I wrote this for the CRC Pastor’s Facebook Group

My central goal in The Banner conversation is to get us thinking and talking together. In the sub piece I posted I noted the culture-making analogy of paper folding.

The CRC will fail to contribute not so much probably by making wrong decisions but rather by making no decisions at all. We are an anesthetic culture that puts us to sleep to music of other players rather than picking up an instrument and learning to make music ourselves.

The emergence of the two articles that raised ire of many in the CRC was a sign of life. It wasn’t the most positive sign of life but you’ve got to have identity in order to be offended.
My problem with the Banner and what the CRC is becoming is that it is not compelling. In a reactive culture we want to make sure we don’t offend. Now being offensive for its own sake has little virtue and I would be happy if it was our beauty that compelled but I fear it is neither.

If culture making is folding paper then I’m afraid the world is folding our paper for us and we’re just passing around the pre-folded paper we’ve received.

I was working on a series on CRC history in the late 20th century and I got up to the Reformed Journal faction and stalled with Molly Worthen’s book partly because I realized how parallel the RJ community ran with the CT community. Is what we want from the Banner to be a more provincial version of Christianity Today?

The RJ crowd in its heyday desired to be consequential. I fear that line has been mostly spent and felt a loss. Maybe we just resigned ourselves to our obscurity? I don’t know.
Why do we go through all the bother to be CRC? Go to classis, support institutions, pay ministry shares, run Christian schools? Many I think would say “why not just be evangelicals like everyone else” and then pick your sub-tribe of evangelicals as distinguished by your favorite celebrity pastor or blogger. Why not see denomination or tribe as a rather unimportant accident of history?

I believe that paper folding comes out of communities. In community, and specifically the church, God moves history forward and for that reason our tribe matters, but it will only matter if we start folding some paper or learn to fold again.

The Banner isn’t the CRC, I get that, but around what institutions and things can we find space to fold paper? We surely do it in our local churches. I know that. I’m about to do some paper folding this morning, I hope, with my preaching and teaching. But will we do it together? How?

That’s my question and my mission in this conversation.