Christian Reformed Church in North America

Gijsbert Haan had already been unhappy with the Reformed Church in America for years before 1857. He had settled with his family in Holland, Michigan in 1847, part of a larger wave of Dutch Calvinist emigration, and he preached openly that the church his community had joined was not sound. His specific complaints were concrete rather than abstract: the Reformed Church in America admitted anyone to communion regardless of what they believed, its hymnals included texts he judged unbiblical alongside the Psalms, catechism instruction for children was inconsistent from congregation to congregation, and some members kept up membership in Freemason lodges the secessionists considered incompatible with Christian faith.

In 1857, Haan and his followers submitted formal documents of secession to their governing classis, laying out those grievances. Church leadership rejected the documents at first, but one congregation left anyway in January 1857, and others followed through the year until four churches, roughly 130 families in all, about a tenth of the Dutch immigrant church membership in West Michigan at the time, had withdrawn. For two years the new body had no settled name at all. It adopted Holland Reformed Church in 1859, then Free Dutch Reformed Church in 1861, then True Dutch Reformed Church two years after that, before settling on Holland Christian Reformed Church in 1880 and finally Christian Reformed Church in 1904. Growing Canadian membership through the twentieth century led to the current name, Christian Reformed Church in North America, adopted in 1974.

The question of whether women could hold ordained office split the CRC synod for years before it settled on an answer, and the answer it reached was to stop insisting on one answer at all. An earlier synod vote opening the offices to women was itself overturned in the early 1990s, a reversal a contemporary evangelical press report described plainly as a setback for advocates on both sides. In 1995, synod tried a different approach. Rather than rule that one reading of Scripture was correct, it recognized officially that there are two different perspectives and convictions on the question, both of which honor the Bible as the infallible word of God, and it let the offices of elder, deacon, minister of the word and commissioned pastor open to women, but only where the local classis and congregation chose to allow it.

That local option, not a synod-wide mandate, is what actually changed practice. Restrictions passed the same year kept women from serving as synod delegates or synodical deputies until 2000, and delegates could not be forced to vote against their own conscience on a woman candidate. Adoption spread unevenly: by 2000 eighteen of the forty seven classes had declared the word male inoperative in their own church order, opening ordained office to women locally, while others did not. Three women were ordained in 1996, the first year the option existed; twenty five years later, in 2021, the denomination marked its two hundredth and two hundred first women pastors, describing the path as still not an easy one for female candidates passed over for certain positions because of their gender, a local option rather than a settled denominational consensus.