Episode 278: Synod 2026 — A Healthy Denomination Means Engaged Churches — Zack Flipse (Part 2)
“In years past, people knew about the issues but didn’t really care, because our local church was going to be fine…When I come back beaming about the Christian Reformed Church, the people are really excited. There is a desire to see the denomination healthy…Now that trust is building in the institution, people are saying: I can do some of those old things with the denomination that I wasn’t sure I could keep doing.” — Zack Flipse
Summary of this Episode
In the second half of this post-Synod conversation, Zack Flipse and Jason Ruis move from how Synod 2026 felt to what it asks of the church now. The encouragement from Part 1 is still here, but it shares space with some concerns. This show has never been about pretending everything is solved. Reformation is always about doing the next faithful thing, and doing it well.
The theme of the episode is a worry both men carry into the church planting vision. Yes, 150 new worshiping communities in three years is thrilling. But Jason has watched church plants done unhelpfully, and if the CRC does this poorly, it can do real damage to the denomination. Multiplication without ecclesiology is just activity. So the conversation keeps circling back to a half-joke that is also dead serious: the denomination could really use a study committee on ecclesiology. The overture didn’t pass this year, which means the responsibility falls to classes and councils to make sure churches are planted in a Reformed way—with counsel, with oversight, with the patience that fits the tradition.
Underneath that is Zack’s conviction: “I want to be part of a denomination that’s doing theology.” He’ll almost always vote for a study committee, not because studies are cheap (though they are), but because a church filled with pastor-theologians is a church taking its calling seriously. When the denomination weighs in on something like Christian nationalism, that’s not mission drift—that’s the body doing its work. And here the CRC has an advantage. Of all the traditions talking about Christian nationalism right now, the Dutch Reformed are uniquely equipped, with Kuyper and Bavinck in their own lineage. The job isn’t to point back and say “Kuyper already covered it.” The job is to actually do the theology, in the church’s own language, for its own moment. The principles hold; the application always has to be done again, in a new day.
Zack and Jason also have an honest conversation about the current state of the CRCNA. There’s a contingent, Zack observes, that “found out in 2022” certain things were out of bounds—while for many others it was never in doubt. Even where the denomination now agrees on conclusions, real differences remain in how Scripture is read. That’s why they spend time on the three streams of the CRC: confessionalist, pietist, transformationalist. Someone on the floor said the confessionalists are in the driver’s seat, the pietists in the passenger seat, and the transformationalists in the back—and was okay with it. Jason is okay with it too, mostly because he finds a bit of himself in all three. Zack argues that holding all three voices together is a strength the church shouldn’t want to lose.
From there they return to Jason’s hobby horse since this podcast began: a denomination is healthy when local churches are engaged. The CRC got unhealthy in part because too many churches shrugged—”they’ll do what they’ll do in Grand Rapids”—and disengaged. The hopeful flip side is happening now. Ministry shares are up, candidates are up, people are picking up the banner again, and as Zack puts it, growing trust is giving people permission to re-engage with the denomination they’d quietly given up on.
The last stretch they talk about the tension between unified worship and faithful contextualization—how a shared liturgy can function like a chord progression you can riff on without losing the song, and how contextualization, untethered, can slide into syncretism. And Zack shares the project closest to his heart: a kids’ Heidelberg Catechism he makes with his daughters on a little video podcast. Question one: “What gives you comfort? That I belong to Jesus.” Instead of complaining that the resource didn’t exist, he built it. That’s the whole ethos of this show in miniature.
Zack wraps up the episode with a final word: “Figure out what you can do to plant a church so that more people worship Jesus tomorrow than worship Him today. Let’s plant some churches.” That’s the long obedience ahead—do theology, stay engaged, raise up leaders, catechize the kids, and plant. Christ is building His church, and His people get to be part of it.