A bureau is a unit created by a community to serve certain specific needs. Such a bureau can be called a board or an agency or a department, all meaning the same thing, namely an entity made and maintained to serve the whole.

In the CRC we call our bureaus by various names: committees, boards, agencies. Usually our bureaus co ns ist of two elements: 1) a board or committee theoretically supervising the work of, 2) an executive and staff.

When does a bureau—which can be a good thing –become a bureaucracy—which is a bad thing?

The answer is: when a bureau starts to serve itself, that is when it comes to aim as much (or more) at its own perpetuation as at its service of the whole. A bureau has become a bureaucracy when it becomes an end in itself and tends to take its own path. And a bureaucrat is an executive or staff member who likes it that way.

There is a kind of natural law about bureaucracies: they tend to grow. Not only that, but because of it they tend always to cost more to maintain. Size of staff and budget is, for the bureaucracy, a measure of worth; and growth in both a measure of accomplishment.

There is another sort of natural law about bureaucracies: the more they grow, the less willing they are to let the parent body know exactly what they are doing. Indeed, it is an almost sure mark of a bureaucracy that it is determined not to divulge many details of its operations nor of its expenditures. Yet it looks to the parent body to dole out support by custom or through blind loyalty, especially when stimulated by a stream of propaganda. Indeed, the bureaucrat assumes growing financial support as his prerogative, something to which he is entitled merely by existing.

Now, I think that the CRC has become bureaucracy-ridden.

And it is my experience that our bureaucracies are highly successful at using our denominational boards as channels and our synods as tools to provide them with ever-increasing funds, to rubber-stamp projects and programs not too carefully spelled out, and, when useful, to protect the bureaucrats from close scrutiny by the membership of the denomination.

The techniques bureaucrats use to manipulate synods—which are supposed to represent the constituency in relation to the bureaucracy—would be an interesting managerial, or psychological or sociological study, one which has fascinated me for many years.

The rise of bureaucracy in the CRC was foreseen many years ago by one of the pastors for whom the CRC at large entertained the highest respect. He predicted with uncanny accuracy the bureaucratic structure we now endure.

     

My reference is to Idzerd Van Dellen, sometimes called the “Nestor” of our denomination. Nestor was a legendary Greek hero known for his wisdom.

As an authority on Reformed polity, Reverend Van Dellen published with Reverend H. Keegstra, in Dutch, “the blue book” commentary on our Church Order in 1915. The current version of that commentary, in English, Van Dellen and Monsma, illumines us still.

In 1950, Reverend Van Dellen issued through Baker Book House a small autobiograph y which he entitled In God’s Crucible.

Looking back—and ahead—in his eighth decade, our Nestor recalls how he and some others discerned, long before 1950, the trend to bureaucracy in the CRC: “The Christian Reformed Church at present has strong Boards which are constantly gaining in power. I consider this a great danger. We plainly see in our American Churches to what this ultimately leads. I remember that at one of our Synods Prof. Dr. Steffans of the Reformed Church was present as an honored guest. We were debating the pro and con of the Board system. The old professor then made a gesture with his cane as if crushing the head of some vicious animal, and said: ‘Brethren, kill the Boards. They have done much harm in our Church.’

“When they become strong,” Van Dellen goes on to say, “consistories, Classes and even Synods have little to say. Delegates to Synods and General Assemblies declare that Synods become little more than rubber stamps. They have to take it as the Boards have cut and dried it, for the whole machinery would be wrecked if they refused to act in accord with the decisions of the Boards. The Boards, or rather a few persons in whom the power is centralized, finally run the Church. You get your ‘bishops’ and little ‘popes,’ though they end their reports to Synod by assuring that body that they are ‘humbly submitted, your servant So and So’” (pp. 105–106).

But Van Dellen’s warning seems hardly to have been heard, and certainly went unheeded. The CRC has, rather, permitted a whole web of bureaucracies boards, executives and staffs together–to become exactly what he describes.

If you are skeptical about that, pause and think for a moment of any board or agency or committee of our denomination that comes to mind, presumably working in our names and on our behalf—and at our expense—and ask yourself if you know:

1) who its personnel are;

2) how many of them there are;

3) where they are;

4) what you are paying them;

5) what they did on this day in our name;

6) what they said on this day in our name;

7) what their views are on issues that you think crucial to the welfare of the Christian Reformed Church. If you don’t know, that reflects the possibility of bureaucracy.

Are you thinking that, if you wanted to know any or all of these things about our boards, agencies, committees, etc., it would be an easy matter to find out? That there are surely information officers in all of them appointed for precisely the purpose of keeping the denomination fully informed?

You will discover, to the contrary, that instead of an information office to which one could turn for quick and clear answers, the bureaucracy is apt to have a “development” office supported by your money for the purpose of issuing blurbs professionally designed to extract more money from your pocket. There are, so to speak, two streams flowing between a parent body and its bureaucracies: 1) a stream of financial support from the body to the bureaucrats; and 2) a stream of propaganda from the bureaucrats to the parent body, so much of it sometimes as to shock even the most loyal of supporters.

