My Experience At Covenant CRC Appleton Part 6 - The Exit Interview

My husband and I undergo an exit interview and issue one last warning and call to repentance before we leave

Over the last few Substack posts, I have been detailing my experience at Covenant Christian Reformed Church of Appleton, WI and the events that led to the departure of 30% of the congregation.

Part 1 describes my unsuccessful attempts to determine the accuracy of the information I was provided at the new members class and receive a clear account from the elders of the church as to what they believed about various resources and beliefs being promoted by denominational entities such as the Office of Race Relations, the Office of Social Justice, and the Banner.

Part 2 describes the departure from Covenant of both the senior pastor and the associate pastor and the 6 months in which the elders made confusing statements about the church’s doctrinal stances and refused to provide clarification when asked.

Part 3 describes the efforts by my husband and myself to seek the assistance of Classis Wisconsin Church Visitors as well as the way in which the elders at Covenant dragged their feet in setting up that meeting and hid its purpose from the congregation.

Part 4 describes how Covenant experienced a sudden mass exodus of congregants over the issue of women serving as elders, something that members who recently joined the church were led to believe would not happen but which the elders now argued had been allowed since the 1990s. The elders also expressed their intention to hire an egalitarian pastor and not conduct further study of the issue of women in office until that pastor was in place and able to lead such a study and discussion.

Part 5 describes the discussion that took place at the June congregational meeting and the elders’ continued prevarication over how they were handling the issue of female elders as well as their refusal to apologize to members who departed from Covenant once it became apparent to them that they had been misled about the church’s beliefs and direction regarding women in office.

This 6^th part will describe the exit interview that my husband and I were asked to participate in. Although I intend to write a few further posts giving my thoughts on some of the overarching issues surrounding what I experienced at Covenant, this post will be the final post in this series that has been laying out the narrative of what happened.

After the congregational meeting, my husband Rob received an email from the elder Mike Ivy asking to hold a meeting with him, Covenant’s interim pastor Roger Sparks, and me to discuss Rob’s intentions regarding his membership at Covenant. I was not a member so this ostensibly only pertained to me in an ancillary way. This meeting was held on July 16, 2024.

Although the meeting request was made for the purpose of discussing my husband’s intentions regarding his membership, Mike started the discussion out by confronting me for, in his memory, at the congregational meeting having accused him of lying. His memory was mistaken, and it turned out that what he was referring to was my husband’s statement, “Well, one of you is lying to us then,” which he made after Mike had said that Dominic’s description of what had happened in the search committee meeting had not happened.

We discussed the difference between the story Dominic told us and the story Mike told us and tried to understand why they did not seem to match. Pastor Sparks said that he had attended search committee meetings that Mike Ivy and the elders had not attended. Although he did not remember search committee members refusing to open their Bibles and look at the scriptures regarding women serving as elders (as Dominic had described to my husband), he did say that the issue of female elders had been raised and there had been unwillingness on the part of some committee members to rehash the issue which they believed had been settled in the 1990s.

Mike expressed the opinion that it was inappropriate for Dominic to have shared what happened in the search committee. My husband asked if they had been in Executive Session, but Mike did not know. Mike felt that things said in committee meetings were confidential except for what was reported in minutes and that search committees in particular needed to operate with a great deal of confidentiality. It bothered him that my husband and I seemed to know more about what happened in the meeting than what was said in the minutes.

My position was that it was unreasonable to expect Domic, who had been serving as an elder, to leave the church suddenly but not explain why he did so when people asked him, particularly if what happened in that committee meeting played an important role in his decision to leave. I also pointed out that I had only mentioned that story at the congregational meeting because other people were suggesting that the congregants who left over the issue of female elders had done so without ever trying to start a discussion, but Dominic’s story suggested that attempts had been made.

My husband thought the way the council had handled the issue was absurd. Before Pastor Sparks had been brought on, the council had stated in their minutes that they wanted to discuss women in office, but then he arrived and they didn’t have him address it and they didn’t bring it to the congregation. Now they were falling back on the claim that it was taken care of by a 30-year-old vote, but the council had known it was an issue that needed attention.

I reiterated what I said at the congregational meeting: at the new members class I attended, we were told by Pastor Mark that the church had held a vote in the 90s allowing women to serve as elders but had since moved away from that and come to a place where Covenant had female deacons but not female elders. I did not think it had been presented as some sort of policy that didn’t align with the church. It seemed unlikely to me, given that people were willing to leave Covenant over this issue, that they would have even joined the church to begin with if the church view on women elders had been presented differently to them. I believed the congregants who left had been misled.

Although I didn’t necessarily make this point clearly in the meeting I will say now that in the new members class it had sounded to me like, on paper, the church still had a policy that allowed women elders but that paper policy was no longer where the church’s heart was at or what they practiced but they may not have had the time or bandwidth at that point to have taken the steps to officially rescind it. I assumed that at some point in the future they would make this change in policy official.

