The Reformed Journal blog was born on this date in 2011. As I’ve recounted more than once here, I posted the first blog, “Do Calvinists Believe in Luck?” At least three people read it.
In those days, we published a print magazine called Perspectives. It was the successor to the original Reformed Journal, and while the source of many important articles over the years, Perspectives did not have a wide audience. In a 2011 planning session, Phil Tanis said an online presence was paramount, and suggested starting a daily blog. Before long, “The Twelve” was born, with twelve original bloggers writing twice a month. A guest blogger took the Sundays each month.
The original bloggers were me, Steve Mathonnet-VanderWell, Deb Rienstra, Jim Schaap, Scott Hoezee, Tom Goodhart, Jes Kast, Theresa Latini, Jamie Smith, Jim Bratt, Jessica Bratt, and Jason LIef.
Steve and Deb have blogged for fifteen years; both Jim Bratt and I took a break along the way before returning as regulars. Jennifer Holberg has blogged since she replaced Jamie Smith in 2012. Let’s hear it for consistency!
Names have been changed along the way. Perspectives has gone out of print and become the all-digital Reformed Journal. The twice monthly blogging schedule proved too taxing for mere mortals and we’ve gone to monthly contributions from most writers. This means we have more than twelve regulars. So we dropped the name “The Twelve.” Let it be clearly stated that at no time did we think “The Twelve” sounded snooty. Our standard response to that accusation has been “Pretentious? Moi?”
We wrote about the church and contemporary life. But no one imagined the extent of what was coming. Fighting over sexuality had begun in the Reformed Church in America by 2011 and there were dark clouds on that denomination’s horizon.
What about the Christian Reformed Church, you ask? I’ve always maintained that every controversy the RCA deals with is discovered by the CRC about five years later. However, no one anticipated in 2011 the winnowing that was to come in the CRC. Both denominations have fractured, but I will go to my grave convinced the CRC’s process was more painful—and unnecessary.
It must also be said that none of “The Twelve” anticipated that within five years Donald Trump, riding the votes of White Evangelicals, would remake American politics. In the halcyon days of 2011, Trump was the host of the television reality program The Apprentice and the guy who’d gone on The View claiming Barack Obama was not born in the United States.
We should have seen Trump’s influence coming when Obama felt compelled to release his birth certificate that March. A month later, Obama roasted Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, bruising Trump’s pride and fueling his politics of grievance. The country has not been the same since.
I’ve often said, mostly in jest, that these days we wouldn’t know what to write about if the CRC stopped fighting and Donald Trump dropped out of politics. Steve MVW and I have also said to each other (again, mostly in jest) that our best articles were written when no one read us. It takes time to build an audience.
Having said that, I also need to say the internet allows articles to go viral without building an audience. Kate Kooyman’s “I’m Sick of Appreciating Teachers” was published (coincidentally) on this date in 2018 and was our first experience going wildly viral. That post drew over 500,000 views, a testament to the power of an intriguing title (also known as “clickbait”) and Kate’s good writing. But those 500,000 readers didn’t stick around to read the next day’s blog. Over the past fifteen years we’ve built an audience that reads daily. An average day has somewhere around 4000 views. I may be hopelessly and foolishly Pollyannaish, but I think of our faithful readers and writers as a community.
Occasionally. somebody writes something that jumps the tracks and finds a wider audience. Our top article in the past couple of years was by a Dutch theologian about Donald Trump being an antichrist. It has over 110,000 views. I’ve written here before that the takeaway should not be that we published that article but that since Trump’s second term began, hundreds of thousands of people have typed something about Donald Trump being the antichrist into their search engines. Think about that.
The internet also brings an ungodly number of bad actors into play. So far this year our security devices have blocked over half a million log-in attempts from various bots and criminals along with over 85,000 spam comments. Those comments aren’t necessarily filled with obscenities. They are more likely to be filled with commercials and nefarious links.
I really don’t like bad actors who try to attack us. They reinforce my Calvinistic belief in sin. But I don’t mind comments by those who have different opinions. Allow me to explain.
Frederick Buechner famously wrote that doubt is the ants in the pants of faith: they keep it alive and moving. In that spirit, I’d say comments are the ants in the pants of our blog. They keep it alive and moving. I appreciate the comments our articles draw, even when they are in sharp disagreement with the author. I’ve published articles that have drawn lots of disagreement and articles that hardly anyone comments on. I much prefer having lots of comments, so please don’t stop commenting.
As of noon on Wednesday, we had 1,289,986 page views in 2026, compared to 1,289,442 page views in all of 2025. We passed 2025 sometime Wednesday morning and still have two months to go in 2026. I’m grateful for that number and grateful most of all for the people it represents.
Thanks for reading the Reformed Journal. Who can say what our sixteenth year will bring to our pages? There’s only one way to find out.
