Episode 274: Synod 2026 — What Is a Church? Forcing a Theological Conversation (Chris Ganski & Derek Buikema)
“Never more than ever does ecclesiology and sacraments and the ministry of the word have more relevance than in our modern technological age — those are forms of resistance.” — Chris Ganski
Summary of This Episode
For ten years, a small group of pastors in the CRC has been meeting and talking — about the denomination, about ministry, and again and again about the church. They call it the company of pastors. Chris Ganski and Derek Buikema have been at the center of it. So when Classis Wisconsin’s overture to Synod 2026 — asking the denomination to appoint a study committee on the nature of the church — hits the floor, it does not come out of nowhere. It comes out of a decade of conversation that has finally been written down.
In this episode, Chris and Derek tell Jason how the overture came together. Derek wrote the first draft. Chris made it substantially better. And the thing that struck them as they worked was simply the number of task forces the CRC has stood up around the edges of ecclesiology — the virtual church task force, the multi-church task force, the church planting conversations — without ever doing the foundational theological work of asking what a church actually is. Synod 2025 itself flagged this gap when it received the virtual church report, asking for more theological work on the nature of the church. The Wisconsin overture is that work knocking on the door.
The diagnosis is sharp. Chris names the American philosophical inheritance that has shaped CRC life more than we like to admit: pragmatism, which says the true is what works. We have not lost the doctrine of the church. We still confess it. But the practice of the church has been quietly absorbed into the domain of what works, and theology has been quarantined. Derek picks up the diagnosis with a story from his Calvin Seminary days. John Cooper told him that a generation ago, if you made a pragmatic argument at Synod, you lost. The synod would call it out and the argument would fall. Now those are the only arguments that win. The Nine Marks observation from Derek’s work in New England drives it home: the church plants that thrived in some of the hardest soil in North America were the ones rooted in rich ecclesiology. The lesson does not transfer one-for-one — Reformed ecclesiology is not Nine Marks ecclesiology — but the principle does: deep churches are planted from deep theology.
The conversation turns from diagnosis to vision. Chris keeps the bar low and the vision serious: a study committee that forces a theological conversation, that retrieves Calvin’s deep ecclesiology — election, the church as creature of the Word, the sacraments, the ministry of the Word — and reinterprets it for a secular age. He names the moment at Synod 2025 when delegates began talking about virtual communion and someone said they had not yet figured out how to do virtual baptism, and his point lands hard: at that moment, we had no idea what a sacrament was anymore. Derek’s contribution is to remind the denomination what study committees actually do. They frame conversations. Children at the Lord’s Table did. Human Sexuality did. Whether you loved the outcomes or hated them, those committees set the agenda in every CRC congregation for years. The mechanism is not mysterious. When the pastors of the church get their own hearts captivated by a serious theological reality, that reality starts working its way through every classis, every council, every congregation.
The pivot of the episode is the shift from diagnosis to posture. Chris notes that what makes this study committee different from the recent ones is that it is not trying to resolve a controversy. It is trying to articulate a positive vision. Jason names what the Messy Reformation team has been saying for months — the CRC needs to move out of a fighting phase into a building phase. Derek puts the same point in a different image: a faithful pastor knows when to fight and when to garden. There is real error to fight. But a pastor who only fights — and a denomination that only fights — eventually has nothing left to defend. It is past time to garden. To till. To plant. To cultivate. The Wisconsin overture is an invitation to garden.
Then Chris turns to Calvin — not as a museum piece but as a model. Calvin was a refugee. He fled France at twenty-five, landed in Geneva, and was forever an outsider. That experience shaped his ecclesiology. Luther and Zwingli always had a prince behind them; they could afford to think of the church as more or less continuous with the Christian commonwealth. Calvin could not. So he invented things. He established the consistory. He gave the modern diaconate its shape. He insisted that the care of the poor was not the magistrate’s job but the church’s. And from Geneva, for forty years, he sent church planters into France. Hungary, Poland, England, Scotland — the geography of the Reformed church follows the path of Calvin’s ecclesiology. Reformed mission did not come out of pragmatism. It came out of a refugee’s deep theology of what the church is.
The final word is pastoral. Chris closes by naming the anxiety that drives so much CRC ministry right now. We say with our lips that the church is God’s. We function as if it is ours. Calvin, the refugee, refused that posture. He believed the church was founded in God’s election, and that belief freed him to lead, to build, to send, to plant. The church will not stand or fall on whether this overture passes. It will not stand or fall on any of us. It is grounded in God’s action. Believe that. Lead from that. That is what reformation looks like.