Sort of, but not really. What are Newspapers today? What are magazines? Why are we reselling vinyl records?
I suspect we will find a new editor and “The Banner” will continue, but when everything around something changes that thing changes too. I’m not sure much thought has gone into how our Internet everything-all-at-once world changes what a denomination is or what it decides to commit to paper and to pixels under a domain name.
pvk
Leadingchurch.com 