If I were Jerry Dykstra wouldn’t my #1 priority at this point have to be facilitating the process by which the CRC would come to a decision on the Belhar? If I were a member of the CRC BOT wouldn’t this also become my #1 priority? The confessions are supposedly (after the Bible and the creeds) the most important documents we possess. They are supposed to give shape to the church’s life and vocation aren’t they?

We spoke earlier that the confessions have a face looking inward and a face looking outward. Some of the Synod talk to the Belhar’s promotion concerned the CRC embracing it before it adopts it. What kind of a process would result in this if this were your goal? Is the BOT’s goal its adoption or the discussion?

Our congregation sent an elder to Synod. Because she went there are others now who are saying “what’s confession?” (Maybe that speaks of the poverty of my performance.) One woman board and CRC said to me “I thought we had two: the Apostle’s creed and that other one we say sometimes…” Ouch.

Synod as an assembly is sometimes something like an ADHD amnesiac. We’ll all get memos in our boxes saying “You’ve been assigned to run an ecclesiastical marathon, the likes of which we haven’t run for almost 400 years. Bring appropriate footwear!” The CRC has spent the last 40 years paying attention to other things some of which we haven’t done very well and now we’re going to try to do this?

It could be that at this moment when the CRC is having a deep identity crisis that such a thing is providential. Maybe we need to get out a flashlight, head to the basement and attend to foundation of the house. We’ve seen a lot of cracks, and even whole rooms falling off the house. The thing about doing this kind of work is that you never know what exactly you’ll find when you start digging, pulling off the drywall, etc. Mostly what we tend to do is take a quick look and say “I’m not sure I have the time or the money for this. I’ll attend to the urgent.”

The Faith Formation group was tasked 5 years to examine the joists under the nursery, baptismal font and the Lord’s table.

Does the leadership think this is less of a task? Does that indicate that they are mostly seeing these confessions as documents that face outward rather than inward?

If the denomination is going to promote a process I assume they’ve better have something to roll out by the fall classis meetings. I suspect, however, that the decades long process of attending to agencies pursing the coveted prize of “collaboration” continues to attract the majority of the energy the ED (executive director) and the BOT have to spend. More recently the denominational priority for healthy churches for the purpose of transforming lives and communities worldwide http://www.crcna.org/pages/healthy_church.cfm . The healthy church priority is intended to renew the vigor of the local congregation for that transformative work.

I suspect we’ll see almost nothing in terms of a process led by the denominational offices. That might be a good thing given the levels of suspicion voiced at least on CRC-Voices (somewhat of a broadly CRC sample) about anything coming from a central office. Or maybe it’s indicative of how “confessional” the CRC really is internally and in practice.

It would seem an insult to the Belhar if what we were really serious about was getting our picture taken with the other adopters of the Belhar at some imagined Belhar convention to look however it is supposed to make us look.

After I posted this on CRC-Voices (a good place for Belhar discussion) I got an offline e-mail asking for some clarification so I wrote the follow.

If I’m challenging anyone with what I’ve written I guess it would be to be clear about what they are saying and to be honest about implications.

1. Our youngest confession is nearly 400 years old. We haven’t added another one since. It seems to be we’d want a evaluation period that would be in some ways commensurate with the relative importance. The RCA’s process of having classical ratification seems more honest in terms of having the document “embraced” not simply “adopted”. That phrase from the webcasts of the presentation stuck out for me.

2. These ecumenical confessions serve in two directions: outwardly (towards other denominations) and inwardly (FOS, towards our own people). It seems most of the focus from the IRC is naturally on the outward. OK, we want to stand in solidarity, but a confession at this level also points inward. That process would and should be very carefully considered. It would seem to be that denominational leadership WOULD have to adopt this as job one IF they saw it this way. I don’t see it having that level of priority from them, they have other priorities that they have been working on. THEREFORE I wonder if we are taking this aspect (inward) of the confession seriously.

3. I think the “embrace” vs. “adopt” is a key thought in this discussion. To me “embrace” means “make it your own in life and in practice”. “Adopt” means “add it to the book” which will likely mean that we treat it with the sort of benign neglect we tend to treat 2 of the 3 confessions we already have. The Belhar is a document that demands action. That kind of action demands embrace and engagement, not mere adoption. The greatest slight you could give to the document would be to quickly adopt it and then ignore it. It would seem to me that if you want to honor the document and the people who wrote it you’d better begin a process where people at the grass roots level engage the document, wrestle with it, weight what it is try to say, weigh how it is trying to say it, etc. This would mean de-prioritizing other things on the CRC burners at this point and making discussion on the Belhar a priority. Is that happening at the BOT or the ED level now? I don’t know that it is or isn’t.