Christian Reformed Church in North America

Heritage

The Christian Reformed Church in North America began in 1857 when Dutch immigrant congregations in west Michigan, led by figures like Gijsbert Haan, separated from the Reformed Church in America, judging it too accommodated to American ways and too lax in doctrine and discipline. Successive waves of Dutch immigration — many shaped by the 1834 Secession and Abraham Kuyper's neo-Calvinist revival in the Netherlands — made Grand Rapids its capital, with Calvin University and Calvin Theological Seminary at its intellectual center. A binational church with strength in Canada, it counted 792 US congregations in RCMS 2020. Recent synods have reaffirmed the traditional position on sexuality with confessional force, prompting some congregations to depart — a sorting still in motion.

Theological family

Confessional Reformed: the Three Forms of Unity — Heidelberg Catechism, Belgic Confession, Canons of Dort — with Scripture as the infallible Word; overlaid with Kuyperian neo-Calvinism, the conviction that Christ's lordship claims every square inch of creation, which made the CRC unusually serious about scholarship, schooling and cultural engagement.

Who decides what

Reformed presbyterian polity by continental design: local consistories of elders and deacons, regional classes, and an annual Synod; ministers are called by congregations. The CRC opened all offices to women in 1995 while allowing churches and classes to differ — a settled but still-varied practice.

What a first-time visitor would find

Orderly Reformed worship — historically two services a Sunday, catechism preaching in the second — with strong congregational singing from psalms and hymns; today styles run from traditional to contemporary, but the sermon retains its weight, and the Heidelberg Catechism's comfort still frames the church's teaching.

What it has always cared about

Christian day schools built and filled at famous sacrifice — the CRC created one of America's densest parochial school networks outside Catholicism; scholarship as discipleship, from Calvin's philosophers to its seminary; catechesis by the Heidelberg; world missions and relief through World Renew; and the antithesis-and-common-grace debates that gave American Calvinism its intellectual edge.

Its gift to the wider church

The CRC naturalized Kuyper for North America: faith claiming scholarship, politics, art and schooling — an intellectual tradition (Plantinga and Wolterstorff came up through it) that re-armed American evangelicalism's mind, plus a Christian schooling model studied far beyond Dutch circles.

Commonly confused with

With the Reformed Church in America above all — the older body it left in 1857; the two share confessions and Dutch roots, and outsiders in west Michigan routinely mix them up. Also with the United Reformed Churches, which left the CRC itself in the 1990s, and with the Protestant Reformed Churches, which left in 1924.

Range of views inside it

Real range, currently under strain: congregations differ on worship style, on women in office (a both-positions polity), and on how the recent confessional decisions about sexuality should be applied — the denomination's live question as this record is written.

Where Christian Reformed Church in North America churches are on the map

314 Christian Reformed Church in North America congregations appear on The Church Map, across 36 states.

• Michigan — 96
• California — 35
• Iowa — 27
• Minnesota — 17
• Illinois — 16
• Washington — 15
• Wisconsin — 14
• Indiana — 12
• South Dakota — 10
• New York — 10

Moments this body was part of

• 1857–1882 — The Christian Reformed Church secedes

  Seven years into the union, four congregations of Classis Holland — Graafschap, Noordeloos, Polkton and Grand Rapids, about 130 families, roughly a tenth of the Dutch immigrant church membership in west Michigan — sent letters of secession, read at classis on April 8, 1857. Graafschap's letter opened with a hymnbook: eight hundred hymns adopted, it said, against the Church Order, alongside neglected catechism preaching and a communion table open to anyone who came. The elder Gijsbert Haan, who had traveled east among the older Dutch churches and come home convinced the American church had gone slack, was the argument's engine. The seceders called themselves the True Dutch Reformed Church; in 1882 a further group of Michigan congregations left the RCA over its refusal to bar Freemasons, roughly doubling the young body, which took the name Christian Reformed Church in 1890.

  The two churches spent 157 years apart and then sat down together in one synod session in 2014. They never once stopped confessing the same catechism.

