What I Learned from the Better Together Convening of Concerned Congregations

What now? That’s been the question on my mind since the 2024 Synod of the Christian Reformed Church, and it’s the question on the mind of many others like me. We are under “limited suspension,” and beginning the process of disaffiliation from the only denominational home we have known.

A year from now, my congregation will very likely not be Christian Reformed, and I will not be ordained in the Christian Reformed Church anymore. This feels like such a big change that it can become all-consuming in my mind. When I think about church ministry, I think about disaffiliation. At council meetings, we attend to the details of disaffiliation. When I gather with other pastors, we give updates on our disaffiliation process. If you’re a regular reader of the Reformed Journal, you’ve read quite a bit about Synodical decisions and disaffiliation over the last few months. None of this is what I originally wanted for myself or for the church, so I also get angry about disaffiliation and about how we got to this point.

With this big, wide-open question in my mind: “What now?” I attended a gathering of church leaders at the end of August. We were summoned by Better Together, who called this gathering a “Convening of Concerned Congregations.” Better Together has been advocating within the Christian Reformed Church for the past couple of years for unity across difference for the sake of mission. The gathering in August was in response to requests from many CRC congregations for Better Together to facilitate conversation.

Some of my preoccupation with disaffiliation is necessary and good. It’s good that our church council is attentive to the details of this process. It’s good for me to acknowledge the anger I feel and find healthy expressions for it. At the same time, the gathering in August was for me a healthy and helpful reminder of the broader mission of the church in a season of change and turmoil. I was reminded of the ways that God will use the church for God’s mission in the world, both in spite of these times of division, and also through these times of division.

The Mission of the Church in Lament

The Better Together Convening acknowledged that we cannot move forward unless we tell the truth about where we are now, and about what has happened. The weekend together was filled with times of worship, and the worship began with lament. On Friday afternoon, we sang songs of lament and prayed with confidence to Jesus who hears our lament. We held small rocks to represent the burdens we carried, and we placed them in the front of the worship space in an act of prayer.

I felt the lament in a more relational and informal way, too. Of the 80 congregations represented in person at the Convening, only about 22 of us are actively beginning the process of disaffiliation from the Christian Reformed Church. The others are all wrestling with how to faithfully—and with integrity—remain in the denomination, or they are considering disaffiliation some months or years down the road.

It is good for me to focus on the new thing, on the congregations with whom I will be in fellowship in the future. But I will never be able to fully leave the Christian Reformed Church behind. The congregations that are staying still include my siblings in Christ. As I spent the weekend hearing many of their stories, I was reminded to keep them in my prayers. They still matter to me, even if we will not end up in the same denomination together. I grieve the loss of these denominational connections, and I have much empathy toward the challenges that those who remain in the CRC have ahead of them.

The Mission of the Church in Unity

I am on the steering team of Better Together, so I have been part of the big-picture conversations about the organization, but I was not part of planning the Convening. I was part of the group of pastors who began this effort in 2022. Our group was not and still is not of one mind about sexual ethics; we each hold different views about the church’s teaching on same-sex marriage. What holds us together is our belief that the Church can still function and even thrive despite our differences on these ethical questions.

Our initial goal was to encourage Synod 2023 to reverse the confessional status of Synod 2022’s interpretation of Question and Answer 108 of the Heidelberg Catechism. By the measure of that goal, our work as Better Together was a spectacular failure! Synod 2023 did not reverse anything, but strongly affirmed the work of Synod 2022.

Even so, we had a broader vision for the church that we maintain to be just as true as ever: to engage our world with the good news of God’s love despite our disagreements over issues that do not determine our salvation. The church’s teaching on same-sex marriage is a matter of great importance, and it is a matter of ethical discernment, not orthodoxy or heterodoxy. Faithful Christians reading with a Reformed hermeneutic interpret scripture differently on these questions.

Our differences on this issue certainly have implications for congregational life (Will this congregation ordain someone in a same-sex marriage? Will the pastor officiate a same-sex wedding?) and denominational polity (Will congregations who answer those questions one way tolerate the presence of congregations who answer those questions in a different way?). But our conviction is that these differences do not need to be barriers to our ability to work together for the sake of the mission of the gospel.

At the Convening, we heard reminders of this vision, and we heard a continued call to work towards unity across difference for the sake of mission. Better Together offers the idea of centered-set identity as a more gospel-focused way to understand the church. We learned at the Convening about bounded sets, fuzzy sets, and centered sets. A centered-set church is defined not by boundaries of who is in and who is out, but by our relationship directed toward Christ at the center.

I wonder, for our particular branch of the Christian family tree, what it might look like for a Reformed understanding of scripture to be the lens through which we view the center. Mark Baker makes space for this in Centered-Set Church (InterVarsity, 2021). He says that the center of any centered-set church is God revealed by Jesus Christ. “However,” he continues, “saying that Jesus is the center is not a complete definition. The center is also defined by a church’s theological beliefs and how a church seeks to follow Jesus…For instance, Wesleyan, Reformed, and Orthodox churches will define their centers differently.” The concept of a centered-set church is new to me, so I am curious to continue exploring what a Reformed, centered-set church might look like.

I attended a workshop at the Convening led by the Rev. Dr. Tanner Smith from The Colossian Forum. He invited church leaders to lead from a theology of reconciliation. The steps in that reconciliation journey (which I believe he attributed to Dr. Edgardo Colón-Emeric) are longing for how things could be, lamenting the gaps between those longings and reality, attending to the movement of the Holy Spirit, and joining the Spirit’s work.

