Worship Weblog
Saturday, July 30, 2005
Report from CRC sesquicentennial planning committee at Trinity College
Here at Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights, Ill., at the planning meeting of the Christian Reformed Church’s sesquicentennial conference in 2007, we’ve begun by wrestling with the question of how an ethnic denomination can have a future once it has assimilated. The CRC was founded by Dutch immigrants and the vast majority of its current members descended from those immigrants (though now 1 in 10 CRC members are Korean). But while our Dutch names are unmistakable, today most CRC members are more American and Canadian than Dutch. As one member said, the problem may not be that the CRC is too Dutch (though indeed its historic ethnic insularity is lamentable), the problem may be that the CRC has lost its immigrant identity, an identity that once fostered a strong denominational loyalty and fervent piety. As another member put it, while the CRC once identified with its status as “stranger in a strange land,” now it must find a way to be a “stranger in a familiar land.”
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