c. 1998 Religion News Service

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. _ Near the end of”Our Family Album,”a traveling drama about the Christian Reformed Church, two characters have a screaming argument about the good-and-bad impact of the 1960s.

As the fight drags on, a person watching the play on-stage, part of a multi-ethnic group representing the contemporary CRC, abruptly rips up the program and walks out.

Multiply that by 30,000 departures, and you get a sense of the pain at the heart of this little Dutch denomination, says author James Schaap.”What that’s saying is our fighting has alienated tons of people, and we’ve got to repent,”said Schaap, an Iowa teacher who wrote the play and an accompanying history of the CRC.”Our Family Album”doesn’t flinch from the problems plaguing the Grand Rapids-based CRC. It tells the story of a denomination that was born from a fight and has endured many since, including recent skirmishes that have contributed to a loss of more than 30,000 members since 1992.

But the play and soon-to-be-published book also tell of a proud history, a loyal people and a strong tradition of piety, social action and fine thinking. The book and play pose challenging questions: What is the Christian Reformed Church today? What holds it together? Does it have a future?

Schaap’s story doesn’t provide easy answers. But he hopes it will get people thinking.”There’s a lot of folks with wrinkled eyebrows all over the place saying, `What’s going on? Good night, do we stand for anything anymore?'”Schaap said.”Maybe if we go through the whole story, it’ll help us understand where we come from and give us some sense of purpose.” Peter Vander Meulen, the play’s producer and head of the Free to Serve denominational agency sponsoring it, hopes the story makes people realize it’s time to write a new chapter if the CRC is to survive.”All of our history is a history of breaking away from the Dutch church,”Vander Meulen says.”Now what? If that’s all we have, then the church is finished.”The audience should walk out of there saying, `Yeah, that’s who we were. But we’re not that anymore.'” So far, after performances in Iowa and Illinois, some people have walked out weeping, moved by the bitter conflicts and rugged heritage of their church.

The stage production stemmed from Schaap’s book, which completes an unfinished CRC history begun in the 1980s. That history was compiled by Calvin College historian Herbert Brinks and James Heynen, former executive director of the CRC Board of Publications.

A few years ago, the CRC Historical Committee approached the publications board about writing a comprehensive history. The board in turn asked Schaap to breathe life into the abandoned project.

Schaap is a professor of English at Dordt College in Iowa, and author of several works of fiction and non-fiction including the novel,”In the Silence There are Ghosts”and the short-story collection”The Secrets of Barneveld Calvary.” He decided he could write the book only as a continuing story of the CRC’s struggles. Like the ancient Israelites who drew strength from the re-telling of the Moses story, CRC members may recover a sense of identity by reviewing their story, he feels.

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In the book’s first chapter, Schaap says the CRC is suffering from”a denominational identity crisis.”Born in 1857 as a breakaway group from another breakaway group, West Michigan’s Dutch Reformed settlers, the CRC’s ethnic roots are diluted and its doctrinal moorings unsettled, Schaap said.”Is there something unique about us, something worth keeping alive?”he writes.”We’re not what we were … but then who are we? And where, pray tell, are we going?” Along with short pieces and pictures contributed by Brinks, William Buursma and Tymen Hofman, the 400-page book traces the CRC from its Reformation roots onward. It spans the Rev. Albertus Van Raalte’s founding of Holland, the 1924 breakaway of the Protestant Reformed Church, the upheavals of the 1960s and women’s ordination.

But Schaap paints the historic events with personal portraits, beginning with his grandmother, who dutifully pasted into a scrapbook pictures of CRC ministerial candidates published in the denominational magazine, The Banner.

Such”doggedly attentive care”is gone from the CRC, but so is the tribal insularity of her generation, he writes.

(END OPTIONAL TRIM)”Each year, fewer and fewer of us care to define ourselves by denominational affiliation,”Schapp writes in his CRC history.

In that, the CRC story is the same as other Protestant denominations’ _ once ethnically defined and doctrinally secure, now adrift in a sea of spiritual seekers.”In the post-modern polyglot of values and avenues toward fulfillment, eventually people are going to say, `What is the difference between crystals and Reformed theology?'”he said.”Our Family Album”is a reflection on the past that implicitly calls its audiences to shape the future, Vander Meulen says.”The identity of this Reformed church has to be an outward-looking one, and has to be based on ministry,”Vander Meulen says.”Without that, there’s not a whole lot of point to being Christian Reformed.” Directed by the Rev. John Schuurman, pastor of Wheaton, Ill., CRC, the play uses images on a 12-foot video screen, music and a 12-member traveling cast. Members of local churches serve as a kind of Greek chorus observing the action.

Three main characters represent what Schaap sees as the competing”minds”in the CRC today: upward, focused almost exclusively on salvation and a personal relationship with Christ; outward, less interested in doctrine than applying the gospel to social ills; and inward, unwaveringly committed to the church’s historic creeds and confessions.

It is the last two that have clashed in recent decades over everything from female clergy to evolution, Schaap says.”For the most part, it’s been the inward people who have gone to war with the outward people and killed each other off,”he said.”The only people left are the upward people.” Cast member Matt Kortman said the play raises troubling questions about the denomination’s future. Does pettiness still prevail? Does modern America care about the CRC’s gift for thoughtful theology? Is the CRC distinctively different from other evangelical churches?

He said he hopes the play will serve as a gentle wake-up call to CRC members, reminding them they’re not just”this weird Dutch tulip on the American landscape,”but a church whose whole world belongs to God.”We realize we’ve been through a lot,”Kortman says.”But we’ve got work to do, as God’s people.”

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