Episode 277: Synod 2026 — The Slow Work of Trusting Our Institutions Again — Zack Flipse (Part 1)
“I grew up in the Christian Reformed Church. It’s almost literally all I know. It is my faith formation…Going to Synod, I discovered I don’t think I have to qualify this anymore. I’m not an emotional guy, but I was moved to tears three or four different times on the floor of Synod…This is me. I’m represented here—which is not the way I felt for many years preceding this year…Like a sigh of relief: ah, I belong. I have a sense of belonging in this denomination.” — Zack Flipse
Summary of This Episode
Welcome back to another episode of The Messy Reformation, post-Synod. Our goal this stretch is simple: sit down with delegates from Synod 2026 and hear, honestly, what happened in Grand Rapids. Our first guest is Zack Flipse, a returning friend of the podcast, a commissioned pastor in Oostburg, Wisconsin, and a hybrid student at Calvin Seminary—and this year, a first-time delegate. He came home energized. For anyone who lived through the synods of 2022 and 2023, that sentence alone is worth sitting with.
Zack and Jason spend the first half of this conversation comparing notes across a few short, seismic years. Jason remembers needing a month to recover from synods that were so heavy they were mentally and emotionally draining—the year delegates stormed out, the year he wept on the floor, not from disappointment but from a real fear that the CRC might die. Three years later, the room felt different. As Zack puts it, the disagreements are no longer about direction. Everybody is rowing the same way; the arguments now are about how to get there, not whether to go. That is not a small shift. It is the difference between a denomination in crisis and a denomination doing the slow, ordinary work of faithfulness.
Much of that work is about trust. Zack is candid that low trust in our institutions is partly a cultural inheritance and partly his own fault for believing gossip—”shame on me,” he says, naming something many of us need to name. Trust, like trust between a parent and a child who has lied, gets rebuilt slowly, through a track record of making good. Both men see that track record forming: a seminary students are gravitating toward, a new professor with a heart for boots-on-the-ground ministry, candidates doubling from last year, and denominational ministry shares climbing from 60% to 80% of churches since early last year. These are not slogans. They are signs of a church re-engaging.
Zack grew up so thoroughly Christian Reformed that meeting another CRC member felt like family—until, about five years ago, “Christian Reformed” stopped meaning what he thought it meant, and he found himself constantly qualifying the term. At Synod 2026 he realized he didn’t have to qualify it anymore. “This is me. I’m represented here.” For a man who says he isn’t emotional, being moved to tears three or four times on the floor tells you how deep the relief runs. “I belong in my own denomination. I love this.” That is what reformation feels like when it begins to take hold—not triumph, but homecoming.
From there the conversation turns toward the road ahead, and it does not flinch from the cost. The church planting vision—150 new worshiping communities in three years, inside a 10-year plan—is thrilling in the room and sobering at home, where it “falls squarely on us.” Zack and Jason do the hard math out loud: a 15 to 20 percent pastor shortage, vacant pulpits, a retiring generation. By rough reckoning, the denomination may need something like 350 new pastors in three years and seminary classes of over a hundred, when a class of 36 already felt like cause for celebration. You cannot vision your way out of that. You have to raise people up.
So the episode lands on the unglamorous engine of reformation: naming gifts. Both men have learned that calling rarely starts as an internal lightning bolt. More often someone asks you to teach a Sunday school class or lead a study, and the body recognizes a gift before you do. Zack confesses he had an external call long before an internal one, and that waiting for students to feel called is doing it backwards. Jason tells the story of a youth leader who needed three years of faithful service before anyone—including her—saw what she was made for. This is why the commissioned pastor track, the Leadership Development Network, and ordinary intentional ministry matter: they are the on-ramps. And it’s why Zack loves being Reformed. It slows him down. His council has pulled him out of more than one snare.
This is the hopeful future of this Messy Reformation: honest about the shortage, clear-eyed about the work, and genuinely glad. We had to fight just to survive another year not long ago. Now we get to dream in decades. Christ is building His church, and a first-time delegate came home in tears of joy. Praise God for His Faithfulness.