The Oostburg CRC 150th birthday - iii

    But there was also, among some of those who left (and those who stayed), the deep suspicion of evil, of worldliness, of, quite frankly, good people of Dutch descent becoming “American.” Many of those people thought your ancestors and mine were, well, liberals. Traditionally, Oostburg-ians, deeply pious, carried that piety and their bibles with them to the new country and quickly became suspicious of bad behavior anywhere near. Believe it or not, one of the founding fathers, a dominie no less, sold liquor in Cedar Grove.

But just as important was the dream that homesteading the Nebraska grassland would be a breeze because, with no trees to fell or roots to dig, the horrors of breaking ground on the lakeshore were over.

They were right, and dead wrong about relative ease. But that isn’t the story I’m telling tonight. For that, we need to go back to Holland for a time. Stick with me, because understanding the very first meeting of the Oostburg Christian Reformed Church requires some Dutch history. 

     I’m not at all sure of what motives prompted some men and women to leave the Oostburg Dutch Reformed Church, but I can take some educated guesses on the basis of Dutch Reformed history. 

Now, if your head isn’t spinning, we’re going thirty years back in time and putting Town of Holland, Oostburg, Wisconsin, and the new world in the rearview mirror in order to ship ourselves back to the Netherlands, the Old Country.  Let me put this in a context. 

 When Dominie Hendrik DeCock walked into his country church in Ulrum, Groningen, the Netherlands, the sanctuary was full. Right away, he noticed two police standing at the gate to the pulpit to make sure he didn't get in it--the pulpit that is. So the story goes that he simply stepped into an aisle and stood on a front pew to deliver a sermon on  Ephesians 2--"For by grace. . ." . My guess is you know the text.

That's me in the Ulrum church, maybe ten years ago. Just spoofing.

That afternoon the doors were nailed shut so no one could get in for the second service. Dominie Hendrik DeCock, undeterred, took to the horse barn, where those dozens who'd come to hear his sermon simply listened to him hold forth on the first q and a of the Heidelburg Catechism, right there amid the horses. The next week, when DeCock was hauled off to jail, Dominie Scholte, from down south filled the pulpit. He could do it because the parishoners at Ulrum knew him to be orthodox. That Dominie Scholte would, just 14 years later lead hundreds of Dutch immigrants to the plains of Iowa, to a place he called Pella.

It was the afscheiding, the separation, a church split, the departure of those who considered themselves the true church in rural Holland, circa 1834. My own ancestors were among them--not there in Ulrum, but among those who were convinced that the State Church had departed from orthodoxy, so convinced, in fact, that they left Holland.

In fact, the vast, vast majority of Dutch immigrants to America in the 19^th century were “separatists,” people who’d chosen to leave the State church for having departed from orthodoxy. And the vast majority of those were the kind of poor and needy that could be listed under Emma Lazarus’s poem on the Statue in New York harbor. It doesn’t hurt us to remember that, too.

But is that important? You’ll have to answer that question for yourselves, but you do need to remember that a church split is an important chapter of your and my history.