This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
On May 1, 2004, the Dutch Reformed Church ceased to exist as a separate denomination. It united with the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Kingdom of the Netherlands to form a single new body, the Protestant Church in the Netherlands, ending 433 years of separate Dutch Reformed governance since the church's 1571 founding at the Synod of Emden.
The merger was substantial in scale. The united Protestant Church in the Netherlands numbered about two million members organized into 1,350 congregations at the time the three churches joined together, a single national Protestant body where three separate ones had stood before.
The merger was not total. The Dutch Reformed Church's own offshoot in South Africa, founded when Jan van Riebeeck carried the church to the Cape in 1652 and tracked separately through its own history of apartheid support and later renunciation, was not part of the 2004 union. It remained, and remains, an independent denomination untouched by what happened in the Netherlands.
What the 2004 merger changed for the Dutch Reformed Church's spread was an ending in its country of origin even as its overseas offshoot continued on its own separate path. The church founded by exiles in Emden in 1571 stopped existing under its own name in the Netherlands, absorbed into a broader Protestant union, while the daughter church it had planted an ocean away carried on independently.