"By schisms rent asunder, by heresies distressed"

No one mentioned it, but the truth is that the meeting was definitely historic. As few as a couple of decades ago, a get-together between churches of the two denominations would have been almost unthinkable.

 

I can't complain about my parents. They were pious but thoughtful, capable of long and involved discussions about politics or theology, conversations they enjoyed and I enjoyed hearing when I was old enough to understand the fundamental issues being discussed. The stock images of dour, nay-saying Dutch Calvinists was nowhere close to applicable. My parents loved the Lord, they'd say, and practiced a piety that was as palpable at home as prayer itself.

But when my sister fell in love with a boy from the Reformed Church (RCA), they weren't happy, largely because, traditionally at least, members of the RCA not only didn't support but actually opposed Christian education, which is to say the Christian school I attended and they supported (my father was board president, my mother a frequent substitute teacher), the Oostburg Christian School just a block--maybe less--from 714 Superior, where I grew up. 

When my sister determined she would marry the RCA boy, things were said that were never totally forgotten. I believe they learned to love him, but in some ways the damage was done, as it was in many homes of the Dutch Reformed people in whose close circles I grew up, people who considered what my sister entered into something of a "mixed marriage."

The meeting, just one night ago, as far as I know, was locally the first of its kind: members of two denominations meeting in one room to discuss their mutual concerns in light of theological questions surrounding gay marriage. Today, it seems, both groups can consolidate their missions by a perverse looming enemy, what conservatives used to call "the gay agenda." What's brought the RCA and CRC together after 164 years (the CRC officially left in 1857) was gay marriage; both denominations have suffered bitter dissension about how to deal with homosexuality.

A mutual struggle brought them together--not because of gay marriage, the participants maintained, but because of radically different views of scripture. Those who would close the door on the LGBTQ issue claim those who wouldn't quite simply do not read the Bible right. The division is a matter of orthodoxy, specifically whose orthodoxy is the verifiable orthodoxy.

Late in the meeting, a well-meaning man stood to say he was 76 years old, and he just wanted to say that his grandfather feared the Lord and read the Bible as if it were the Word of God. It wasn't an unfamiliar comment, nor was it off the track of the conversations that went on. "Give me that old-time religion," he might have said, a comforting idea that resonated with lots of people who'd gathered. 

But it's also silly. I'm sorry. No one in or around Sioux Center, Iowa, practices a way of life the man's grandfather did in the Siouxland of the 1930s and 40s, when some congregations still used the Dutch language and would (and did) fight to save it. 

We no longer live in his grandpa and grandma's era. If you would like to know the difference, read the imaginative writers of the era or visit a local museum. Still, that comment energizes many who want to walk away from those with whom they disagree and animated the discussion even before he said what he did.

I know exactly where to look in the book I wrote about the history of the Christian Reformed Church to find a list of the reasons why the CRC broke away from the RCA in 1857. In less than a minute, I could find a handy listing of those reasons, but don't ask me to recite them. I'm guessing very, very few of those who gathered in that church sanctuary, a word we once used, could list any one of the five reasons I listed and discussed in that book. Any. Of. The. Reasons.

I'd love to go back to Alaska and know more about the life and work of the Rev. Sheldon Jackson, a Presbyterian missionary who traveled unceasingly throughout the west, establishing churches, doing wonderful work among a people dispossessed by waves of white people who wanted their land. There's a museum there, all about his work. 

If you'd like to read exciting stories about Native America, pick up a biography of Father DeSmit, a legendary Jesuit "black robe," who left a legacy you can see in innumerable stained glass tributes throughout the west. I share DNA with the Rev. Andrew VanderWagen, a CRC pastor, who learned to love the Zuni people in New Mexico, gave his life to them, and is buried there among them, as is his wife and children.

But I can also point you at books written by Native people who describe Christian missionaries whose palpable enmity was sourced in their differing denominational backgrounds, men whose hate and spite Indigenous people saw as hopelessly confusing and was, as they describe it, a blot on their Christian witness.

I can't help but wonder at the righteousness of yet another split, another faction, another denomination. The Center for the Study of Global Christianity says there are already 200 denominations in these United States and 45,000 in the world. 

It seems some among us believe there should be yet another, this one home of the truly orthodox.