On Oct. 18 the Christian Reformed Church's Council of Delegates interviewed and appointed Joel Vande Werken, 49, as the denomination’s first director of ecclesiastical governance, a role that replaces the previous director of synodical services position. Vande Werken served as temporary associate director of synodical services from April to August during the illness and following the death of synodical services director Scott DeVries, who died of cancer April 27.
Vande Werken, pastor of Fairlawn CRC in Whitinsville, Mass., was ordained in the CRC in 2007. He expressed to the Council his long interest in the assemblies and governance of the church, having joined the interim committee of Classis Hudson just six months into his first pastorate. Vande Werken said he believes in the importance of “setting up conversations well in our church assemblies” and sees the guides of Church Order and Rules for Synodical Procedure not as “hoops to jump through or boxes to check off, but as wisdom literature”—advice from the past set in place to help the church now to discern well.
In reviewing the denomination’s needs for the senior leadership position, the Office of General Secretary decided to remove some logistical duties and focus the new position more on ecclesiastical support of governance, including for classes, the CRC’s regional assemblies. The Council of Delegates heard this week that Ashley Medendorp, a senior administrative assistant with synodical services, has moved into the role of coordinator of synodical operations, taking care of the logistical details of running synod and coordinating the Council’s gatherings.
Vande Werken, in the role of director of ecclesiastical governance, will encourage collaboration across agencies and ministries, provide leadership and support of synodical study committees, standing committees, and other teams, and liaise with stated clerks connecting the classes with the denomination.
“I love pastoring,” Vande Werken told the Council of Delegates, but “I’m stepping into a season of still serving the church, but in a different way. I hope I can take congregational experience that I have and people who have shaped who I am and take that into this position and use it as a framework for how God has called me and shaped me to serve the church as a whole.”
Vande Werken, his wife Brandie, who was present for the Oct. 18 interview and following welcome, and their five children between the ages of 4 and 15, will be relocating from Massachesetts to Michigan this fall, and Vande Werken will start in the position in mid-November.
Anthony Selvaggio, Classis Atlantic Northeast, and Chris Pedersen, Chicago South, each spoke encouraging words endorsing Vande Werken to this role. Pedersen had been in Classis Hudson at the same time as Vande Werken. “My heart was glad to see Joel here today,” Pedersen said, believing “Joel was born for this job and honed for it.” He said he had both an “incredible mind for detail” and a pastoral heart making him a rare “heart and head combination.” Selvaggio, who served alongside Vande Werken in the Atlantic Northeast classis for seven years, called him “a leader in our classis—someone we look to, a counselor to me personally on some of the peculiarities of CRC Church Order compared to the Presbyterian order” from which Selvaggio came. “It will be a loss to our classis but a huge gain to our denomination,” Selvaggio said.