The Means of Grace: An Invitation to All

About 40 years ago, a perhaps-too-clever person in Grand Rapids said this in my hearing: “When the Christian Reformed Church acknowledged the 1960s—if it did at all—it did so in the 1970s when it allowed the formation of a new congregation, The Church of the Servant, in Classis Grand Rapids East.”

I was a minor player in that initial phase of the church’s founding. My participation in writing some of the new seasonal liturgies came later, in the second generation. Back then, there were some brilliant and imposing characters at the new congregation’s founding, most notably Nicholas Wolterstorff, professor of philosophy at Calvin, as well as many others.

Nick was the leading light, who gave us a broad vision of why we were doing this: most notably the recovery of the regular offering of the sacrament of holy Communion. He opened our eyes to what we all knew but had forgotten: that prior to the Reformation, the Catholic Church had devalued the sermon in public worship; the Protestants, in their zeal for the recovery of the scripture, now in their own languages, made the sermon the new focus of public worship, and thereby relegated holy Communion to a secondary place, offering it only once a month, or even, in some cases, just four times a year.

Nick showed us the obvious point, but one that had been obscured, that our Sunday services should combine the two. By the 1970s we proposed to join with others in being word-and-sacrament people: Catholics (after Vatican II), and well as Lutherans and Episcopalians, who were, in their own ways, rediscovering the role of the sermon in Sunday worship. In short, we were eager to join a kind of ecumenical consensus, recovering what had been obscured in the years of Christian history.

It was very exciting to (re)discover all this. Moreover, we hoped to accomplish these changes along with a renewal of the role of the laity in public worship—that is all the laity—most notably including women in all aspects of our congregation’s life. It was the 1960s and 1970s, after all, and we were trying to hear what answers were “blowin’ in the wind,” even as we hoped to build a “bridge over troubled waters.”

I was a junior professor at Calvin, just trying my wings in teaching history in a neo-Calvinist manner. The redoubtable Lew Smedes told me, before he departed Calvin for Fuller Theological Seminary, that my assignment, beyond teaching well, and as a scholar in the tradition of Kuyper, was to help the Reformed community do it’s thinking in a “world and life” manner. For Lew, that meant I was to contribute at least once a year to The Banner and twice annually to The Reformed Journal.

Well, that was a tall order for a recent immigrant from far-off Boston, who was just learning how to pronounce Dutch names. But I was determined to make my contribution to the CRC. Even though I was raised Episcopalian and have returned to that denomination after my retirement 36 years later, I heeded my dad’s advice when I came to Michigan: that if, for example, I were to be a missionary in West Africa, I’d better learn how to affirm, as much as I could, the ways of life of the people I came to serve. Thus, I threw myself into the life of Calvin and the CRC, believing that this was where I was called to serve.

The founding of the Church of the Servant was not an easy sell. Sociologically, our views on gender equality upset some people; but even more difficult for some were our views on the equality of Word and Sacrament in public worship. For example, some clergy and elders elsewhere asked about the lack of a “preparation” Sunday. They said that “taking Communion” (interestingly, not “receiving”) was a serious matter and not to be taken lightly. One had to examine oneself, lest one bring “condemnation” on oneself for being “unworthy.” Many of them were unsatisfied with our reply that every gospel service should be a preparation Sunday in which confession and absolution were prominent features. Moreover, we insisted that in relating sermon to sacrament, one gave context for the other, and the other for the one.

Not everyone was convinced. I contributed a piece in The Banner in which I invoked The Belgic Confession, which spoke of the two—word and sacrament—as “the means of grace.” I was surprised by a rejoinder from Leonard Verduin, one of the great men in the CRC in a previous generation. He wrote, in a true Zwinglian manner, saying that he wished our language allowed the Confession to say that the preaching of the Word was the “means” of grace, that is, it alone. I did not reply. I was, after all, a very junior professor at Calvin (and not even a Calvin grad).

Soon afterwards in The Banner, there came an intervention on the subject by no less than Jake Eppinga, the pastor of the influential LaGrave Avenue Christian Reformed Church in Grand Rapids. He reported that he had been on vacation to a part of the country where there was no CRC church, so he attended the local Episcopal church in that town. He wrote that he sensed that the people were not taking the sacrament seriously because they did not have a preparation Sunday. He could “see in their eyes” that taking Communion did not appear to mean all that much, but that they were just going through the motions. I did not reply to that piece either, but I wonder, both then and now, how Jake Eppinga could know what he said he saw, and then give a cruel put-down to fellow Christians. I was also stuck with an honest question: Did the Reverend Eppinga ever consider what was in the eyes of the people in his, and other CRC churches, who listened to 104 sermons a year? Were any of them just going through the motions?

This past summer—some 40 years after the events described above—my wife and I spent an extended period in London, where one of our sons lives. Because we’d lived in London for several years, about two decades ago, we know our way around, and have our favorite places. No one is surprised to learn that one of our favorites is St. Paul’s Cathedral. Who can resist that building, the first of the cathedrals built in the Protestant era, with its majestic nave and pitch-perfect acoustics?

On the day we visited, it was packed. I know that the possible seating is 3500, but on the day of our visit they hadn’t put up any additional chairs, so my informal estimate is the congregation was between 2000 and 2500. The choir sang very well and we were just glad to be there.

The gospel was read in the Ga language (from Ghana), which caused my attention to wander a bit. Looking around, I noticed that, as white people, we were in the minority. Most of the congregants were dark-skinned, perhaps from Africa, India, or the Middle East. Our son told us that he had recently been at a work-related conference in Kenya. He mentioned that at the Nairobi airport, he, a white person, was in the decided minority. He sent a picture, saying that he was in the majority world now. I looked around St. Paul’s that day and saw something similar and was comforted in knowing that I was seeing a picture of what the Kingdom of God truly looks like.

It took some time to administer holy Communion to that many people. During that time, and for a reason I cannot know, I thought of the comments by Jake Eppinga those many years earlier. What would he see in the eyes of all these folks at St. Paul’s Cathedral? Were they receiving elements that were “the means of grace,” or were they going through the motions? They could not have had a preparation Sunday.

The recessional hymn was Fanny Crosby’s classic “To God Be the Glory.” Led by the great choir, we raised the roof (and, if you’ve seen the place, that’s some roof!). I hadn’t sung it for years. It’s in the Church of England hymnal but not the American Episcopal one. Of course, I sang it in Grand Rapids because it is in the Psalter Hymnal. It was great to sing it again, and on the refrain I even (once only!) joined my fellow congregants in raising my hands on “Praise the Lord.”

But as I hummed that tune over the next few days, I sensed there was something wrong. I was singing Crosby’s words “who yielded his life an atonement for sin, and opened the life gates that all may come in.” When I got back to the United States, I took down from the shelf my copy of the Psalter Hymnal. And there it was: “opened the life gates that we may come in” – not all. I wonder if, when that hymn was chosen for the Psalter Hymnal, the Canons of the Synod of Dordt were invoked: think TULIP and limited atonement.  We and I may come but not all. Wow!

I did my best to be a good servant of the community when I was at Calvin, and did what Lew Smedes had said, as I tried to help the Reformed community do its thinking. But over 36 years, I never bought into a “means” of grace or limited atonement. I wonder if, in today’s world, the CRC Synod might be on my case.