In my view, this reconciliatory focus of The Colossian Forum may be the best possible alignment of the mission of the church with the needs of our polarized world today. The close partnership between The Colossian Forum and Better Together is one of the main reasons I am excited to stay engaged with the efforts of Better Together. (Check out Jennifer Holberg’s review of a recent film on The Colossian Forum’s work as well.)

As my congregation and I consider disaffiliation, I admit that we are eager to put conflict and disagreement behind us. This divisive time in the Christian Reformed Church has wounded us and has hurt our witness in our community. The Convening reminded me that the church’s mission is not to avoid conflict, but to navigate it in ways that reflect the love of Christ. We are called to continue growing in the skills and character necessary for such Christ-shaped conflict.

My congregation has taken a “full participation” approach toward those in same-sex marriages, but many members of our church are either uncertain or personally disagree with same-sex marriage for faithful Christians. This means that we continue to cultivate a place of hospitality and safe disagreement. And even though our status as an “affirming” church means we are no longer welcome to participate in the same denomination as other Christian Reformed congregations, we still seek partnership with congregations, seminaries, non-profit organizations, and others who disagree with us about sexual ethics but who share our goals of communicating the gospel of Jesus Christ.

I left the Convening with no silver bullet about how to achieve the unity of the church. But I became even more convinced that one of our most important callings as the 21^st century church is to learn to receive the gift of Christian unity, both for our own sanctification and for our witness to the world.

The Mission of the Church in Challenges

Living into this vision of Christian unity will bring challenges. Some of those challenges, which are present every day in the life of the church, were also present at the Better Together Convening. I’ll mention two of them here.

First, there were several LGBTQ+ church leaders who attended and who were gracious and hospitable participants in the weekend. They also courageously spoke up and pointed out that for them and for others in their community, the church has been a place of pain and exclusion. Because of that, what many of them need now is a fully affirming space, a church community that will embrace them without reservation. A community of churches like Better Together hopes to do exactly that, but by also embracing congregations with a traditional teaching about marriage, Better Together ends up falling short of the fully affirming space that these queer Christians long for.

I hope we can have both: I hope that those who have been marginalized can find congregations where they experience unfettered welcome, and I hope that those same congregations can be in fellowship with traditional congregations, and that all can learn from one another. I’m called to keep listening to my queer siblings in Christ on these matters.

Second, the racial/ethnic composition of the Better Together Convening did not mirror the racial/ethnic composition of the global church. While the voices of people of color were centered and were included in the planning, they were in the vast minority of those who attended. I have found the same to be true in gatherings that I have attended over the past few months of leaders from disaffiliating congregations: people of color have either been a small minority or entirely absent.

The ethnocentrism that tempts an immigrant-founded denomination like the Christian Reformed Church is present still among those who are leaving. As we go forward, how can we become more broadly inclusive of all types of diversity, not just those regarding sexual ethics? How can God’s liberating power be expressed in the way we handle both race and gender/sexuality? We have a lot of learning and growing to do in this area.

The Mission of the Church in Concreteness

Finally, amid all my broad reflections about the mission of the church at the Convening, I also learned a lot about some concrete next steps that congregations can take to live into the church’s mission in this in-between time. I’ll share two of them here.

First, Better Together received a grant that will fund learning activities for a community of congregations. They are partnering with The Colossian Forum and Cultivate Renewal for this project. We were invited to consider participating in this project for the next two years, at which point the grant funding will end. This isn’t anything that would replace a denomination; it’s rather a temporary learning cohort.

Second, several leaders from the Reformed Church in America were present at the Convening. They shared concrete information about RCA polity and about the possibility of transferring ministerial credentials to the RCA. Many former CRC congregations may have conversations in the next few years about joining the RCA, but are not to that point yet. For now, it was a gift to receive the hospitality of RCA leaders towards us in this in-between time. They understood our situation and were honest and kind about what they could do for us.

We Are Better Together

A month after the Convening, my congregation participated in an annual tradition: a combined worship service with St. Luke AME Zion Church. Our two congregations share a building, normally worshiping at 10:00 and 12:00. This year it was St. Luke Pastor Dwight Gutridge’s turn to preach, and he selected Revelation 7 as his text. The coming together of a Black church and a white church for the purpose of worship was what inspired that selection and his sermon title, “We Are Better Together.”

Pastor Dwight knows quite a bit about our situation as a congregation leaving our denomination, but I don’t know if he is aware of the Better Together organization. He preached not only about different races coming together before the throne of God, but also about people with different political loyalties, different socio-economic stations, and different views on same-sex marriage. He proclaimed to the combined congregations:

Can you imagine with me, St. Luke and Calvin, this moment happening one day? We know, in the heavenly city of God, all distinction, all differences, and all discord will cease to be, and we shall all simply be the people of God in glory. And we will stand together as a united people. But just maybe, I said just maybe, this text is telling us the way God meant for us to be as his people. I believe that we are better together when we can stand together and let go of the issues that have historically separated us. And I recognize, I said I recognize, that we are different, that we have different ideologies. I am not suggesting that we should group-think or assimilate. What I am suggesting is that we make Jesus our starting point and stand together on our love for him.