$150,000 Grant Will Help CRC and RCA Plan for Renewal

Representatives of the Christian Reformed Church in North America and the Reformed Church in America will be meeting in coming weeks to collaborate and to explore the possibility of creating a new center for church renewal.

With the help of a $150,000 grant from the Helen and Richard DeVos Foundation of Grand Rapids, Mich., the denominations are looking to come up with a proposal in spring 2018 for what a new center — if they decide that a center is what’s needed — might look like and how it would function.

They would then provide a few recommendations to the synods of the CRC and RCA in June 2018 when both groups meet, separately and jointly, on the campus of Calvin College.

“This is an exciting chance for us to work together in creative ways to help our churches,” said Colin Watson, Sr., the CRC’s director of ministries and administration.

Their work will not begin with a blank slate. Both denominations have been working independently and together on several church-renewal efforts. With the new planning grant, the team will review those endeavors and propose a way forward.

“We will be having conversations with one another and with congregations to look at how we can bring together our key resources and come up with ways of doing even better at church renewal,” said Watson.

The way forward remains at this point an open question.

“The good thing about this grant is that where it will lead is open-ended,” added Ken Eriks, the RCA’s director of special projects. “We have no preconceived idea of what will come out of it.”

Key in the process, he added, “will be to talk with and listen to pastors, ministry leaders, and church members on the ground to get a good idea of the struggles they face and how we might be able to deliver the right help at the right time.”

By doing this, said Watson, the goal will be to build collaboration between the denomination, the classes, and congregations.“This will involve living out the idea that we are better together in solving problems and doing the work of God’s kingdom,” he said.

Calvin Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids and Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Mich., will be part of this process. The Church Renewal Lab at Calvin Theological Seminary and Ridder Church Renewal at Western Theological Seminary have both been helping congregations chart a new future for themselves.

Other efforts such as Healthy Church, a CRC congregational survey that helps churches assess their own health, Go Local, a CRC initiative to help congregations become more vital parts of their communities, and several RCA programs geared to maintain and grow church health would also be included to help shape this exploration process.

In addition, various leadership programs, a report for the RCA that affirmed the effectiveness of different ministry-delivery system models, and the findings of the CRC’s 2014 Strategic Planning and Adaptive Change Team project will be considered.

“We hope that this new collaboration will result have into place something that churches can go to for the best renewal resources that the CRC and RCA have to offer,” said Watson.

In the grant proposal, CRC and RCA representatives point out that church renewal is important because many denominations — including the RCA and CRC — are seeing declining membership numbers.

“The projections about congregations are sobering,” the grant application says. “The trends are, at times, discouraging when looking at many North American denominations, including the RCA and CRC.”

In the U.S., the Pew Research Center’s 2014 Religious Landscape Study found an 18.1 percent decline in the number of adults affiliated with the mainline Protestant tradition compared to the results of a similar Pew survey in 2007.

In light of these numbers, the RCA and CRC have launched efforts and provided resources in recent years to address the troubling trend.

“We are now looking to do an even better job and to create a new path forward,” said Watson.

For the two denominations, this exploration effort is part of the direction that came out of the “Pella Accord,” the agreement the two denominations signed in 2014 while meeting in a joint synod session in Pella, Iowa, to work together in whatever ways may be possible.

The effort is also an outgrowth of the Church Multiplication Initiative, also supported by a DeVos grant, through which the CRC and RCA worked together to plant churches.

“This new project is an extension of all of the efforts we have done together so far. Hopefully we have learned from those, and now we’ll be able to go deeper,” said Eriks.