"The Sioux Center Affair" (vii)

 In April of 1921, the synodical deputies announced that seven members of the original Consistory were "deposed," lost their jobs, an action that Church Order made clear should have happened in a meeting in which they deposed were present. Hadn't happened. Half the church, eighty families, as well as the Consistory and their families, refused to accept their deposition. Those families decided to meet for worship in what was then the Sioux Center Town Hall, to take their case back to the denominational Synod, and to say goodbye to the Sioux Center Classis and simply enlist in Classis Orange City, who'd taken up the Town Hall group's cause by lodging protests and assigned them "spokesmen" to aid the group in forming a new congregation, as well as providing them with pulpit supply until the Town Hall-ers could call their own undershepherd. 

Meanwhile, the old Teachers Meeting group voted in their own new consistory and, of course, opened up the Sunday School once again, using the new constitution of course. In a move that, a century later, seems totally bizarre, the new church told the Orange City Classis that the Town Hall group wasn't really a congregation at all--no one, after all, had been kicked out and that they (Orange City Classis) had been in error in taking them in because they were still members of the original church.

In June, Classis Sioux Center met in Rock Valley to try to create order from the chaos. The Town Hall-ers claimed they wanted reconciliation, but they wanted a peace created on the basis of their original determination--that the Teachers Meeting publicly confess their sin, going way back to that Christmas service debacle. Besides, the argued, as Van Dyke puts it, "They were the legal congregation because they stood for true Reformed principles."

Classis Sioux Center, as you can imagine, didn't take kindly to being accused of poor judgment. What's more, they determined that there was no evidence that the Teachers Meeting descendants were at all interested in reunification. The best resolution, at least for the present, was for the separate bodies to continue to meet on their own until the 1922 Synod could meet and sort things out. 

Meanwhile, the Town Hall group decided they needed a minister so they called a pastor from the Worthington, MN church, a Rev. Ypma, who accepted. Thus, in the fall of 1922, the Town Hall group--led by the old Consistory--became a separate church. For the time being, no new action was taken, which doesn't mean there was peace around town, I'm sure.

It just so happened that the 1922 Synod of the CRC met in Orange City. After lengthy wrangling Synod ruled that the action taken by the breakaway group--deposing the old consistory--was illegal, as was the new congregation's manner of meeting without members of the old Consistory's following. But the original Consistory was also admonished for secretive meetings that excluded members of the church--and the pastor--they were supposed to serve. 

In short, here's the score after Synod 1922:

1-the Teachers Meeting was wrong in deposing the rightly-constituted Consistory;

2-The office bearers selected from the original nominations from the Old Consistory were the rightful office-bearers.

3-Should there be two Sioux Center Churches, the half of the congregation to come from the original Teachers Meeting should give financial aid for the purpose of building a church. 

Van Dyke claims that the Synod, even if it met locally, because, for all practical purposes, the horse was already out of the church barn. A kind of roughshot settlement had arisen as both parties began to work at their own agendas. Ruling as they did, Synod attempted to right past wrongs in good fashion; however, for all practical purposes going back was not now where this battered church was. Already, there were two congregations. Practically speaking, there would be no peace moving backwards. The only hope was a new beginning from a defined split.

That third synodcal ruling, Van Dyke says, was "the source of much future dissension." Now, that there was money involved, the acrimony would almost certainly, require different arbitrators. Now, the courts would be involved, even though traditional piety on both sides maintained that brothers in Christ had no business using courts to solve their problems. 

The disgruntlement, the outright hostility that had already taken up two long years, required multiple meetings of multiple classis and two annual denominational Synods, but it was about to enter a whole new venue.