Returning to the CRC

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Trading travel stories and knocking back iced tea, our little tribe whiled away the summer afternoon into the evening on Karen and Tom’s screened-in back porch. It was a respite from the hustle of 20-somethings trying to prove ourselves, a hustle which somehow didn’t seem necessary that day. I met Sara that day on the porch.

Geneva Campus Church’s young adult ministry—the reason for our gathering—in those days consisted of those long Sabbath afternoons, slowly digesting bagels or potluck chicken to the sound of unhurried conversation. Nothing feels quite like being absolutely and completely welcome.

On another afternoon, while chatting with Karen during church-basement potluck, Sara walked right up to me and asked me out. An online dating service had connected us that week, she said. Excited as I was, Karen had stars in her eyes, eager for another young Geneva couple.

Later that fall I left Geneva and the CRC. Sara followed me.

The reason for leaving goes back to a moment years before, the moment when the faith of my childhood finally got under my skin.

My college friendships were intense and devoted, built on long, serious talks and high-mountain adventure. I wrote poems about them. But as graduation approached, one by one they committed to jobs and futures in different states, gone for good. Loneliness has a flavor, and that day it was all I could taste.

On an aimless walk through a windless parking lot by the Yellow Breeches creek on campus, I watched a scrap of paper dance. For a full two minutes, it tumbled across the parking lot above the ground, never touching, until it stopped. I sat down and stared at it for a long time. Then I walked and sat by the creek, pondering the tiny bubble of my life on the flow of time. In that moment, an overwhelming sense of the divine took hold of me. “I care about you,” it said, though not with words.

That little wordless phrase composed the whole of my faith. God cared about people, including me. If you’d pushed me, I might have accepted that Jesus had something to do with that. Maybe.

By the time I reached the Canons of Dort five years later and 1,000 miles away, I’d already read the other CRC confessions on double-sided printouts from the library. Over 100 pages, I set them down gently on the corner of my bamboo couch and stared at the ceiling till long after sunset. How can any mortal human be so sure of so much? I still had just that one scrap of paper, my whole faith.

By this point, I thought I wanted to become a pastor. If the confessions were bread and my soul a tub of butter, I could barely cover one-tenth spread thin. The printouts lay on that couch for weeks, yellowing in the afternoon sun, as I began to work up the nerve to leave.

The Other Church

The denomination where Sara and I landed edits its 30-page confession triennially. To become a pastor, you need to “mostly agree” with it.

Their local congregation met late on Sunday afternoons, choosing a cheap-rent space in order to give more away. I happened to visit on Harvest Sunday, a worship service hosted outdoors on picnic blankets. I soon met Mark and Janice, crunchy ex-missionaries to Indonesia. Mark wears flip-flops year-round in Wisconsin.

The church didn’t hold many doctrines, but what faith they had they lived. Almost everyone owned small houses despite some large salaries. Their lives overlapped heavily. In some cases families shared lawnmowers.

Sara and I married in that picnic-blanket church. Five families agreed to try for kids at the same time, and in a year we were raising them together.

If it sounds idyllic, that’s how it felt.

I can’t say when the slide began, and I won’t tell you—dear reader—whether it was conservative or liberal. Woke and MAGA, in my opinion, reflect the same human impulse, and I’ve seen it go both ways.

At first, politics was a side project. We volunteered, wrote letters, and visited politicians. We connected with other churches who shared the vision, which made us feel a part of a movement bigger than ourselves.

Slowly, we got a little less of the Bible that challenged us, a little more of the part we liked. A new pastor took it a bit further.

You could call our blindness willful. Maybe it was. But when COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter showed up, the church worked itself into a froth. We went off some kind of cliff. To us it seemed to transform overnight, though in retrospect the signs had been there all along. Sara had noticed them, but I’d foolishly reassured her. By that point, we only used Scripture when it supported our preconceived notions. We might as well have ripped out the rest for a lighter book.

That’s the irony of the centered-set church. We had this motto: “Centered on Christ, but not bounded.” To join, you just had to show up. But in practice our wall reached higher than churches with strict rules. I remember watching recent arrivals smack into that wall unawares. They’d say something that rankled our ideology—making a joke perhaps—and our scorn filled the air like a fog. Those people always left “of their own accord,” so we told ourselves. Nobody acknowledged that our wall was there, much less where it stood. It was made of politics.