• 1876–1920 — Calvin, and a school beside every church

  On March 15, 1876 the Christian Reformed Church installed Geert Boer as the lone instructor of a theological school in Grand Rapids with seven students; it became Calvin Theological Seminary, and its preparatory department became Calvin College. The same conviction — that Christ's claim reaches scholarship, politics and art, which Abraham Kuyper argued at Princeton in his 1898 Stone Lectures — sent immigrant families of very modest means to build day schools next to their sanctuaries, and thirty-seven of those schools organized the National Union of Christian Schools in 1920. Outside Catholicism, no American church built a denser network of its own schools.

  A small immigrant church spent its money on classrooms, and the habit outgrew it: much of American evangelicalism's later confidence about scholarship was learned from these Dutch Calvinists.

• 1911–1939 — Grand Rapids prints the evangelical bookshelf

  William B. Eerdmans, a Dutch immigrant who sold books door to door while studying at Calvin Seminary, opened his publishing house in Grand Rapids on August 16, 1911. His nephews Pat and Bernie Zondervan started theirs just outside town in 1931, Herman Baker — another immigrant, trained in the Eerdmans stockroom — opened Baker Book House in 1939, and Louis Kregel had been trading Dutch theology across the city since 1909. One immigrant church's city became the place American evangelicals of every tradition buy their commentaries, their study Bibles and their seminary textbooks.

  The New International Version was begun by a Christian Reformed overture in 1956 and published by Zondervan in 1978 — presses founded by Dutch immigrants supplying the rest of the American church the words it now reads aloud on Sunday.

• 1924–1925 — The common grace argument

  Meeting at Kalamazoo in 1924, the Christian Reformed synod adopted three points on common grace: that God restrains sin in the world, shows a favor of a non-saving kind to those outside the covenant, and leaves them able to do civil good. Herman Hoeksema, Henry Danhof and George Ophoff refused the three points as unfaithful to the confessions; their classes deposed them within the year, and the congregations that went with them organized as the Protestant Reformed Churches in 1925. At issue was how far God's kindness extends to people who never come to him — argued in Dutch, in print, at length, and the magazine the fight produced is still published.

  The Protestant Reformed Churches stayed small, and they and the church that deposed their founders still teach from the same three confessions. The break was over an inference drawn from those documents, not over the documents themselves.

• 1965–1978 — A Bible in common: the NIV

  Begun by initiative of the Christian Reformed Church and the National Association of Evangelicals, the Committee on Bible Translation drew scholars from dozens of denominations across the English-speaking world; the New International Version they produced in 1978 became the best-selling modern English Bible, read each Sunday in Baptist, Pentecostal, Presbyterian and non-denominational pulpits alike.

  Traditions that share no bishop and no assembly now share sentences — the same words, memorized across every border in this taxonomy.

• 2014 — The Pella Accord

  On June 14, 2014, at Central College in Pella, Iowa — the town the other 1847 Dutch colony founded — the Christian Reformed Synod and the Reformed Church in America's General Synod sat in one business session for the first time in the 157 years since the split, and adopted the resolution since called the Pella Accord: to act together in all things except those in which deep differences of conviction compel them to act separately.

  Not a merger, and neither church pretended otherwise. It is the smaller, harder thing — two bodies that spent a century and a half explaining why they are not each other, agreeing to work as one wherever they can.

• 2022–2025 — The Christian Reformed Church draws its line

  Synod 2022 adopted the denomination's Human Sexuality Report and declared its position on unchastity to have confessional status — binding on officebearers in the way the three forms of unity are binding, rather than settled by each council. Synod 2024 ratified that reading and placed congregations that had registered protest into a one-year process of limited suspension, ending in restoration or in disaffiliation. Around thirty of those congregations left, out of roughly a thousand in the United States and Canada; several were in Classis Grand Rapids East, a mile or two from the denominational offices, Calvin University and Calvin Theological Seminary. The Reformed Church in America, the body the CRC seceded from in 1857, had been through its own parting over the same question two years earlier.

  Two churches that spent 157 years apart, sat down together at Pella in 2014, and then went through the same argument eight years later — each losing congregations it did not want to lose, and each still holding the catechism the other holds.