The Impact Of These Things On My Journey With The CRCNA Part 1 - How I Found Myself At A CRCNA Church

A brief recounting of my experience at the Episcopal Church, how I ended up at a CRCNA church, and why, when I landed at the CRC, I was not inclined to trust that everything was okay

Now that I've provided an overview of some of the concerning things I have seen on the CRCNA's denominational website and within the pages of the Banner, I would like to go back and explain in a little more detail how I came to be attending a CRC church, how I came to be aware of these issues at the denominational level, and how my journey toward potentially becoming a member of CRCNA has been impacted both by what I see at the denominational level as well as by the response I received from church leadership when I brought my questions and concerns to them.

My husband and I spent a decade in the Episcopal Church. Our children were born during that time, and our oldest was baptized at the Episcopal Church. We joined knowing that the denomination was left-wing, but we did not appreciate how the denomination’s course would impact individual dioceses and congregations. Our diocese was pretty moderate and did not immediately approve same sex marriage when it became an option, and the pastor of our individual church at the time we joined had his head somewhere several centuries in the past. I was told he wrote his sermons in Latin (although thankfully he gave them in English), and I do not remember any of them obviously conflicting with scripture. Though I assume he was personally left-wing in his politics, that never entered his sermons because he never talked about modern issues.

It was only after our first pastor retired and we called a new pastor that things started to truly head south and divisions within our local congregation became apparent. When the search committee members were asked what their ideal candidate would look like, opinions varied wildly from “They should be able to read the Bible and convey scriptural truth” to “They should be a married lesbian.”

We didn't get a married lesbian. Rather we got the closest thing we could have gotten that would initially appear to be acceptable to a divided congregation that held wildly different views on a number of core religious/social issues.

The man gave off the appearance of being a thoughtful and wise person, but he was actually a very weak willed, completely hollow human, devoid of any inner life, who I do not think ever had a thought originate from within himself in his entire life. He uncritically reflected back the most fashionably progressive, left-wing, unorthodox viewpoints of the people closest to him in his social bubble, and because he was so devoid of any ability to think critically or look beyond his own tiny circle of friends, he had no idea that other people disagreed with him.

I believe that the logical end result of a church accepting same sex marriage is that it will eventually embrace full on universalism (maybe with a carve out for people they think are “judgmental”), and that is certainly where this particular Episcopal priest went. The only reason my husband and I did not leave the church immediately upon hearing him give his first universalist sermon is because my husband was the Senior Warden, and we felt he had a responsibility to see out his term.

My husband and the Junior Warden believed it was their responsibility to sit down with the pastor and express their concerns with the theological direction of his teaching. And…within a brief period of time, the pastor quit. He was such an empty, unthinking shell of a person and was so taken aback by the reality that not everybody in the church agreed with his viewpoints, that he had no idea how to deal with that disagreement, so he left.

The church went through something like two years of upheaval trying to find a new pastor, and during that entire time my family was stuck there because my husband had his term as Senior Warden extended. We gave so much time, so much energy, so much money, and so much prayer to the church during this period in the hopes that through our faithful dedication God would bring us out the other side and bless our church with a godly pastor.

We did not understand that the Episcopal Church was an apostate entity, and there was nothing left to save. It was like the man described in Matthew 12:43-45:

[43]Now when the unclean spirit goes out of a man, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, and does not find it.

[44]Then it says, “I will return to my house from which I came”; and when it comes, it finds it unoccupied, swept, and put in order.

[45]Then it goes and takes along with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there; and the last state of that man becomes worse than the first. That is the way it will also be with this evil generation.

We had done our best to sweep our church clean, but the Episcopal Church as a whole was so degenerate and apostate that there remained nothing but heretical priests to take the place of the one who left.

Out of propriety, we attended the first service the new priest led, and then we left. Now that church flies the rainbow flag, claims to welcome everyone, and, I've been told, has about 20 members remaining, most of whom are elderly and not necessarily happy with things but feel too old and weak to go elsewhere or to do anything about the situation.

The next week my family walked through the doors of a CRCNA church. 

