The Reformed Church in America Releases Forty-Three Congregations to Form the Alliance of Reformed Churches

On 1 January 2022, forty-three congregations of the Reformed Church in America formally departed the denomination to join the Alliance of Reformed Churches, a conservative Reformed body organized the previous year by congregations questioning their place in the RCA. The RCA's General Synod, meeting in October 2021, had adopted regulations its own leaders described as a mutually generous separation for congregations petitioning to leave over the following five years, and voted to form a restructuring team for the congregations remaining rather than adopt the recommendations of its own Vision 2020 Team directly, clearing the way for the January departure. Alliance leaders described the new body as built around a more theologically aligned and agile structure than the RCA's own; the RCA's communication director said the denomination wished to bless the departing congregations in finding another denominational family. Both sides named the same unresolved division: the ordination of LGBTQ clergy and the blessing of same-sex marriages, which some RCA regional bodies had begun permitting even though the practice ran against the denomination's own broader policy.