The meeting of our churches’ representatives in their annual June Synod is a significant event which the Outlook usually makes a special effort to cover. I have been asked to make a preliminary survey of the agenda for that meeting. The 568 pages of material may be looked at from various points of view. The reports of the churches’ agencies may be studied somewhat as corporation reports are studied by the directors or stockholders before their annual meeting to determine from the columns of statistics the size of the business and it s profits or losses. Considering the business of the churches in this way as it is reported in the agenda would lead to one kind of conclusion. The Outlook and its readers are less interested in these numbers and statistics then in what the reports may indicate is happening to the work and cause of the biblical Reformed faith in the various areas and activities of the churches. Seeking to determine that is a more complex and difficult matter. To the extent that it can be done it may lead to quite different conclusions than those of a statistical and financial report.

Radio

As usual the first and one of the most encouraging reports comes from the Back-to-God Hour, “the only organization of its size that is directly related to a single church” (p. 12) in this field , accountable to the churches and seeking “to proclaim the entire Bible the whole counsel of God.” The report speaks of the growing Arabic work of Rev. B. Madany, the French Broadcast of Rev. A. Kayayan, the Spanish, Portugese, Chinese, Indonesian and Japanese as well as English outreach. The report also speaks of the new efforts to use TV.

Calvin College and Seminary

Calvin College and Seminary have through the history of our churches had a strategic role in that they are the schools in which the churches’ leadership has been trained. As such, they cannot help but profoundly influence our at present troubled churches by the views which they hold and teach.

The seminary proposes to appoint “a member of a minority race” to its faculty. Naturally, no one should object to the appointment of any qualified teacher because of his race. Now, however, the only reason given for admitting one to this position is his being non-white, and the reason for establishing the position is the alleged need for someone from another race to provide the “illuminating experience” required to equip people for the gospel ministry. In this case, doesn’t the school’s Reformed commitment to the gospel which transcends all differences of race and class seem to be giving way to following a modern gospel derived from and determined by social experience?

In recent practice appointments to the college faculty have been made by the board of trustees, but appointments to the seminary faculty have been made by the Synod itself. Now the board proposes that this be changed so that also seminary faculty appointments be made by the board—another significant step away from what little control the churches through the Synod still have in determining who will teach their future leaders (pp. 43–45).

World Missions

The Board of World Missions proposes that the present Committee for Educational Assistance to Churches Abroad be reorganized to also take over planning, organizing and publishing needed Reformed literature in the major languages of the world (p. 52).

It is also proposing to loan two missionary families to work in the Sepik River Valley of New Guinea in connection with the educational missionary program which the Orneal Kooyers family have been carrying on for over a decade since they began working there with the Wycliffe Translators.

We note that the Nigeria report mentions 110 congregations, 1800 places of worship and 260,000 church attendants in that field in which our missions have been working (p. 64). From a high of 14 missionary positions in Japan, work there is being reduced to 8 or 10 (p. 68).

Home Missions

The Home Missions Report includes a proposal that the home missions board approve grants–in–aid instead of bringing them to the Synod for action as has been the practice. (p. 87). This too is a significant step toward shifting control of this work of the church away from the decisions of the churches through their Synod delegates to the more independent management of a board. While we hear much less about “boardism” than we used to (although another proposed change speaks of more local responsibility and control) hear a few decades ago we are seeing much more of it. In the “Report on evangelism Principles and Strategy” one wonders whether the bald assumption, “God expects his church to grow” (p. 96) doesn’t echo a current mythological fad rather than the realism of God’s revelation. Isaiah’s message, to which the report makes an excellent introductory appeal (p. 78), assured the prophet of no such thing (Isaiah 6; cf. Rom. 11:8). One observes that our Canadian churches increased their quota support from 41.5% in 1968 to 78% in 1977 (p. 103).

Publications

The Board of Publications wants a “radical” change of organization placing its activities under the control of one administrator. In the current organization and performance of our churches’ work, does anyone remember the principle still maintained in article 95 of our Church Order, “no office-bearer shall lord it over another office-bearer”?

For The Banner the Board does not favor a “multiple-editorship” proposed by Grand Rapids East. The Synod will have to choose a new editor for The Banner.

Since 1970 the Synod has approved and the Board has been producing a curriculum for a “united church school.” Despite the apparent logic of providing such a unified program of education a substantial number of our churches have not adopted this system because it “consciously abandoned” (Acts 1973, p. 232) making the Catechism the basis of the churches education and does not systematically teach the Biblical doctrines as the older methods attempted to do. These churches still “teach catechism classes” insisting on more substantial materials. The current agenda report on these denominational educational materials seems to state more accurately than it even intends, “We’re simply not always sure what it means to be Reformed, even though we are sure it’s important” (p. 120).

