Origins: A Movement Begins…
Origins: A Movement Begins…
This is the story of the movement that became the Alliance of Reformed Churches (the Alliance). Lately, people have asked us: “How did the Alliance begin.” As we approach the first anniversary of meetings in which votes were taken by classes to release congregations to the Alliance, it feels like we may have enough perspective to answer that question. Also, while the early story of this movement focuses primarily on the Alliance’s birth out of the Reformed Church in America (RCA), the Alliance’s ongoing mission is to partner with all congregations looking for a dynamic home in an organization of congregations founded on the Reformed theology and Biblical principles.
The Alliance started with a movement of congregations asking the RCA to provide definitive boundaries to its view of Biblical exegesis and understanding of authority. By doing so, the RCA would also set boundaries to its understanding of universalism, interfaith practice, and human sexuality. While human sexuality was most often the focal point of these requests because of cultural trends and national government practices in Canada and the U.S., the core foundation was defining the understanding and boundaries of Biblical authority and exegesis in the RCA.
This movement of congregations had been in discussion for a number of years. However, it became the object of direct focus in 2015. General Synod President Greg Alderman proposed a motion which General Synod 2015 (GS2015) adopted:
That the General Synod form a special council to meet in spring 2016 for the express purpose of describing a pathway forward for the Reformed Church in America to address the question of human sexuality as it relates to ordination and marriage.
In the RCA General Synod 2016 (GS2016) minutes, it is clear that the RCA was a deeply divided group and the special council did not find a way forward. A “Group of Five” was tasked with collating the responses from this gathering. (Here is a link to their report which begins on pg 72 of the minutes.)
“Drawing from the work of each small group as listed above, the Group of Five compiled what appeared to be consensus recommendations and presented them to the entire special council for their affirmation.
There were two themes that appeared in the above recommended actions that bear mention. However, these were seen as issues of implementation rather than recommended action. Those were:
The creation of a conscience clause if appropriate.
A call for grace-filled, orderly separation over a period of time, if needed. After discussion and deliberation, the following recommended actions emerged as the conceptual framework for further deliberation by the General Synod 2016.”
Among the recommendations the “Group of Five” provided to GS2016, was a recommendation for a change to the Book of Church Order.
“Sec. 20. The consistory shall assure that all weddings performed by their pastor and/or in their church are between one man and one woman.”
This recommended change was adopted by GS2016, but it was not affirmed by 2/3 of the RCA classes during the 2016-2017 ministry year; failing by a narrow margin.
While specific action was being taken in 2015 by the General Synod, the RCA was also receiving overtures from Classis British Columbia and the Dakota Classis and regions like the Far West and Great Lakes. These overtures were regularly asking General Synod for clarity or consistency around Biblical exegetical principles and a theology of human sexuality. Sometimes these overtures focused on a specific problem and other times they focused on the greater system by attempting to change the Book of Church Order. As an example, Classis British Columbia at its Special Classis meeting held on February 10, 2018 passed the following motion unanimously.
“Regarding our theological differences in the RCA on the topic of human sexuality and biblical hermeneutics, unless God moves the RCA to a radical reconstitution within the next 5 years, we see no other way forward than to withdraw from the RCA graciously.”
Eventually, requests/communications like these and the special council summary were subsumed into a task force approved by General Synod 2018 (GS2018); a task force that would become known as the Vision 2020 Task Force.
As the GS2018 task force began, the world did not stop. Meetings of classes and regions kept happening where they continued their conversations. By mid 2019, when the attendees of General Synod 2019 (GS2019) were asked to provide feedback to the Vision 2020 team (as the GS2018 task force was being called), it was becoming clear that “generous separation,” already considered by the special council, was remaining as a strong option – maybe even the preferred option.
In early 2020, a group of conservative leaders in the RCA invited key leaders to attend a 24-hr summit in Denver CO on March 11-12. Fifty-four (54) leaders from twenty-four (24) classes answered that request. As we well know, this group met with very little time to spare before the US was almost unilaterally closed down to travel because of restrictions caused by the Covid-19 virus. In their time together, the group considered many ways forward. Near the end of the meeting, the question was raised, “Are we done fighting for the RCA to have a common and consistent theology?” The nearly unanimous consent from the group was that they were done fighting; they were done being distracted by the ongoing and never ending overtures; and, they were strongly inclined to depart if generous separation were offered. Shortly after that moment of consensus, attendees made their way to cars and nearly empty airplanes to head home to a new reality created by a pandemic.
