CRC Welcomes Women, Sort Of

My denomination, the massive and now ancient (just turned 150!) Christian Reformed Church, has made a decision to further include women in church office. This decision interests me, not only as a member but as a compelling case study of dealing with ecumenical issues.

The change that's actually occurring is a little confusing but let me try to recap, quoting the CRC Synod News Service. First, "since 1995, congregations and classes had been allowed to ordain women as office bearers under a system of local option. Currently 26 of the 47 classes have exercised that option."

What is new is that, "synod voted last night to remove the word 'male' as a requirement for holding ecclesiastical office in the Christian Reformed Church. This opens the way for any CRC congregation to ordain women as ministers, elders, deacons or ministry associates."

Whereas before, a classis had to exercise the option to ordain women before a congregation could choose to, now any congregation can make the decision on its own. Which means that under the old or new systems, any individual congregation could not ordain women if it so chose, regardless of its classis's decision or now its denomination's decision. There apparently wouldn't be a problem if a particular congregation just happened to have no ordained women now, or anytime in the future.

Already we see that the denomination is allowing a fair amount of diversity. It is leaving the door open for a CRC congregation to have no ordained women and presumably reject the possibility of any individual's ordination solely based on their being a woman while officially supporting the idea of women's ordination.

In addition to this change the synod affirmed last year's vote to allow women to be delegates to synod. By way of compromise and with the "desire to maintain unity in the church by respecting the convictions of those who believe the Bible prohibits women serving as office bearers. It allows classes to set restrictions on women serving as delegates to classis meetings."

Based on this, not only could there be an individual hold-out congregation that didn't ordain any women but a local classis could prevent women ordained by a local congregation, freed by the new rules, from coming to its classis meetings. They would, however, have to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with ordained women at the denomination-wide synod.

Well that's the decision. The question is, is it a good one? Does this model the kind of unity in diversity that we should seek in ecumenical dialogues with other denominations? Or is it a compromise that satisfies no one, just barely preventing the splitting up of an already small denomination?

The first thing I thought when I read this was, What if it was any group other than women? What if the Church had a similar rule on an ethnic minority? What if the denomination allowed classes to restrict attendance of classis meetings based on ethnicity? Or what if the situation was reversed? What if a congregation or classis went to the opposite pole and decided they wanted only women to be ordained and they wanted to restrict classis meeting attendance for men?

OK, so these examples might be disingenuous. There isn't anybody seriously arguing that racial minorities or men shouldn't be ordained (at least any more? in the case of minorities) while there is, it seems, a reasonable case to be made against women's ordination. But what if there were such a one? Is the case for allowing these congregational differences just that "people of goodwill can disagree?"

My next thought was, If this is an acceptable route to take on women's ordination, why not on other issues? Why couldn't a whole host of schisms be undone along these lines of allowing the exercising of local options. Imagine that the Vatican suddenly said that, though they maintained their teaching as the right one, Lutherans could be allowed to dissent at the local level on issues of priestly celibacy, the doctrine of the sacraments, supremacy of the pope etc. etc. Then imagine that the Vatican and the Eastern patriarchs dropped their squabbling over the filioque and decided to just agree to disagree. Then really stretch yourself and imagine the CRC and the RCA got over their disagreement about lodge membership and got back together. Would that mean that the substance of the disagreement was judged in retrospect to never really have mattered much in the first place?

The tension is real. On the one hand I want to argue that many of these theological disagreements are important and we shouldn't just opt for a lowest-common-denominator unity. On the other hand it's obvious to everyone involved that the disunity of the church is a sin and striving for greater unity should be on the front burner for all. Our problem is just that we disagree on what matters are relatively unimportant enough for unity to trump or we just opt for the position that the church is united, it's just smaller than you thought.

In the case of the CRC, the synod is trying to maintain unity, obviously - nobody wants another denomination - while "respecting the convictions of those who believe the Bible prohibits women serving as office bearers." By officially taking the side in favor of women's ordination while allowing lower levels of authority to differ, they are in effect saying that a woman's equal standing in terms of ordination is important, but not that important.

I might agree, if it came down to either that or another split-up denomination, but then again, I'm not a woman.