World Relief

The World Relief Committee reports that the main ch~nge in its work has been the introduction of “new systems of reporting and control” of its various activities. While the committee has been having to consolidate and reduce and more carefully control some of its own diverse efforts, last year’s Synod also saddled it with a responsibility for the new program of its “Task Force on World Hunger.” That program was to have raised one percent of every Christian Reformed Church member’s income to relieve the world’s hunger in some undetermined ways. Now the committee complains “that funds were being diverted from our existing world hunger programs to the new world hunger program” (p. 152). Instead of the millions of dollars that one percent of Christian Reformed incomes would have totalled the committee reports that “the world hunger fund brought in a total of $85,211” (p. 161). Plainly, while our membership continues to show its readiness to give generously where there is a responsible effort to help the needy in Christ’s name, most members are by no means ready to irresponsibly turn over money to ecclesiastical theories who don’t know what they are going to do with it but envision “restructuring the world.” (Agenda 1978, p. 463). Among a variety of needed help programs one still wonders how “partial funding of the director’s salary” for a family counselling service in our big Christian Reformed Edmonton community can be justified (p. 159). What can easily be done locally should not be shifted to the whole denomination.

Fund for Needy Churches

The Fund For Needy Churches Report calls attention to what it sees as indications of misuse of denominational help. “We find churches seeking help from the denomination while supporting rather large faith–promise commitments; churches giving very large amounts to non-quota causes while failing to pay their full denominational quotas; churches supporting rather substantially, evangelism projects apart from their church; churches over-paying their required debt reduction while failing to pay full quotas and only the minimum per family for their pastor’s salary” whereas they “ought to become self-supporting as soon as possible” (p. 192).

Liturgical Forms: Marriage

Both revealing and increasing the disunity of our churches over a number of years has been the succession of new liturgical forms put out by the Synod’s liturgical committee. Its new form for marriage was approved for trial use by the churches in 1977. I had occasion last year to point out that that form “in its capitulation to the modern liberation fad, in the vows pointedly refused to recognize the God-given distinction between the role of man and woman in marriage and even presumed to instruct God in the prayer how He ought to counsel the partners when they become bored with each other!” That form now comes back recommended for adoption with sight changes apparently in concession to criticisms. There is now added to the instruction the statement that God “instructs the wife to be subject to her husband in a way which reflects the church’s subjection to Christ, its head. He also instructs the husband to pattern his love for his wife after the example of Christ’s love for his body, the church. He says, ‘Wives be subject to your husbands as to the Lord,’ and ‘Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her . . .’” This is an improvement in the admonitions, but the vows remain unchanged. In these promises the couple need not acknowledge any such difference between the role and responsibilities of husband and wife, although they have earlier expressed “agreement with God’s message concerning marriage.” This is still a significant concession to the antiChristian liberation movement. The committee report earlier frankly acknowledges the rift that exists in the church and even appears in the committee at such points as this: “We recognize that a single form which emphasizes what each person would like to emphasize would be impossible to produce.” “The committee experienced considerable difficulty in arriving at consensus when it attempted to state explicitly how the husband and wife should conduct themselves in the marriage.” (p. 233). (The increasing differences in the churches on such matters are not just a difference of tastes as the comment suggests. The Bible passages are explicit enough, but the “new hermeneutics” increasingly accepted among us suggests that they were “culturally conditioned” and no longer apply.) The florid and presumptuous prayer at the end of the form is now made optional.

Excommunication

Comparing the new proposed form for excommunication with that currently being used reveals some striking changes and deletions. The “grievous offense” involved becomes mere “discredit to the body of Christ.” The stern warnings of the old form about the seriousness of and the persistence in that offense has been dropped, the warnings against the temptations of the devil, the confession of sins on the part of the church and especially the biblical call to separation from the sins which offend God and from the fellowship of those who persist in them have been removed. It is significant that the secretary of the committee, Rev. Alvin Hoksbergen, cannot agree with even this watered-down form for excommunication. He informs us on the last page of the Agenda (p. 568, as he also indicated in a recent Banner article) that he really wants no excommunication from Christ’s church and kingdom which is not shared by all other denominations, and does not want any such action taken in a public meeting of the church.

