Classes in the 2010s were given a mandate to do ministry. And that is something we never fleshed out… The denomination can do all that they want. If the classes and the local folks don’t join in that work, then the plan is nothing.
—Dan De Graff
The second half of our conversation with Dan De Graff is the part that’s actually about the denomination. Dan is leaving this podcast to give his time to his classis and to the denominational classis restructuring task force, so we asked him what a classis is for and what the CRC has to build now.
Start with the practical problem: getting people to do the work. Dan says it takes a lot of people to run a classis well, and his is hard to run by any measure. Classis Lake Superior’s Canadian churches span twelve hours west to east. Winnipeg is an eight-hour drive from Baldwin. Western Minnesota is four hours the other direction. Classes were drawn as geographic regions back when CRC congregations sat clustered in Dutch enclaves, and that is not who the CRC is now, so Lake Superior works regionally and has reorganized itself around three things: leadership development, church planting, and church revitalization.
The distinction Dan makes is the useful one. A classis can be an assembly or it can be a ministry, and most of the classes nobody would call healthy are stuck in the assembly. He notes that the mandate for classes to have ministry plans came through synod in the 2010s as a church order change with no floor conversation at all—he went back and watched the recording. People were frying bigger fish and it slipped through, and it was a massive change in what a classis is supposed to do. Twelve years on, Dan figures maybe a third of classes worked it out. Jason brings the Classis Wisconsin side: he led its renewal team, the classis restructured and revisioned what its role is, and it has been transformative. What he keeps hearing from denominational staff when he asks why a classis can’t handle something is that not every classis is as healthy as Wisconsin. He doesn’t accept that as an answer. The question is what we’re doing to make the others healthier.
That matters because the ten-year church planting vision runs on classes. Planting churches, raising up pastors, and closing churches—the plan calls it legacy, which Jason notes is a nice face on closing churches—are all classis functions. Dan points to a January gathering in Chino, California for classical ministerial leadership teams, convened in part because training church planters is a different kind of leadership than pastoring and somebody has to teach it. Some classes have a healthy leadership team. Some have a student fund committee that makes sure seminary gets paid for and nothing else. You cannot hand that committee the job of forming church planters and expect it to happen. Dan’s line on the whole plan: the denomination can do what it wants, but if the classes and the local folks don’t join the work, the plan is nothing. He respects that Tim Sheridan stood at the mic at Synod and said he can’t do this for us. Sheridan is coming on the show.
On where reformation goes from here, Dan won’t call the theological work done. He repeats a question one of his regular attenders asked him: how many CRC churches are truly grounded in the Three Forms of Unity—hearing them, studying them? He preaches them almost weekly. And he says plainly that we were wrong to be lukewarm about the ecclesiology study committee Classis Wisconsin overtured for; the conversation at Synod showed the need. Somewhere between seventy and ninety congregations have left, under ten percent, and the Toward Canada group is still working out whether it goes. The waters haven’t settled. He borrows the language of disaster relief—recovery, then rebuilding—and says we’re barely out of the first stage. What he’s thinking about next is deconstruction: not of faith, necessarily, since many of those people have already gone, but of church. Online church, coffee-shop church, church as a work group. He doesn’t think those go away, which is one more reason to want the study committee.
Willy names the last generation a generation of failure and says the only remedy is generations of faithfulness, obedience, and service after it—and that all of our hands are now busy with the work we’ve been saying should be done all along. We may be late to the game, but on his post-millennial read there’s a lot of game left. Dan reaches back to the fight that came to a head in the 90s after twenty years of back and forth, and the aftermath: a generation that didn’t trust the denomination and had been told to stop talking. He was seven when it split, raised in South Holland, with an uncle who pastored the URC church where that movement really took off. His answer for why 2021 was different from 1996 is short. We found who we could trust. Jason has heard the whole reformation described as something that grew out of friendship and doesn’t think that’s an oversimplification; Synod feels like a family reunion to him. The danger now is that without one flashpoint, people split into factions rallying their own troops.
So it lands on building. Jason has been studying the point in the Reformation where Luther and Calvin stopped fighting and started building, and building meant raising up pastors and sending them out to plant Reformed churches. Unapologetically Reformed churches send unapologetically Reformed men to classis; those classes send them to synod; the whole thing changes. He describes taking twenty minutes with a journal, going through every student in his youth ministry and his school, and writing down the ten high schoolers who might be pastors—so he can tell each of them that their name came to mind. Dan’s version is smaller and just as pointed: you may not have to leave your church to help. Be on a core team. Be the person who says, have you thought about ministry? His own call came from people in his local church who saw him working in youth group. Then Willy sends Dan out with the prayer he prays at the end of things, that our love may abound more and more with knowledge and all discernment.
Praise God that the question in front of this denomination is now what to build and who will build it. Five years ago it was whether there would be anything left to build on.
Your classis has work nobody has picked up. What is it, and what would it take for you to be the one? Reply to this email or leave a comment. We read them.