Whacked by Josie Gordon

Author:Josie Gordon [Gordon, Josie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781594931390
Publisher: Bella Books
Published: 2008-12-09T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-six

An hour later, I looked at the ceiling, up being the general direction I spoke to when speaking to God. “Funny,” I said. Middelburg had been ultra-conservative as long as I’d known it, Shore County vying with California’s Orange County as the most conservative, most Republican county in the country. I knew that Dutch settlers escaped religious persecution by coming to the land of the free to start a new home in mid nineteenth century west Michigan. What I didn’t know until now was that the “persecution” they’d fled came at the hands of a government that punished them for restricting the human rights of women and others. The Dutch had come to America to find the freedom to uphold their vision of the pure church. They settled in communities throughout the area—Holland, Zeeland, Vriesland, Drenthe, Borculo, Dorr, Grand Haven and Grand Rapids, establishing churches and Christian schools and every other aspect of society with strong Dutch and Calvinist influence. Over the years, some members of the church grew more Americanized, and around the turn of the century, the community split into what was now the Reformed Church in America and the Christian Reformed Church—the RCA focused on the importance of unity and embracing American culture, and the CRC interested in religious purity and remaining isolated and true to its roots. Around World War I, when such isolationism seemed anti-patriotic and even the more conservative CRC had warmed to their part in the American whole, another church split occurred. The members of the newly formed Christ the Lord’s Own Sainted Elect Reformed Church took over the small community of Middelburg and did their utmost to live lives devoted to the purity of what they saw as the true way for Christians. The other churches, still essentially conservative, had moved on to at least discuss women’s ordination and accepting divorce. They’d conducted services in English for decades. But not the CLOSER Church. Women in leadership, out of the question. Divorce legal, but shunned. And the church’s hymnals still included the psalms in Dutch without music. None was needed. Everyone knew the tunes.

It reminded me of my own church and the Anglican Communion worldwide in the last ten years—people and groups seceding because they felt the institution had grown too liberal, with too many people invited to share the power, the freedom, the privilege. I always thought the good news of the gospel was exactly that, that everyone was invited to the table, but reading this file just reminded me how even my own fairly liberal church so often failed at radical inclusion.

Of course, that didn’t mean Christians have no hearts. Even Middelburg’s founders, for instance, had strongly supported abolition, a super-liberal movement in its time. And Five Points College and Seminary, like many others in the Midwest, argued in its earliest days for the freedom of all men as essential. But that was before the Dutch community had splintered and the CLOSER Church had taken over administration of Five Points.

And I knew how Vance’s mind worked.

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