Task Force Reviewing Structure and Culture

After the departure of the previous non-interim Executive Director the Board of Trustees of the Christian Reformed Church together with the Synod wanted a more in depth examination of our own dysfunction in our denominational life. The fruit of that desire was the Task Force Reviewing Structure and Culture (TFRSC). They offered their first report in the Agenda for Synod 2012 and it is worth reading all of their reports because they nicely attend to the significant denominational history that has caused our present structure and culture today.

What is a Denomination?

While I hope to blog about the significant history that resulted in our present structure, in this post I want to poke around at the more foundational question “what is a denomination for?” What is a denomination? Is it a modern thing? Can we do “church” the same now on a large scale without modern tools?

How the CRC Went From non-congregational Church to Denomination

By virtue of its Dutch Reformed roots and Church Order the CRC has always been a non-congregational church. What I mean by that is via Council, Classis and Synod the CRC has always thought of itself as a church with congregations, attempting to carefully balance the local expression, the regional mission and the national expression or catholicity. This structure was purely ecclesiastical with only one appendage which was academic (Calvin Seminary and prep school.) The culture was ecclesiastical, the offices were ecclesiastical, it was church.

The church first stuck its toe into the world of modern institution the same way many Protestant churches did with the modern missionary movement. The type of resource marshalling required to launch and sustain modern (19th Century as opposed to 21st century) international missions invited the rise of what become para-church organizations and create the institutional face of what we know as evangelicalism. Johanna Veenstra went to Nigeria with Sudan United Mission. If you’re looking to blame someone for enticing the CRC to move from church to denomination you should blame her. Foreign Missions set the pattern for what would become the agencies that the CRC would found INSIDE the church to ministry “on behalf of” the CRCNA.

The reason I emphasize INSIDE is because the CRC has (via some Kuyperian ideas of sphere sovereignty) founded many institutions but did so OUTSIDE of the ecclesiastical structure, think CSI Christian schools, colleges, medical institutions, retirement homes, etc. These have become modern institutions that are organizationally independent of the CRCNA although tied to it through history and often through requirements that board members be members of the CRC (although this is changing too in many places).

In the past I’ve talked about big D little d denomination but I think a better way to differentiate would be church (non-congregational) and denomination, understanding denomination to be the modern institution that employs business structure and culture rather than ecclesiastical office and culture.

On Behalf Of

The denomination was created and developed to do ministry “on behalf of” the church. Modern institutional tools, language and culture were borrowed from the world of the modern state and modern business to do things with money and information that the apparatus of Reformed ecclesiology really wasn’t designed to do. Employees were hired, materials were produced, buildings, vehicles and machinery were purchased and managed, policies were established, retirement benefits were institutionalized, health care was provided, etc. All of these things are modern tools used to create modern life replacing traditional, local, familial forms of human society and care. We simply can’t imagine a world without them.

All of these tools were marshalled to do ministry beyond the reach of volunteers in their local churches. Missionaries went to Nigeria and to New Mexico and this would become World Missions and Home Missions. Radio was invented and it was quickly seen as a tool for proclamation used first by evangelicals (are we seeing a pattern here yet?) so we followed with the Back to God Hour. Our need for professionally published distinctive materials would move from the Board of Publications to Faith Alive and the benevolent diaconal heart of the church would reach out in relief and development to CRWRC to World Renew. Calvin Seminary, run by ecclesiastical officers (did you know that Seminary professors have their own office in the church order?) with a prep school (that my grandfather Hiram attended) would spin off Calvin College first for training Christian school teachers but then pursuing more spheres of life, yet within the ownership of the CRCNA unlike Dordt or Trinity or Redeemer, etc.

Where Flesh Meets Wire

This is the story of an ecclesiastical organism becoming a cyborg of sorts, part ecclesiastical with ecclesiastical offices and culture and part modern institution with the language and methods of modern government and business tools and culture. The marriage of these two things has always been something like where electro-chemical organic nerves meet wire and DC current.