Ordaining Elders and Deacons

The proposed form for the ordination of elders and deacons is haunted by the 1973 study committee report on ecclesiastical office and ordination. That committee in its earlier and revised report persistently refused to recognize the Bible’s teaching that there as any real authority or “ruling” in church office. It wanted nothing but “service,” reflecting the anti-Christian opposition to authority so characteristic of modern society. The Synods, after unsuccessfully trying to get the committee to correct this fundamentally deficient report, finally doctored up the final version with some brief statements about the biblically taught authority of the offices. Now this liturgical committee refers not to that deficient study committee report but to the report of the 1973 Synod’s advisory committee which “strikes a balance between authority and service” (p. 220) and seeks “to capture” that balance in its proposed form. Unfortunately, in this “balance” any stress on the elders having to “rule” has still virtually disappeared, aside from a passing remark about their “governing the church”. Perhaps the most serious alteration found in the proposed form is in what has been done to the officer’s commitment to the Bible and the confessions. The old form reads, “Do you believe the Old and New Testament to be the only Word of God, and the doctrinal standards of this church to be in harmony therewith”? The proposed form asks, “Do you believe that the Old and New Testaments, as confessed and taught in this church, are the Word of God, the completely reliable rule of faith and life; and do you reject every doctrine which contradicts them? Notice that any acknowledgement that the Bible is the only Word of God has been dropped and that one is not really committed to it at all but only to it as confessed and taught in this church” (whatever that may happen to be) and that all allusion to the doctrinal standards has been dropped. The promise, despite the sound of its concluding phrases really ties one to nothing at all for it is all qualified by “as confessed and taught in this church.” Also submission to the discipline of the church in office now becomes a modifier of the previous promises rather than a separate question. In the charges to officers, although the elders’ variety of service is developed, their ruling is deemphasized and there is no longer an explicit reference to “being watchmen . . . taking heed that purity of doctrine and godliness of life be maintained,” but only a mention of “rebuke and discipline.” The charge to deacons is considerably extended reflecting the sociological interests of the committee. “Study the structures and patterns of modern society, that you may be counselors to their victims and prophetic critics of waste, injustice and selfishness.” “Prophet ic criticism” of society seems to be displaying the biblical concern of church offices with “godliness of doctrine and purity of life.”

Evangelists

Last year’s Synod decided that the church was at liberty to multiply and define offices as it might see fit, whether or not the Bible gave it any directions for doing so, and established the new office of “evangelist.” Considering this unbiblical principle, the committee in constructing its ordination form for evangelists musters and includes a considerable amount of biblical material dealing with evangelism.

Ministers’ Pensions

The Ministers’ Pension Fund committee reports that it still has an unfunded liability in excess of $16,000,000 “almost entirely because the basic pension was increased over the years from $3,620 in 1970 to $4,840 in 1978” (p. 230). It is recommending that Canada pensions be separated from those of the U.S. because of differing government regulations.

Race

The Synodical Committee on Race Relations (SCORR) wants to increase its personnel “to recruit and develop minority readership” and enlarge its budget by over $50,000. This committee came into existence not as a result of any specific need for a separate agency but as a gesture to get in on the preoccupation of our society with race problems. The result was that a committee was appointed with a grandiose mandate to work “to eliminate racism, both causes and effects, within the body of believers, and throughout the world in which we live” (p. 247) but with no specific job or assignment! The result was predictable. Half or more of the budget has been used for “administration to manage the office and its activities, and the rest has been given to other agencies who do have their own jobs. As the report says, “This stance has had two negative effects: it is very hard to report on, and it makes the committee’s work almost invisible.” “It makes our work almost invisible because if we are successful, someone else rightly claims responsibility for the results.” (p. 244). In these times of escalating costs of everything and the need to cut out needless expenditures, has the time not come when this committee which has no job of its own but channels its working funds to others should be eliminated instead of enlarged? Not only is channeling channeling funds through an unneeded agency a wasteful procedure; maintaining a separate committee to emphasize “race” is threatening us with a distortion of the gospel. The report tells us that the Christian Reformed Church needs “Black theology” and its “Native American and Hispanic counterparts . . . lest we become an impoverished and impotent church.” It seems at this point that the God’s Gospel which knows no bounds of race is being displaced by a gospel which is produced by and crippled without the experience of each race—as though the gospel were produced by the color of our skins! This is really a “racist heresy” (which we have also observed in the seminary report).

