The Reformed Church in America ship is sinking, argues one Reformed believer. “Listen. Do you hear them? Those are the gentle, mournful sounds of a denomination imploding,” Donald A. Luidens, professor of sociology at Hope College in Holland, Mich., wrote in an article featured in November’s Perspectives. “The denominational craft has carried us far, but its time is up. It has sprung debilitating leaks which can no longer be plugged.”

“It was here; it flourished; it ministered; it floundered; and then it was gone … It is time to look for a new vehicle, or collation of vehicles, to move the church faithfully and compellingly into the twenty-first century.” Luidens makes several arguments – including “ideological messiness,” “theological muddiness” and the weakening of polity – supporting his claim.

Amid years of contention between liberals and conservatives over issues such as the civil-rights movement, women’s ordination and evangelism with regard to social witness, Luidens says “loyalists” emerged to keep the denomination together. They were more dedicated to denominational survival than to ideological purity, he notes.

Though the two extremes were held together then, today many liberals have left the RCA in significant numbers and conservatives have shifted their target to the loyalists and continue to “rail against ‘liberalism,'” he says.

For more, read here.