But lost in the interchange is all but a trickle of the solid information you might expect on issues like those mentioned above.

This is characteristic of bureaucracy.

Suppose, however, that your concern is a more specific one.

You read or hear this or that and come to pondering any of many rightful curiosities, like these: what is held and taught in the Seminary about Genesis, or in the College about the age of the earth and the historical Adam? Which principles of hermeneutics govern biblical interpretation on both campuses? How much sympathy, and where entertained, is there for Liberation Theology in World Mission or World Relief? Who supervises, and how thoroughly, the Reformed character of what is put on the air by radio and TV, or sent in the mails, or spoken in the classrooms staffed by employees of the CRC? From whence are. drawn Home Mission techniques, and how compatible are these with our own heritage? And so on. What return, say, as good steward, are you getting on your support of it all? Yours is indeed the faith; what is their promise?

These legitimate concerns all come to have one thing in common: the discovery that in addition to being shy about distributing information about themselves, bureaucracies are apt to close ranks against efforts to pry loose information about matters that concern you.

Say, for example, that rumor has it that something is amiss in our missions in Mexico. Or you find reason to wonder about what view the editor of The Banner has of the Bible.

Or, you are led to ask specifically how a given Seminary professor stands on biblical criticism, or Adam, or women in the pulpit. Or what the travel budget of one agency or another is, and how justified. Or the ratio of overhead to effective expenditure.

You write to the executive of the agency involved. If the reply does not fully satisfy you, you address the board which you think represents you vis-a-vis the agency. What happens?

You likely discover that board and agency are one bureaucracy together. They close ranks to leave you pounding at a closed door. Far from being eager, to keep you well-informed, the board or committee which is supposed to be overseeing the agency in the name of the Church, seems quite willing to keep you in the dark.

This is bureaucracy.

And if you are naive enough to remember that employees of the Church do sign the Form of Subscription pledging themselves not only willing but eager to respond to queries, you are likely to hear that bureaucrats are much too busy to find time to answer questions.

This is bureaucracy.

Let’s try another perspective.

Suppose that as a member in good standing in the CRC, you would like to make some comment on these or other matters to synod—your synod—meeting in Grand Rapids next June.

Yau decide that you have a right to address the broadest body-not the highest body; we should keep that distinction clear—in our Church. (The highest body in our polity is the local consistory; there is the seat of original authority.)

You choose to communicate your views by way of a letter.

You soon learn that before your letter got out of your typewriter the tentacles of bureaucracy were already raised to keep it from the floor of synod. Nor will it appear in the agenda. This, of course, in the name of good order.

Yet you know that our bureaucracies have full and free access to synods. They spread self-serving reports, characterized more by warmth than light on the kinds of questions mentioned above, across agenda pages printed at our expense, with opportunity to supplement these at will before synods convene. And as these reports are discussed, representatives of the bureaucracies have free access to the floor to say as much as they like.

The scales are weighted in favor of bureaucracy. Its voice drowns out your own before you are even heard.

It obviously is a pretty weak bureaucrat who does not learn rather soon how to use synods for his own purposes, as Reverend Van Dellen points out.

This is bureaucracy in action.

Ah, you have an idea?

You will travel to Grand Rapids in June, attend all the sessions of that synod, and in due season ask the right to be heard on the floor?

You probably are not surprised to discover that such behavior is ruled out on the grounds, again, of good order (good order for whom, you may wonder). After all, while public bodies often open their floors to the voice of citizens who attend board, or council, or commission meetings, church bureaucracies keep a tighter grip on ecclesiastical affairs.

The principle seems to be this: synods are elective bodies, and the floor is reserved for those duly chosen to represent classes, and through them consistories, and through them . . . you. You are thus represented on the floor, but may not speak yourself. Why not? Because you are not an elected delegate.

Perhaps that appeals to you as sound parliamentary practice? Until you discover that there’s a whole group of persons who, like you, are not elected delegates either, but who can always take the floor at synod. These are members of the Seminary faculty. They are not elected delegates, but they have leave to speak on whatever, and whenever, and as often as they like when synods are in session.

The scales tip more and more in favor of bureaucracy. Indeed, this, one might say, is bureaucracy on display.

While in Grand Rapids you may learn of an even more bureaucratic twist as concerns the synod elected to represent you. It is this:

After the classical naming of delegates, but before the new synod convenes, there is a unique meeting in Grand Rapids. The officers of last year’s synod join the Stated Clerk in organizing the upcoming synod. This they do by dividing the delegates to this year’s synod among the several advisory committees who handle all of synod’s business, setting an agenda for each advisory committee, and naming both the chairman and reporter for these committees plus a Seminary faculty advisor to each.

You will reflect that all this is done by persons who are not, any more than you are, elected delegates to the forthcoming synod.

This is, you will come to thinking, bureaucracy incarnate.

The CRC is, I repeat, bureaucracy-ridden.

It remains to ask:

1. What’s wrong with that? 2. How did we acquire ours? 3. What, if anything, can be done about it?

Lester De Koster, former Calvin College professor and editor of the churches’ The Banner, lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan.