See John, that's just my point. If it was still that way today, there would be no question of staying. BUt last time I checked, it wasn't...
Kevin:
Lynn's story is so close to home for me too. I recognize so many of the characters that are in her story. The same happened in our church, in our neighboring CRC church, and in so many other churches. You're right, it isn't still like it used to be. It isn't at all like the rosy picture I drew.
I don't think that this negates all the good things I knew of the CRC. I'm no longer CRC either, even though I live closer (within walking distance) of the church I grew up in. I live right next door to the original parsonage. I was talking about the many things that I respected of the CRC, and of which I still haven't found in other churches. It seems almost that what was taken for granted, what was so elementary to church teaching and practice, isn't known or heard of in other Reformed churches. I really lament losing those basics. But I think they are proper and right, Biblical and provable, and strive to see them instituted in any church that I am a part of. Where ever I go I would like to see the old CRC revived. So I'm really old CRC at heart and always will be.
There are two CRC's, just like their visible and invisible church distinction teaches about the true church. There is that to which we strive, and there is the actual. The modern CRC has given up on the former altogether. I am sure that the most eminent professors of theology at Calvin Seminary no longer know the former defined distinction between visible and invisible church. That's been gone a long, long time. The church I am referring to is the invisible CRC, the one we tried so hard to be for ten or fifteen years. The visble CRC did everything to wipe out that image after those years, wipe out that direction, that goal.
But going back to Lynn's testimony, I know my wife can tell you a story along the same lines too. Her best friend was in the same boat. And the church was not helpful. But together the two of us can tell you a story about how we were treated because we had eleven children. This is a church that champions the covenant, that makes teaching the young a priority, that insists on children going to a Christian school, and most of all, believes children are a blessing from God. In Bible discussions some had no problem at all in talking about their practice of birth control, but it was we who had eleven children who were the perverts, the ones addicted to sexual intercourse. It was so obviously gross and self-condemning, so immoral, and yet they were completely unapologetic about it. We found it to be no different in the FRC or the URC.
There were many other experiences I could talk about. But none of this even touches that idea which my parents and others strove for when they started this local congregation. What we were taught in our catechism classes exceeds by far what the actual practice by weak men testifies to.
Because of my catechism training I was able to stand alone against my grades 11 and 12 classmates, defending the Word of God against the idea that the Bible had been discredited in the areas of history and science. I was successful time after time, even though I was an average C student arrayed against A students. This High School had a five year program, but I went to work after grade 12. The A students who tried to defeat the Bible became Christians in grade 13, only a year later, and they came to me one by one to thank me for what I had shown them. And all I can say is that it was my catechism training that has to take the credit, not me. That's the Spirit working as the Reformed churches have always taught should be the case.
I can't be part of the temporal CRC anymore, but I cannot be separated from the invisible CRC. The visible CRC gave up the invisible CRC, but I haven't. The modern CRC is at war with her original purpose. You can see that in the issues which resulted in the '92 split. It is not so much that they argued for and agreed to women in the offices, or caved when it came to Theistic Evolution, or inclusive language, or "homosexualism" (a word peculiar and original to the CRC), or the other issues; its what they willingly did to the Bible in order to accomplish these purposes. As little as twenty years before it would have been unthinkable, and yet in that short a time it became unthinking and easy.
Looking back on it today you have to wonder how or why anyone would believe those arguments back then. But its because stories like the one Lynn tells were all too common and familiar to all of us. Not everyone shared the same goals, and in the end the ones with high ideals lost out to the ones with low ideals, to the ones who let their prejudices rule their sense of community.
I'm not commending staying in the CRC. I would be very careful about leaving it, though. You don't know what's out there, and I can tell that you're likely in for a lot of heartbreak if you think its better elsewhere. You have to go church by church, not denomination by denomination. And give it lots of time so that you can find out what a church is really all about, not just what they say they're about. Its hard, Kevin, but its no less hard the other way.
But I took it be a reference to the chocolate and the Beer. What else could you have meant, right?
