What is a Denomination For?

Most of the time we approach this question from above. We pursue meta-congregational unity because Jesus desired it in John 17 and our divisions betray the body of Christ. “Denomination” itself is a sort of confession of our sinful weakness. We are divided.

From below we need identity and community.

As finite human beings we are short-lived and have a limited relational capacity. Identity and confession must be specific because we are limited. We are this and not that. We have relational ties to these people and groups and not those. Our narrative threads that compose our identity is made up of these cumulative selections.

You Will Always Have Groupings

American evangelicalism is implicit denominationalism in denial.

Mark Noll in a very worthy post on BioLogos entitled 15 Reasons Why Evangelicals Fear Evolution noted this about the development of evangelicalism.

In the effort to build churches with forms and assumptions that fit the new American nation, most of Europe’s traditional authorities came under severe attack.  The great exception was the Bible.  Passages from Scripture had been invoked everywhere during the Revolution, though often in symbolic ways (like referring to the British Parliament as “Egypt” and George Washington as “Moses”) rather than in deciding whether the Revolution was a just war.  In the early republic, the great engine of the revival preaching that proved so successful for Methodists, Baptists, and many others was the Bible.  Scripture was preached by itinerants and by regular clergy; it was the basis for organizing churches on the frontier and maintaining stability in settled regions.  In the absence of well-developed social institutions or government structures, the King James Version of the Bible was the closest thing to a universal cultural authority.  And because the Bible was the people’s book, which all who could read might appropriate for themselves, it almost completely escaped the suspicion that fell upon the other mainstays of historical European Christianity.

It is important to restate the sequence that undergirded the attitudes that took firm hold in early American history. Conventions in biblical interpretation were not worked out in academic isolation but were agents of tremendous public power forged in the crucible of practical necessity. A democratic, populist, and literal hermeneutic was the interpretive strategy that evangelical Protestants exploited to win the new republic for Christ. The social transformation that resulted seemed to validate the evangelicals’ approach to Scripture. For reaching the unreached with the Christian message, for organizing congregations and building churches, for creating agencies to construct and reform society, reliance on the Bible alone, literally interpreted, worked wonders

Evangelicals can agree to pledge allegiance to the Bible even if they can’t agree on what the Bible says. The Christian Reformed Church’s European confessionalism embraces a more specific challenge, to create identity and community around not only the Bible but around specific teachings found in the creeds and confessions. We believe the Bible is one of the two books we need to live faithfully before God, yet that faithfulness requires the community to discern with specificity the shape of the revealed story.

The Bible is a field with wonderful agricultural potential, through confessions the church takes up Adam’s call to cultivate it into a garden.

 How The Belhar Revealed Our Poverty

Did the CRC appreciate the magnitude of what it attempted by adding the Belhar as a fourth confession?

The CRC received its three creeds from the ancient catholic church. It brought its three confessions from northern Europe. While the confessions were supposed to be the basis of unity, the gravitational forces that have continued to pull against this unity are mostly post-confessional. The story of the 20th century for the CRC was one of assimilation. The closest attempt we made in the 20th century was to fashion the Contemporary Testimony, a document that could express unity even among the CRC factions that increasingly mirror the larger factions of the children of Western Christianity.

The challenge of the Belhar was to have a covenantal conversation surrounding a confession that wasn’t from the West. The task of hosting that conversation fell to the denominational exoskeleton. The church (the whole church) has been having conversations since Jesus. We thought we knew how to have a conversation. Since the time of Jesus the tools of conversation were podium/pulpit, table and paper.

(See my past posts on the Belhar discussion)

Assembly Deliberation in a Cyber Age

Christian Reformed polity is centered upon assemblies of confessionally covenanted office bearers. We’ve always known, however, that while decisions are made at deliberative assemblies, assemblies cannot contain or limit this deliberation. Deliberation happens at home, at church, in the street, in the market, with books, with family, with friends, with rivals, with experts, with scholars, with lay people. Now deliberation is happening increasingly in front of glowing screens.  Identity and community are shaped by deliberation and deliberation is shaped by identity and community. Denomination is supposed to facilitate deliberation in such a way as to help it be faithful to God and productive for community.