Altogether the slide took 15 years.

On the way out, my daughter inadvertently stole a toy from the nursery, a wooden dog with wheels. She still loves that toy.

The Return Journey

In the following year—along with some other exiles—we darkened the doors of 30 churches. Slow learners that we are, we relentlessly sought one whose faith mattered more than politics, but who still shared our politics.

One church hooked us. It had a view of the lake, a dynamic preacher, compatible politics, an amazing organist, great kids’ programs, and what seemed like a serious faith. Three visits in, we got excited, but the next sermon was on sin. “Good,” I said to Sara, “now we’ll see how they handle things.” In that beautiful sermon we heard how the sinner had to be invited, healed, restored, made whole … but never forgiven. You could’ve swapped the word “trauma” for “sin” and never been the wiser.

Five altar calls, 15 organ solos, and 20 communions later, we’d nearly given up.

A close friend mentioned that Jim—one of Sara’s oldest friends—had taken the lead pastor job at Geneva, the church where we met. An odd coincidence, it was just weird enough to make us wonder if God was in it.

Meanwhile, during the spiritual decline of the picnic-blanket church and our great search, I started asking hard questions. If the past few years taught us anything, it’s that a church needs durable forces to counter its own worst tendencies. In a conservative town you’d better find some reliable source of compassion. In a liberal town, you need something to temper your big ideas. In both there’s the trap of overreaction, as I’d witnessed first-hand. The slope is so slippery.

If you can’t see anything preventing a church from sliding into the great open maw of politics, that’s likely because nothing is.

To join a church where faith went first, we finally admitted that we had to surrender some of our own political attachments. I won’t pretend that realization didn’t hurt or that it has stopped hurting. Some pain you live with.

After a couple visits to the church, Jim came to our house. Following some catch-up—we were old friends, after all—he described with complete transparency Geneva’s strengths and shortcomings, and we disagreed openly about both theological and political matters. Two things stand out from that visit. First, I detected no pretense or ego in his honest and open responses. Second, despite our disagreements, I sensed only deep respect. “I hope you come to Geneva. But if you don’t, I completely understand.” That was how he left it.

When you go house hunting for a few months, you develop an intuitive sense for home values. Walking inside a house you just know, for example, “This house is worth $240,000.” After a year of church hunting, we sensed Geneva’s faith the moment we walked back through the doors and heard people talk. There’s a steadiness to it and a quiet confidence, like deeply-rooted trees. In high school, we’d used to call people who’d wanted to seem like skateboarders (but weren’t) “posers.” Genevans were the direct opposite of that.

Those “durable forces” I spoke of earlier Geneva has in abundance. The college town keeps it liberal. The influx of Intervarsity people and its connection to the CRC keep it conservative. And the stubbornly moderate people there like it that way.

And so we return to the Canons of Dort and the other confessions. I’ll never completely affirm everything that’s in those documents. I can affirm the creeds, which is a big step up from that one scrap of dancing paper. But I seem to be constitutionally incapable of affirming over 100 pages written by humans (the Bible being a special exception).

All churches set up walls, and in the CRC the confessions are our walls. While I certainly prefer doctrine to politics as a building material, I really do wish that our walls were made of something else. I’d be happy to renounce my cellphone, move to the church neighborhood, quit my job, or even wear a uniform. Those things I can do.

At the moment, though, I’m deeply grateful. I’m so glad for a wall I can see. That really is better than the alternative. Some days I want to just sit and stare up at it in astonished bewilderment, and gratitude.

Home

“Are you back?” Karen asks, hopefulness and sadness openly competing. We’d visited twice in recent months and then disappeared again. We weren’t the first people she’d asked this question over the years.

This conversation replayed a dozen times that day, including with Jim. We hadn’t told him our decision.

Sara and I drove home slowly and quietly that afternoon, which was three years ago. Our daughter—who is seldom quiet—played contentedly with the wooden dog in the back seat. Sara and I just looked at each other. Nothing needed saying. We both knew we were home.

BIO:

Jeremiah Robinson attends Geneva Campus Church in Madison, Wisc., with his artsy wife and spunky daughter. He runs a data analytics firm by day and makes religious forecasts at night (americasreligiousfuture.com).