We chose this church for a number of religious and practical reasons. We had asked two separate people whose opinions we valued to give us church recommendations, and each of them, separately, recommended the two same churches—the CRCNA church and a presbyterian church. Between the two churches this one seemed to have wider Sunday school and youth group options for our children. This church also had a building and had already gone through a building expansion a few years before, whereas the other church was in the middle of searching for a permanent building (which under other circumstances wouldn't necessarily be a factor, but I was quite burnt out by giving after our previous experience). Additionally, we went to the denominational website and read the denominational position statements that are posted there, and they seemed to fit reasonably well with what we believed and nothing jumped out at us as objectionable. Finally, when we attended our first service there, the sermon was solidly orthodox and the church environment seemed good. Given all of these green flags, we didn't even see a reason to look elsewhere and just kept attending.

Three months after we first started attending, the Covid panic happened and the entire world went batshit insane. Our church actually shut down a week before other churches in the area shut down, which was not good, but they also reopened earlier than most, which was positive. For a few months over the summer, after Wisconsin's Safer At Home Order was overturned, our church got by with its one regular service. But, after Governor Evers implemented his obviously blatantly illegal masking order (the one that was not even enforced and that also included a ton of loopholes that allowed people to legally not wear masks despite the rule) our church split into 2 services because the people who were adamantly in favor of masks were not willing to share a service with people who did not wear masks.

The result of that choice by the church leadership was that we effectively had two churches who met in the same building but possibly did not have much else in common with each other. The church I attended was filled with solidly orthodox people who cared about God, studying the Bible, pursuing truth, and trying to conform their lives to scripture. I don't know what the other church was like because I never attended it, but since our two congregations have come back together my impression is that this new combined church takes doctrine, truth, and spiritual discipline much less seriously than the congregation I was attending during the church split.

My husband attended the new members class and joined the church relatively quickly. I waited to attend a later new members class in part because, at the time of the first class, our youngest was 3 years old and I didn't want to leave him so I could participate in a class, and partly because, after our previous church experience, I was not ready to jump into church membership right away but wanted to observe the church a little more before becoming involved.

When I did eventually attend the new members class, our pastor mentioned a couple of issues facing the CRCNA. He touched on the Human Sexuality Report which, at that time, had not yet been passed. If I'm remembering correctly, I think I was already vaguely aware of Neland Avenue, and the issue with Synod's slow response to them was discussed during the new members class. The pastor also told the class that he had concerns about some of the denominational entities, and he specifically mentioned the Office of Social Justice and stated that he did not recommend the Banner. He said that if the HSR was not approved and same sex marriage was allowed in the CRCNA that he would work to lead our local church out of the denomination. 

In light of the issues he raised, I asked him if it would be possible for the church to do anything about the denominational entities that were concerning. My perspective, which I expressed during the class, was that they were a cancer within the denomination and, if that was not recognized and if nothing was done to them, they would metastasize and spiritually destroy the entire denomination. I found it problematic to be giving church money to organizations that the church recognized as being unsound, so it seemed like, at a minimum, the church should be designating its giving away from these offices. Our pastor was receptive to that and thought the church would also be receptive to it. He even thought Synod had recently made changes to facilitate that very thing (which they had in 2019), but he was not closely involved with denominational politics so he didn't know the particulars and needed to look into them.

After completing the new members class, I decided that I was not ready to become a member yet and explained to my pastor that I wanted to see how Synod handled Neland Avenue and the HSR, that I was also concerned about these denominational entities and the tolerance the CRCNA had for them, and I also didn’t know half the people at the church because they had chosen to separate themselves from the non-masking members. I wanted to see how things went at Synod 2022 and what this church was like when the masking members attended it before deciding whether or not to move forward on becoming a member. He did not tell me any of my concerns were crazy or unwarranted or suggest in any way that I was being overly cautious or judgmental.

My general feeling at the time was that the church I was attending was solid, even if half the congregants had needlessly panicked during Covid. I assumed the church couldn’t be that bad given that they had called a solidly orthodox and godly pastor whose teaching they had sat under for 15+ years. My general concern was not with my local church but that the denomination with its problematic areas would be a bad influence on the congregation I was attending. I just wanted to button up a few things to verify that the local church was committed to scripture first and the Reformed confessions second and would not be led astray by false doctrine at the denominational level should Synod not respond correctly to Neland Avenue’s unBiblical choice to appoint a married lesbian as a deacon.

Everything my pastor said, led me to believe this church was solid and I had no real reason for concern.  Needless to say, things did not go as smoothly as I hoped….