The Zylstra raised Frisian blood in me drives a certain skepticism that some find  irritating. One of the earliest manifestations of this happened in 1983 in a small Christian Reformed Church in Grandville.

Institutional Christian education is a key part of the Reformed tradition. If everything is spiritual [reference] then addressing God in the liberal arts pedagogy of US American primary and secondary school is a intrugal part of shaping spiritual life.

Children begin in the typical Sunday school setting. During this morning’s closing song the projected lyrics contained a shot message…
SUNDAY SCHOOL DISMISSED
… and the children began squeezing and sliding their way past their parents and older siblings to the isles. After church my 16-year-old niece invited Jessica to study one of Abraham Kuyper‘s favorite reads, the Heidelberg Catechism [reference].

In many ways today’s CRC is different than what we had in 1983. On the 1st Sunday of the month the church elders busted out the bread trays and really cool tiny cup holders for communion. At Hope CRCthe trays were passed north and south down the pews by elderly white men in sharp jackets and muted ties. We sat, from the isle Scott •Norm • Father • Mother • Ann Marie • Shonna. Mom and Dad each took a cube of white bread and fluted cup of grape juice. The multi-purpose church pews were seats, book selves, pencil holders, pamphlet racks and cup holders. The communion cups fit nicely into the rubber cylinders; cylinders we yoinked in and out of the pews during evening services. We’d only dared fiddle around during the 2nd service; Dad enforced a strict no fiddling policy during the morning service that was not enacted after 6 p.m. Strangely, my spiritual grow did not seem to have any correlation with the level of in-service fiddling allowed–I wonder what John Calvin would think about that?

Every month some folks took the body and body of Christ, the communion sacraments, and some did not. Who picked the teams? What divided the partakers and the watchers? At Hope CRC a public profession of faith split the players and the watchers. After attending Wednesday evening Catechism through high school we all lined-up and made Profession of Faith. There we were, saying “I do”, like it’s written in the back of the black Psalter Hymnal I’d pages through hundreds of times.

t.b.c. …

research:
http://www.crcna.org/pages/ffc_faq.cfm