Synodical Interim Committee

The Synodical Interim Committee, responding to an assignment of the previous Synod recommends that “Synod discontinue the practice of appointing an Advisory Committee on Appointments” (p. 261) in view of the fact that it really had little to do. It proposes that nominations for committees should be channeled through the Stated Clerk’s office and study committee appointments be made by the advisory committee suggesting the study and the officers of Synod. There may be a good argument for eliminating this advisory committee. What I find disturbing, however, is that this looks like another step in t he direction of placing appointment of important committees in the hands of relatively few people. In the Outlook of December 1977, I observed that especially two prevailing practices were converting our denominational assemblies from the representative bodies they were intended to be into a “political machine.” One was control of the agenda by which many materials properly submitted by the churches could be kept out of the printed agenda. The other was control of committees. Eliminating the Synod committee on appointments and referring the appointments to other committees or the clerk’s office would appear to aggravate rather than correct this second harmful practice. Looking over the agenda one again sees instances in which committees, nominating their own successors keep the work of the committee in a little circle of area people, especially preachers or professors, who have been largely controlling denominational activities. In the matter of appointments some means should be devised to make them more representative of our 700 churches.

The Stated Clerk’s plea that agenda reports be made “as clear and concise as possible” deserves special attention. Most of them would be much more useful if they were shorter and simpler.

Capital Punishment

In 1976 Classis Orange City asked our Synod to address our governments in favor of capital punishment. The committee to which this matter was entrusted now gives us a 40-page study. The study begins with a philosophical analysis in which it concedes that “Punishment is at its center retributive” rather than utilitarian, but hastens to add that Christian ethics may also regard the opposite principle of the usefulness of punishment.

“It is a sound principle of jurisprudence that no law should be enacted which has no or very little prospect of finding moral support and consequent observance within the community” (pp. 298–299). The larger part of the following study becomes an argument against the tradition in Reformed theology and ethics that God’s righteousness “demands” the death penalty for murder. It is instructive to study the way in which the committee labors to set aside especially the injunction of Genesis 9:6 “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.” We are told that this is not really concerned about retribution but about “societal protection.” Since God is concerned about the security of man as his “image” if that security “could be attained by . . . restraints short of execution, would he really be offended?” We are told that “we are here confronted not with a command, but with an allowable way . . .”, that God had given different directions in the case of Cain, that this may have been a temporary correction of the pre-flood violence and that “in other times, and in other circumstances such measures may not be necessary,” that we no longer regard the injunction “Be fruitful and multiply” as applicable in our crowded world, that the text was not talking about governments, that it may have been merely a proverb, or a prediction rather than a command (though the report concedes that this last suggestion is not likely) (pp. 301–308). Later, coming back to this text again, the report suggests “it is doubtful that capital punishment either enhances the public’s regard for man’s special status in God’s world, or is one of the better ways in which the state can give expression to its esteem for human-kind” (p. 319). Finally the report attacks the integrity and unity of the text attempting to separate the two parts because the committee expresses “doubt that God could present as a reason for the death penalty the fact that man is made in the image of God” (p. 320). While killings are sometimes necessary for the public good, “they are not something either God or man can posit as a goal or establish as a plan” (p. 321).

Could anything reveal more clearly the critical arrogance with which the Bible is treated with by this committee, (headed by professors whose sympathies for the “new interpretations” are well known)? With this kind of argument, the committee concludes that the Bible does not demand capital punishment for murder, but that it does permit it, and pragmatically suggests that it should be used only “under extreme conditions” (p. 333). The report despite its length and detail, will be no more convincing to Bible-believing Christians than other such “higher-critically” controlled studies have been.

Contemporary Testimony

The “Contemporary Testimony Committee” proposes further steps toward preparing a “contemporary testimony” (short of a new creed) to officially speak concerning the issues of our time. (Cited among indications of current interest in statements of faith is “Our Testimony” published in the Outlook, (p. 348).) The committee envisions a testimony that will be orthodox opposing apostasy, pious, articulate a “kingdom” vision and be ecclesiastical. It mentions issues that should be covered, but favors a statement reflecting the full perspective of the faith rather than one directly issue–oriented. It would leave the relationship of such a document to present creeds undefined, have it developed by a CRC committee and later referred to other corresponding churches and suggests the kind of cooperative members needed for a committee to formulate it.

Belgic Confession

Another committee presents a new translation of the Belgic Confession. Perhaps most interesting in its report is its information on the differences between Guido De Bres and John Calvin regarding especially their views of the relationship of church and state and its appeal away from the ver sion of the confession in common use to an earlier, little known, apparently more authentic one showing significant differences in emphasis between De Bres and the revisors. De Bres it seems was less scholastic in his view, inclined to stress sin and man’s depravity and had a somewhat different emphasis in dealing with predestination. The committee chooses for going back to the older version. This matter would seem to call for further study. Are the differences as extensive as the report indicates and is the church prepared to follow the committee’s choice in deciding on the official version of its creed?

