The Secession of 1834 Founds the Christian Reformed Churches in the Netherlands

On 14 October 1834, a majority of the Dutch Reformed congregation at Ulrum, in the northern province of Groningen, signed an Act of Secession and Return, breaking from the state supported Nederlandse Hervormde Kerk under the leadership of their pastor, Hendrik de Cock, more than a century after Louis XIV's revocation of the Edict of Nantes had ended large scale organised Calvinism inside France, already recorded here. De Cock had been barred by the government from warning his congregation against what he saw as doctrinal error in his colleagues and from baptising the children of dissenting believers; the seceders invoked the Belgic Confession's own Article 28 and Article 29 to declare the state church no longer a true church. King William I's government answered with Napoleonic era restrictions on unauthorised gatherings, fines and imprisonments that lasted until 1840, but the movement grew fast regardless, more than one hundred twenty congregations joining within its first two years under de Cock and fellow ministers Hendrik Scholte and Albertus van Raalte. The seceders organised as the Christelijke Gereformeerde Kerken, still active in the Netherlands today, and their emigrants later founded the Christian Reformed Church in North America, decades before the Alliance of Reformed Churches formed in London in 1875, already recorded here.