Reformed Church in America

Heritage

The Reformed Church in America began as the Dutch Reformed congregation of New Amsterdam in 1628, making it the oldest Protestant denomination in continuous service in North America; Manhattan's Collegiate Church still descends from that first congregation. A second stream arrived with the 1847 Dutch immigration to the Midwest — Albertus Van Raalte's Holland, Michigan colony chief among them — giving the RCA its enduring East-Midwest double culture and its colleges (Hope, Central, Northwestern) and seminaries. The RCA produced household names from Norman Vincent Peale to Robert Schuller. Between 2021 and 2023 a substantial number of congregations departed amid the long dispute over sexuality — many into the new Alliance of Reformed Churches and Kingdom Network — and the RCA restructured to continue. RCMS 2020, counting before most departures, recorded 912 US congregations.

Theological family

Confessional Reformed: the Three Forms of Unity — Heidelberg Catechism, Belgic Confession, Canons of Dort — plus the Belhar Confession, adopted in 2010; Scripture confessed as the church's rule. The RCA has long contained evangelical and progressive wings, and its recent losses came precisely from the strain of holding them; the church continues with genuine breadth and an unresolved center of gravity.

Who decides what

Reformed presbyterian order, continental style: consistories of elders and deacons, regional classes, and a General Synod; the RCA has ordained women to all offices since 1979-80, with historic room for dissenting consciences that itself became part of the church's long negotiation.

What a first-time visitor would find

Worship spans the whole American range — historic East Coast pulpits with formal liturgy, Midwest congregations from traditional to fully contemporary; the Heidelberg Catechism's warmth and the Lord's Supper's regular observance are the common threads a visitor can expect.

What it has always cared about

First-arrival endurance — nearly four centuries of continuous ministry; the Heidelberg's comfort as a teaching tradition; colleges and global missions, with historic RCA missionaries from Arabia to Japan; and, in figures like Peale and Schuller, a knack — argued over inside the family — for speaking Reformed faith in thoroughly American idioms.

Its gift to the wider church

The RCA is American Protestantism's longest unbroken thread — a living link to the continent's Reformation-era beginnings — and its Heidelberg-hearted, bridge-building instinct helped teach American churches that confessional identity and ecumenical warmth can coexist; it holds full communion with the ELCA, PC(USA) and UCC.

Commonly confused with

With the Christian Reformed Church perpetually — the 1857 daughter that left it, sharing confessions, Dutch heritage and west Michigan geography; and now with the Alliance of Reformed Churches and Kingdom Network, the networks its departing congregations formed, which are distinct bodies.

Range of views inside it

Wide and consequential: East Coast and Midwest cultures, evangelical and progressive convictions, traditional and contemporary worship — and, congregation by congregation, different memories of the recent parting.

Where Reformed Church in America churches are on the map

132 Reformed Church in America congregations appear on The Church Map, across 22 states.

• Michigan — 36
• New York — 26
• New Jersey — 21
• Iowa — 11
• Illinois — 6
• California — 5
• Florida — 3
• Minnesota — 3
• Colorado — 3
• Arizona — 2

Moments this body was part of

• 1834–1850 — The Dutch seceders sail for Michigan and Iowa

  Hendrik de Cock was deposed at Ulrum in 1834 for preaching against the Dutch state church's drift, and thousands who followed him out of it were fined and jailed for worshiping in barns and farmhouse kitchens. Poverty and the potato blight finished what the fines began: in 1846 Albertus Van Raalte sailed with about a hundred of these seceders and founded Holland, Michigan on February 9, 1847, while Hendrik Scholte's party founded Pella, Iowa the same year. Their frontier congregations organized as Classis Holland and, in a union the General Synod ratified on June 5, 1850, joined the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church — the old New Amsterdam church, today the Reformed Church in America.

  A church planted by Dutch settlers in 1628 was still standing when a second Dutch migration arrived two centuries later, and the newcomers joined it — for seven years.

• 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.

• 1997–2009 — The healing documents

  On Reformation Day 1999 at Augsburg, the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation signed the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, declaring that the sixteenth century's church-dividing condemnations on justification no longer apply — the World Methodist Council joined in 2006, and Reformed and Anglican bodies have since associated themselves with it. In the same years American churches signed full-communion agreements in a lattice: ELCA with the Presbyterians, Reformed and UCC (1997), with the Moravians (1999), with the Episcopal Church (2001), and with the United Methodists (2009).

  The argument that broke Western Christianity in 1517 was declared, by its own heirs, no longer church-dividing. Unity here arrived not as merger but as mutual recognition — churches remaining themselves and calling each other true.

• 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.

• 2021–2023 — The Reformed Church in America parts

  The Reformed Church in America — planted in New Amsterdam in 1628, the oldest Protestant body in continuous ministry in North America — saw more than two hundred congregations depart between 2021 and 2023 over sexuality and governance, many joining the newly formed Alliance of Reformed Churches or the Kingdom Network. The 2021 General Synod adopted recommendations for regulated, "gracious" separation, releasing churches with their property.

  The oldest Protestant body on the continent chose to let congregations go with their buildings and its blessing — a parting conducted as neighbors rather than as litigants, and both streams still confess the same catechism.