What members of the Christian Reformed Church believe, and how they worship
The Christian Reformed Church in North America is a binational Reformed denomination of about a thousand congregations, rooted in the Dutch immigrant churches of 1857 and confessing the Three Forms of Unity; it is the largest Reformed body of Dutch background in Canada.
1 Christian Reformed church in Fergus
What Christian Reformed Christians believe
The Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRC) states its faith simply: the Old and New Testaments are the inspired Word of God, “the only infallible rule for faith and life.” It confesses the three ecumenical creeds and the Three Forms of Unity, the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism and the Canons of Dort, which it holds “fully agree with the Word of God,” and it has adopted two contemporary testimonies, “Our World Belongs to God” and the Belhar Confession.
The CRC speaks of a Reformed “accent”: God is sovereign over all of life, salvation is by grace alone, believers and their children belong to God’s covenant, and Christians are called to serve Christ in culture, work, education and public life. This emphasis, inherited from Abraham Kuyper, produced the Christian schools and colleges for which the denomination is known.
Worship: what a service is like
A CRC service follows the Reformed order of gathering, confession and assurance, Scripture and sermon, prayer and offering, and blessing, but the style varies more than in the other Reformed federations. Some congregations keep two services with organ and the Psalter Hymnal; many hold one morning service with hymns, psalm settings and contemporary songs led by a worship team, using the hymnal Lift Up Your Hearts. Children are baptized as infants, the Lord’s Supper is celebrated from quarterly to weekly, and baptized children may be admitted once they can express an age-appropriate faith. Catechism preaching continues in some churches and has faded in others.
How Christian Reformed churches are organized
Each congregation is led by a council of ministers, elders and deacons. Churches are grouped into regional classes, and delegates from every classis meet in an annual synod. Ministers are trained mainly at Calvin Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the Canadian office is in Burlington, Ontario. The CRC has about a thousand congregations and roughly 190,000 members, about a quarter of them in Canada; in Wellington County it is found in Drayton and Guelph.
Since 1995 the CRC has permitted the ordination of women, first by local option and from 2007 in all offices. That decision led to the departure of the congregations that formed the United Reformed Churches and to the suspension of the CRC’s membership in the North American Presbyterian and Reformed Council in 1997. Synod 2022 affirmed that the church’s teaching on marriage and sexual conduct has confessional status, and some congregations that disagreed have since left.
Compared with Reformed churches
The CRC is the largest of the four Reformed federations in Ontario and the one from which the United Reformed Churches came; the Canadian Reformed and Free Reformed churches were formed by immigrants who declined to join it. All four confess the same Three Forms of Unity, baptize infants and are governed by elders. The differences lie in the decisions of the last thirty years: the CRC ordains women to all offices, allows a wider range of worship styles and typically holds one service rather than two, while the other three have kept the offices to men, hold two services and sing mainly psalms. The three would say the CRC has moved from the common ground; CRC members would say they have applied the same confessions to new questions. For a visitor the family resemblance is still obvious.