The initial draft of the Vision 2020 report was released in late June of 2020. That report offered as Recommendation #3 the general concept of a “Mutually Generous Separation” which included generalized boundaries guiding its implementation. Later that summer, the Denver Collaborative leaders, as the Denver summit was named, hosted a Zoom meeting. There were over 100 attendees on that Zoom meeting. It was clear that the summit’s common consensus of being done fighting was being embraced by more than just the 54 leaders present in Denver.
In October of 2020, some leaders from classes in the Heartland, Great Lakes and Far West regions, who had already spoken or written about their willingness to consider mutual separation, were asked whether they would be willing to spend a few days in Chicago in order to consider a common way forward for congregations that were inclined to accept the expected “Mutually Generous Separation.” The answers to this request were positive. However, Covid-19 intervened again with increased infection rates in Illinois. Since an in-person meeting was not available, the 14 invitees decided to meet online. Starting in early December, the group met weekly for almost 3 hours every Thursday afternoon. The group committed to prayer, ongoing conversations with each other and their connections, and to dialogue about a healthy way forward.
Unknown to this group of leaders, in late November 2020 an RCA congregation took the first local congregational vote (not classically supervised) to file a petition to withdraw from the RCA. By February, another congregation had taken a local congregational vote to withdraw from the RCA. Alongside those individual votes, there were other congregations encouraging this group of leaders to form a “landing pad” for RCA congregations.
By late February, the group came to the conclusion it needed to form an organization of churches. Some members from West Michigan area had created a corporation for just such a moment, if necessary. By early March 2021, that corporation was named The Alliance of Reformed Churches. By mid March, it became apparent that the forming group couldn’t go much further without creating a board structure and hiring staff. The group polled itself in order to ask whether staff might emerge from those in the original conversation. By early April, the team had decided that a leadership team of two staff would be asked to serve as founding staff.
By early summer, the RCA announced that in October General Synod 2021 (GS2021) would meet in Arizona. GS2021 took up the final version of the Vision 2020 report (this version included more specific directions for generous separation) and adopted most of it. The Alliance and congregations had committed to wait in the hope that a way forward might be found by GS2021 other than “Mutually Generous Separation,” but also in awareness that after almost 6 years of direct efforts to find such a way forward, the likelihood was low that one existed which had not already been considered. When GS2021, adopted the “Mutually Generous Separation” recommendation, with its specific directives for leaving, 43 congregations from the Dakotas, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and Michigan filed petitions to withdraw from the RCA. In an effort to coordinate this movement, the Alliance asked these congregations and their RCA classes to set their release dates for December 31, 2021.
On January 1, 2022, the Alliance moved from its research phase to its launch phase and was born when 43 congregations were released to become partner congregations. Throughout the spring, summer, and fall of 2022, those 43 congregations would be joined by almost 90 more congregations so that the Alliance expects to have 125+ congregations by the end of 2022. A church directory can be found here. On November 11-12, the first network gathering of Alliance congregations will happen in the Sioux Falls, SD with over 40 congregations in attendance.
At some gatherings, people have asked us why we have avoided naming specific individuals who contributed to and were involved in this movement. We have done so, in part, because no one person or small group began this movement. It is impossible to articulate a fixed point where the movement began. It wasn’t born of a single moment or a singled decision. A General Synod President looked for a way forward in 2015. An interim General Secretary proposed the Vision 2020 group in 2018. Classes sent overtures in all of those years pressing for theological clarity. People, who were asked, attended the special council and others served on the Vision 2020 team. Thousands of people filled out feedback surveys for the Vision 2020 team. All of this was done in the context of a movement of congregations. Two congregations specifically voted to leave the RCA before the Alliance existed. A large group of congregations in the Dakotas announced they were honoring their historic classical commitments and moving together. Ultimately, while one group on the Vision 2020 team discerned the need for mutually generous separation, another group of people discerned that God was leading them to help name and form the Alliance of Reformed Churches as a “landing pad” for congregations that might want to find a new home. Some people will name all of this as fomenting division while others will name it as God’s Spirit disquieting people and not allowing them to continue in the status quo.
To start naming individuals, rather than to point toward congregations, classes and regions who were seeking to discern and follow God’s Spirit, seems disingenuous and unfair to the congregations and the people who call those congregations their home. This story is about the consistent desire of congregations and the communities of people who serve those congregations to follow God into the 21st Century. Those congregations and leaders were motivated by the desire to end the circular arguments which most felt were distracting them from their local, regional and global mission commitments. The Alliance of Reformed Churches is thankful for its place in this movement and pledges to keep challenging all of its partner congregations to follow God’s call to pursue His Kingdom vision.