World Hunger

The Task Force on World Hunger follows up its claim that something must be done to change world economic structures. Its 31 pages lead to little more than a call for the practice of love and justice in Christian behavior and for Christians to organize t o bring about changes.

The Verhey Case

It is somewhat surprising to find among the “Reports of Study Committees” Neland A venue Consistory’s defense of Dr. Allan Verhey and Dr. Verhey’s own defense which it endorses, totalling 19 pages. This is really a response to the case of the Dutton consistory against the views of Dr. Verhey which is found as Appeal Number 32 (pp. 561–566) in t he back of t he Agenda. The previous issue of the Outlook (April, pp. 13–15) included a concise summary of the Dutton Consistory’s objections to Dr. Verhey’s views so that there is no need to repeat that here. That article may form a useful starting point to help the average reader understand what the problem is. Dr. Verhey’s and Neland Avenue Consistory’s defense of his views are an extended and generalizing discussion of Bible interpretation. In it he says that he believes that the Bible is the authoritative and inspired Word of God, and his consistory and the classis, mainly on that ground, defend his views. But this kind of defense is mostly irrelevant and diverts attention from the point at issue. We must object not to what he says he believes about the Bible, but to his use and defense of a method of dealing with it which permits him at will to deny what the Bible plainly says. Merely saying “I believe the Bible” does not thereafter give him the right to turn Matthew into a false witness, who, no doubt with pious intentions, lied about what actually happened and about what Jesus actually said and did. The Dutton consistory is convinced that the church may not let its ministers and professors get away with this kind of double–talk in preaching and teaching God’s Word.*

*Incidentally, the N eland Ave. material repeats the erroneous charge (Note, p. 475–6) that the Dutton Consistory “requested Dr. Verhey to come to its meeting” and first granted and there refused permission to have someone accompany him. The facts are that not the consistory but Dr. Verhey asked for the meeting, and that he on the day of the meeting announced that he was taking Dr. Bandstra from the seminary with him. Members of the consistory who could be contacted felt that his arrangement bringing in a seminary professor without i ts approval was inappropriate and so informed him. The Neland A venue consistory was informed of t he falsity of its charge in a letter of May 10, 1978. Its appeal to the Acts of 1971 dealing with Synodical procedures are irrelevant to this matter.

Overtures and Appeals

What must startle many who receive the Agenda is the presence in the last section of 49 overtures and 33 printed appeals. The Stated Clerk does not seem to have used the discretionary authority given by the Synod of 1971 which he has in recent years been rather freely using, not to print in the Agenda matters which repeated material already brought up from other quarters. One overture (#19, p. 513) would require that all such materials be given to all delegates because they were sent by members, churches and classes for consideration and action by the Synod and because withholding them from all delegates by the committee seriously limits Synodical consideration and action. A printed appeal(# 31, p. 560–1) would also delete the rule permitting such materials to be excluded from the printed agenda because “this procedure nullifies the right of members, churches and classes to overture and appeal to Synod, which right is guaranteed by the church order, infringes upon the “original” authority of consistories, a basic principle of the church order, inhibits free discussion of these matters by consistories and classes, lacks adequate ground (an alleged financial saving) and was not properly adopted.

Three of the overtures (#4, 5, 6) would have the Synod approve the New International Bible Version. One (# 22, p. 514–5) seeks to establish a minimum ministers’ salary, three (# 23, 24, 49) have objections to the funding of the ministers’ pension fund, and one (#25) would seek better health insurance for the ministers.

One overture wants a study of artificial insemination by a donor (#47). The overwhelming mass of this material, some 19 overtures and 31 appeals are reactions to the decision of last year to admit women to the office of deacon . Only two favor the action, one wanting women also as elders (overture 34) and one appealing to maintain the decision about women deacons (appeal 33); the rest are for the most part strongly opposed. Six of the overtures want to change or correct the Synod‘s hasty and irregular changing of t he church order (overtures 7 to 12) by making it more difficult to push through such changes. Several ask for clarification of the decision and others would withhold ratification of the changes. Thirty appeals express strong opposition to t he decision, most of them directing attention to its violation of the Bible’s teaching, and its contradiction of the creeds and church order.

It is apparent that this unprecedented reaction against last year’s hasty decision should make this matter one of the major pieces of business before t his Synod.

The first two overtures asking the Synod to reaffirm the inerrancy of the Bible because Dr. Harry Boer* and others are frankly denying it, and the Verhey case which deals with the same matter, really raise one of the basic issues confronting the church. Does the denomination still believe the Bible or not? Whether it holds, or compromises or denies that may be the most serious decision it has to make. May the Lord guide it and us.

*p.505. (Notice also personal appeal #2 p. 567.)