The most common complaint I heard about the attempt to host the Belhar conversation was that it felt less like the denomination (I’m referring to the exoskeleton here) was hosting a conversation and more like it was selling a product. I can appreciate the challenge the denomination faced in this. There is a culture of suspicion in the CRC that is easily activated. Leadership is also often about leading a people into a place they do not wish to go. It is my opinion that the Belhar conversation was botched because we do not appreciate how deeply broader social and technological changes have impacted our capacity for conversation and deliberation. While we have attempted to employ the new tools of the cyber age, we don’t understand how much the larger picture has changed and how it has impacted what a denomination is, what it is for, and how it can work for the welfare of the church and its people.

Agenda for Synod 2014

Look at the bit items on this year’s Synod docket.

1. The Banner: how will our flagship print publication be used and to what end within our community?

2. Creation and Science yet again. Should we have a study committee to explore the historicity Adam and the fall and what are the permitted boundaries for this conversation in the CRC.

3. Synod will (there is little question about it) appoint 2/3rds of its new executive leadership team tasking them to complete the work of the Task Force Reviewing Structure and Culture with an eye towards employing the 5 streams through which the exoskeleton attempts to employ its resources not only on behalf of the churches but also in support of needed revitalization.

The task of the denomination (exoskeleton) is to host these conversations so that they will be a productive and fruitful blessing to the community by continuing to shape and define our identity together.

Questions

• Perhaps the most important function of a denomination moving forward is its capacity to host debate for identity and community. Can the CRC figure out its communication channels?
• What is the Banner for?
• What is the Network for?
• Should they be “dumb pipes” for CRC conversation or should they try to filter and guide conversations? (See my previous post on the Banner). Some see the use of the Banner as moving the church to the left in an ongoing modernist/confessionalist struggle. Some have accused the Network of silencing conservative critics.
• Is content and comment moderation on CRC cyber networks skewed liberal?
• Is it too intolerant of criticism? Is the filter too heavy handed?
• Are passionate and ungenerous voices ruining the capacity of the medium to host a productive conversation?
• Will ungoverned comment threads devolve into uncivil trolling?
• Do Study Committees still make sense?
• Can we immediately assume because some Calvin profs wrote papers with things we disagree with that they were wrong?
• When we want “the brightest and the best” aren’t we probably pulling from the same pool?
• Do the conclusions of a study committee devolve into the politically driven appointment of its members?
• Will the study committee reports have more weight than the findings of Peter Enns, NT Wright, Al Mohler, Francis Collins, Ken Ham and other voices immediately available to CRC people through the non-denominational channels that they trust MORE than the denominational ones? What does this mean for the perceived value of denomination?
• Can a denominational exoskeleton be BOTH an honest host of deliberation AND attempt to lead its organic host in revitalization? The botched Belhar conversation bears out this dilemma.
• Can the denomination both “recommend” something AND host a deliberation about the subject? We already have a suspicious culture, suspicious of those in authority, those with influence, those with power, those who control the tools that are intended to allow deliberation yet who have a stake in the outcomes of those deliberations. Can this work?
• The Evangelical model which is essentially a market model assumes a vacuum of an over-arching coercive institution. Are CRC folks who are participation in this world asking for such a model? Is such a model really faithful to the authority of Christ when we implicitly abdicate to the authority of the religious marketplace?
• Could I have written this series of Synod 2014 posts on The Network? How would they have had to be different?
• Is an independent channel better? Are CRC channels (The Banner, The Network) lacking vitality because it is “too liberal”, “too conservative” or too bland and safe? Is keeping CRC channels safe for folks who don’t want to get upset or be offended making them less useful?

I think if we as a community want to thrive moving forward these are just some of the questions we need to wrestle with.