In the meeting, I told Mike it sounded to me like Pastor Mark had discussed the issue with various leaders over the years. The council was aware of the new way he was leading the church. Pastor Mark may not have known that the council didn’t agree with that change. He may have thought that what he was saying in the new members class was correct and accurately represent the church. It seemed inappropriate for the council to turn around now that Pastor Mark was gone and say they were going to have female elders again. It really bothered me that those people were allowed to become members of Covenant and give their money, give their time, give their energy, give their effort, and then the council did not respect them enough to actually have a meeting about the issue and discuss it openly and potentially hold another vote. At a minimum it seemed to me that the council should have sat down one on one with the departing members and the elders should have apologized to them for having not carried out their responsibilities as elders to maintain the church’s bylaws and make sure the church was adhering to the doctrinal position they claimed to believe.

Mike agreed it was possible that some people didn’t know what the church policy was, but he also knew some of them did. He also argued that nothing had changed. The policy of having female elders was still in place on paper but the church still did not have any female elders. He seemed to fault the people who left for somehow thinking that things had changed and not being willing to stay even though, in his opinion, things hadn’t changed.

I thought that was unreasonable given that the council had already been clear that they were going to hire an egalitarian pastor and that they weren’t even going to discuss the issue until that new pastor was installed. It seemed foolish to pretend that nothing had changed.

The unwillingness by the leadership of Covenant to study the matter deeply concerned me because there is a huge correlation between churches that accept women in leadership and churches that accept same sex marriage. It was important that if Covenant was going to accept females in leadership that they (a) have a really clear understanding of the specific Biblical reasons for that belief and (b) make sure that their reasoning for that belief was not the same reasoning that served as a direct line between the mainline churches accepting females in leadership and then going on to accept same sex marriage.

I told Mike that I had no idea what the discussion at Covenant was in the 1990s when it accepted female elders. I had no idea what the foundation was that had been laid at that time, and the reasoning behind that decision in the 90s was not being presented to people now. If the church was going to move forward with this now, they had a responsibility to study the question and figure out why they believed females should be elders, but they had already said they weren’t going to do that until they hired a new pastor at which point it would be too late and they might end up hiring a pastor who holds egalitarian views for all the wrong reasons.

Mike claimed that the elders were now talking about possibly having Pastor Sparks lead the church through that discussion, but they also didn’t want to overburden him. He believed that before the congregation had that discussion, they needed to hold a study that included the entire scope of the Bible and not just the specific verses that are usually thought of as pertaining to the matter. He declined to say what he himself believed about female elders, instead indicating he looked forward to having a Bible study about it.

He also said that he thought that regardless of whether females were elders or not he believed the church needed to be doing more to train women specifically to serve the church. I told him I thought they needed to provide more training across the board, regardless of sex, on the responsibilities of elders because over the last year I had witnessed the members of the council respond hostilely when they were asked to carry out the basic responsibility of an elder to clarify the church’s doctrine.

Mike, as an individual, did apologize to me, as an individual, which I appreciate.

I got the impression that the council as a whole would not be apologizing and that no effort was going to be made to apologize to the people who had departed. But, I suppose, what I want is not necessarily an apology but actual repentance and an understanding and acknowledgement that the way the elders behaved over the last year and a half was not in line with the responsibilities of elders as laid out in the Bible and in Church Order. I would like to see the leadership of Covenant CRC Appleton make an actually concerted effort to change and to become more responsible as leaders which I doubt will happen.

The meeting was ostensibly called for the purpose of discussing Rob’s intention regarding his membership at Covenant, but we did not get to that until the end of our hour long discussion. Pastor Sparks said they would like to have us remain if our consciences would allow it. Rob explained that we were done attending Covenant but he did not want to formally rescind his membership at this moment because we were waiting on the outcome of our interactions with the church visitors. He also did not think there was a church left at Covenant for us to stay at. In 2020, the council had made the decision to split Covenant into two churches, masked and unmasked, roughly along the lines of older and newer members. The people who left were generally the people who had attended that newer member, unmasked church that we had been a part of, and they were all gone now.

I felt that the decision by the elders to essentially generate a church split in 2020 had been a terrible decision. I felt the second service had been an afterthought, the attendees of which had essentially been shunned by the members of the first service during Covid. Now, even after the two churches had come back together, when doctrinal issues arose, the attendees of that second service did not seem to have had their concerns treated respectfully by the members of the first service. I saw purported sorrow for the departure of these people after the fact, but the elders had not responded well in the moment as those departures were happening and could potentially have been avoided.

My husband and I said our goodbyes, and we left.

Although my husband had been crystal clear during the meeting that he was not going to rescind his membership at that time, we were removed from the church email list. In fact, I suspect we were removed from the list prior to that meeting because the last email I received from Covenant was on 07/09/2024 a full week before our meeting with Mike Ivy and Pastor Sparks.

After a month of consideration, my husband decided to formally rescind his membership. He sent one last email to Covenant’s council as well as the remaining current attendees letting them know he was rescinding his membership. As an attempt to call the council to repentance and provide information to the remaining attendees as to how the council had been conducting themselves for the last year and a half, he explained why he could no longer remain a member and included a link to a PDF I had put together that told the same story I have posted in this 6-part Substack narrative. (See Attachment Z3)

I have little reason to hope that it will result in any positive change at Covenant, but I think my husband and I can at least enjoy clear consciences knowing that we took every step we knew how to warn this church about the un-Christian beliefs they were supporting and to call them to refocus on God and sound doctrine. Even though it looks like Covenant is a lost cause, my hope is that some good can somehow still come from this story and our experience.