I’ve lived most of my life in the small church sphere and I’ve always found the denominational sphere a bit of a foreign place. In the small church relationships are face to face, policies aren’t explicit but implicit and subject to change often without much process dependent upon needs. Structures are quite flat and relationships are personal.

In the 90s in CR World Missions we were always trying to figure out our organizational relationship with World Relief. CRWM’s culture at that time was more ecclesiastical and World Relief’s more modern and so things went back and forth depending on what the “home office” was thinking would work best for coordination. I remember telling the World Missions “director” (note the language) “you tell us how you want the paperwork to look and we’ll send it to you like you want it, but we’ll make decisions here on the field in the way it works best for us, regardless of the way you think we need to make decisions here.” He obviously was not pleased.

In a modern institution I was an employee to be directed. I was his subordinate. In church I was a fellow office bearer, a peer.

The advance of the modern institution into church life arrived at the local level with the Seeker movement. I remember visiting a local CRC in the mid 90s to find the hot topic was “can business practices be used at church?” Bill Hybels, son of a CRC business man, pioneered the large church, CEO pastor model that swept suburban America and the world. Large churches could be managed with hierarchical structures, directors, reports, employees, staff, etc. as a way to create the large, local church where the vast majority of Americans now attend. Wire seems to have replaced flesh and bio-chemical nerves.

Dreams of the Wired Flesh

The response to the Seeker movement was the emergent movement which birthed both its liberal wing and its Reformed wing. Note Rob Bell and Mark Driscoll, bizarro twins of the emergent movement.

Both wings of the emergent movement were reactions against modern institution’s invasion of the ecclesiastical. Institutional was seen as inauthentic, impersonal, unspiritual. Local foods, local culture, local music, local church.

I don’t think this reaction, like most reactions, is fully self-conscious. Rob Bell and Mark Driscoll have employed a lot of modernity in their church and non-church pursuits, but they want modern technology that feels organic, think Apple not HP. The cybernetic organism may pine for its days of pure organism, but once dependent upon the machine it can never go back, it just tweeks the machine to fell more organic. Steve Jobs demands square corners…

On Behalf Of Becomes In Support Of

The critical turn we are seeing in the TFRSC is the CRC realizing that the host organism that has fueled the modern institutional ministries done “on behalf of” the organism is no longer growing (modern institutions and economies always expect never-ending growth) and is probably declining so now the machine wants to figure out how to prop up the organism and make it grow again.

The CRC agencies developed as a sort of exoskeleton that allowed the CRC organism to do what it couldn’t with flesh and bone. With the power of modern institution it could leap oceans and respond to earthquakes. It could amplify the voice of the organism to speak to people on other continents and in other languages. This modern institution of wires and motors could do what no organism could do. It could be a sort of superman.

The exoskeleton has become self-aware and has noticed that the organism upon which it depended is in trouble and it wishes to save the organism so that it can go on being superman because the world needs him.

From Agencies to Stones

If you read the TFRSC report you’ll notice their notice of the ECC and their 5 Smooth Stones. I’m running out of time right now and I’ll want to say more about the ECC later, but the critical thing to notice is that our agencies with the exception of what Home Missions has become have little to do with these 5 smooth stones that would become our 5 streams. Both the 5 smooth stones and the 5 streams are all ecclesiastical more than institutional. For the CRC the question is “can the machinery developed to be superman to the world save the organism that is in trouble?”

Can BTGM help local CRCs grow? Can WR help local CRCs do community development? We’ve been toying with these questions for a while but with TFRSC the denomination (I use that word with utmost intentionality) is getting serious.

Read the recent SPACT report and Lambert Sikkema’s response. This is the shape of the conversation between the organism (with a rather congregational reaction) talking to the exoskeleton. You can also hear it in complaints of the “centralization” protests.

End of the Matrix Trilogy

In the end of the Matrix trilogy machine and organism wonder if each can live without the other. The answer at this time is probably no. This is the conversation that is happening in the Emergent movement in both the Neo-Calvinist (Piper, Driscoll, Keller) and more liberal expressions (Rob Bell, Rachel Held Evans, Brian McLaren).

What will the CRC do? Can we really go back to the days before the machine?