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 14 April 1994, two churches created decades apart to serve segregated congregations became one. The Dutch Reformed Mission Church, founded in 1881 for people of mixed race, and the Dutch Reformed Church in Africa, founded in 1963 for Black members, united to form the Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa.
Both uniting churches had been created by the Dutch Reformed Church itself, established as racially segregated daughter churches under its own mission and apartheid-era policy. The Dutch Reformed Church, whose 1986 renunciation of apartheid theology is already recorded on this atlas, did not join the 1994 union, remaining a separate body from the new church its own policy had once produced.
The unification drew its theological basis from the 1986 Confession of Belhar, with its emphasis on unity, reconciliation and justice, the same confession the Dutch Reformed Church's own renunciation had grown from. The new church's incomplete-circle logo states its own hope for the wider Dutch Reformed family's eventual reunification, a hope the parent church's absence from the 1994 union left unfulfilled.
What the 1994 union changed for the Reformed tradition's spread in Southern Africa was joining two churches apartheid-era policy had deliberately kept apart by race into a single Uniting Reformed Church, while the parent body that had created both of them still stood outside the union it inspired.