Episode 248: Throwback Episode—Unity Through Truth Rather Than Compromise
“You win them to what you win them with. So if you win them with jokes [and] cokes, or bag of tricks and sugar sticks, you have to have those things all the time. Pretty soon you are pastoring essentially a youth ministry of unregenerate kids who are ready to walk away from the faith the minute they graduate high school.” —Willy Krahnke
“…Filling their heads…changing their hearts and the things that they love as they live in the world…Doctrine is the tool and…is…our understanding of the Word of God. The Word of God is our understanding of who God is and what he’s done. As we begin to understand these things…then we live and worship God and we respond rightly; we grow closer to him. We get firmed up in our faith.” —Jason Ruis
Summary of This Episode
This week’s episode brings our listeners all the way back to Episode 1 of the Messy Reformation Podcast from December 2020. At that time, Willy shared about having grown up in the CRC and primarily saw his ministry in the local sense of youth, music, and other miscellaneous ministries primarily at Pease CRC. He had served as a young adult representative at Synod 2019, and was hoping to go back—though, COVID would further delay that. Jason shared that his church background was a bit more mixed, but he had spent 11 years in youth ministry at Bethel CRC (Princeton, MN) before pursuing ordained ministry and pastoring at Faith Community Church (Beaver Dam, WI). He had experienced various parts of the denomination, but his primary broader service was through classis work. He shared the catalyst behind starting the podcast and having conversations was, “Both of us have a heart for this denomination…We get a little worried when we hear people talking about the possibility of leaving the denomination and our denomination collapsing…”
Jason asks Willy to share what he thinks the CRC does really well. Unsurprisingly given the focus of the last five years, Willy focused on our historical beliefs and the desire to revitalize and spread Reformed theology. He also names the Kuyperian influence that is carried out by how people in the CRC seek to impact communities and culture. Jason identifies, though, positives can sometimes become weaknesses. While having a positive impact on society is good, he shared that some worry there was an unhelpful swing toward social justice without the gospel. He also acknowledges something that became a theme in early interviews—past generations who felt doctrine was shoved down their throats did not do much to pass it along. Willy agreed that there are some out there who see the CRC as being too heady, but he asked if they loved what they were taught to believe. Jason shares an idea that he’s taken from John Calvin is that the increase of our theology and knowledge of God should stir us to more love and worship of him.
Given their common experience in youth ministry, they spend a long time talking about trends they’ve seen and encouraging not being afraid of teaching deeply with young people. Willy has some blunt quotes about how some youth ministry has trended toward “supervised irresponsibility” and “You win them to what you win them with. So if you win them with jokes [and] cokes, or bag of tricks and sugar sticks, you have to have those things all the time. Pretty soon you are pastoring essentially a youth ministry of unregenerate kids who are ready to walk away from the faith the minute they graduate high school.”
For both of them, the focus of youth ministry (and all ministry) should be God’s Word, worship, and fellowship. Jason highlights the 3-legged stool as able to produce solid Christians when all three legs—the home, the church, and the school—do their job. It’s not that a lesser-legged stool can’t, but this is a strong foundation! When they talk about not shying away from teaching doctrine, they mean, “…Filling their heads…changing their hearts and the things that they love as they live in the world…Doctrine is the tool and…is…our understanding of the Word of God. The Word of God is our understanding of who God is and what he’s done. As we begin to understand these things…then we live and worship God and we respond rightly; we grow closer to him. We get firmed up in our faith.”
This episode closed with the guys’ thinking about Synod 2021. The Human Sexuality Report (HSR) was out and going to be discussed along with what local churches were doing. Willy saw Synod addressing this by looking at, “Is Scripture’s teaching on these matters true and clear and exhaustive? And with those who are teaching contrary to this, will we bring about discipline?” While he was happy with the report, he was concerned about the readiness of churches and pastors to accept it. Especially on the “conservative” side—where we’ve ended up—it’s clear there was quite a bit of pessimism with how pastors expected things to go. Willy gave us one of the first “messy” references, “The reality of the situation is when it comes to church discipline, sin is always messy…We tend to err on the side of love and grace and mercy…but we ought not to sacrifice holiness or purity or biblical justice in these areas…” Jason highlighted one of the struggles has been that the fear of losing churches had kept us from taking a stand, and yet that lack of conviction was also putting us in jeopardy of losing other churches.
Thankfully, they both agreed the CRC was worth saving, and it would (and will continue to) take reformation among pastors, congregation members, and a denomination.