The Reformed Church in America is a sinking ship, says one Reformed believer.

“Listen. Do you hear them? Those are the gentle, mournful sounds of a denomination imploding,” wrote Donald A Luidens, professor of sociology at Hope College, Michigan, in November’s Perspectives. “The denominational craft has carried us far, but it’s time is up. It has sprung debilitating leaks which can no longer be plugged.”

“It was here; it flourished; it ministered; it floundered; and then it was gone ... It is time to look for a new vehicle, or collation of vehicles, to move the church faithfully and compellingly into the twenty-first century.”

Luidens makes several arguments –i ncluding “ideological messiness”, “theological muddiness” and the weakening of polity – supporting his claim.

Amid years of contention between liberals and conservatives over issues such as the civil-rights movement, women’s ordination and evangelism with regard to social witness, Luidens says “loyalists” emerged to keep the denomination together. They were more dedicated to denominational survival than to ideological purity, he notes.

Though the two extremes were held together then, today many liberals have left the RCA in significant numbers and conservatives have shifted their target to the loyalists and continue to “rail against ‘liberalism”, he says.

Moreover, Luidens points out from studies of RCA members that many in the Reformed churches have little knowledge of the doctrinal standards of the denomination, including the Heidelberg Catechism, Canons of the Synod of Dort, and Belgic Confession.

Though there is a high level of assent to such doctrinal verities as the sovereignty of God, the divinity of Christ and the importance of the Bible, the professor found a widespread affirmation that personal actions and beliefs are central to determining an individual’s eternal fate and that Christianity is not the only route to eternal life.

“What emerges from these data theologically, then, is a generic form of American evangelicalism with a thin Calvinist overlay,” he says.

He adds, “‘The Bible says’ whatever the authoritative speaker wishes, and the biblically illiterate person in the pew has few defences against outrageous truth claims.”

Luidens believes the “high-point” of theological messiness in the RCA occurred with the 1997 Formula of Agreement. The RCA established a full communion partnership with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the United Church of Christ. Many opposed the UCC partnership because it supported an open and affirming view of homosexuality.

Numerically, membership has continued to decline in the RCA, he notes. “Active communicants” fell from 235,000 at its peak in the mid-1960s to roughly 170,000 today.

Luidens argues that the RCA has relied on “internal growth to feed its membership rosters, with a constant trickle of migrants from the Christian Reformed Church as a supplement.” But by relying largely on RCA members having children, “the RCA set itself up for the devastating demographic fact of declining birth rates.”