Christian Reformed Church Ties to Calvin University and Christian Schools Shift as Enrollment and Membership Decline

In a 2014 editorial for the Banner, the magazine of the Christian Reformed Church (CRC), a retired pastor urged members to keep sending their children to Christian schools. The piece, titled “The Three-Legged Stool,” drew on an old metaphor for the relationship among Christian schools, the church and the family, with all three supporting the child’s spiritual development.

According to the report, the stool still exists within the CRC and at Calvin University, but its legs have become much shorter. Membership in the denomination and enrollment at Calvin and local Christian schools have declined steadily over recent decades, based on data from the CRC and the Day 10 report. Family size has also shrunk. CRC members are not necessarily sending their children to Christian schools, Christian school graduates are not necessarily attending Calvin, and Calvin graduates are not necessarily joining their local CRC congregations. In an email to Chimes, Calvin University President Michael Le Roy said, “Most of us observe that denominations, as we knew them in the twentieth century, are giving way to fewer baptisms, closed churches, and the rise of non-denominational churches and movements across North America. It is clear that the future relationship will be different, but the exact form and nature of the relationship is unclear at this time.”

The article links these changes to lower birth rates in the CRC and the Midwest, which it says affect all three institutions. In 1990, 5,917 children were baptized in the CRC; in 2018, the number was 2,834. Evangelism totals were also lower in 2018 but have stayed fairly constant since 1990. CRC director Steve Timmermans pointed to changes from 1999 to 2019 in professing members, meaning adult members who take communion, compared with total membership. In both Canada and the United States, he noted, the drop in professing members has been far smaller than the drop in total members, which reflects fewer children. Rev. Peter Jonker, minister of preaching at LaGrave CRC, said he sees fewer families with four or five children. Rev. Mary Hulst, a Calvin University pastor, recalled, “A couple of generations ago, you had four kids; they all went to Calvin. They each had four kids; they all went to Calvin.”

Hulst also pointed to declining denominational loyalty, which she traced in part to the rise of Willow Creek Community Church. The megachurch, which departed from many conventions around worship, ministerial training and denominational identity, had what Hulst called a “ripple effect” on churches across America, and West Michigan’s Mars Hill in Grandville followed the trend. Churches that once shared a common hymnal, a similar liturgy and regular preaching from the Heidelberg Catechism began borrowing elements from Willow Creek’s services. “Denominational churches, whatever the denomination, began to look less like their denomination and more like the generic non-denom, small ‘E’ evangelical worship type,” Hulst said. As a result, a service at a Methodist church and a CRC congregation could share many characteristics, and many young people raised in the church, she said, did not mind attending a different denomination because, for the most part, it seemed the same.

A cultural shift in the CRC has accompanied this decline in denominational loyalty. Decades ago, members were assumed to send their children to Christian schools; that is no longer the case. Tom DeJonge, superintendent of Grand Rapids Christian Schools (GRCS), said younger CRC families now weigh a competitive list of schools for their children. “That’s just a shifting expectation in the minds of families who are just now raising kids,” DeJonge said. The article reports that last year was the first in which Grand Rapids Christian High School’s share of students from CRC families dipped below 50 percent. South Christian High School principal James Peterson said, “30 years ago there would have been a stigma on families who did not send their kids to Christian school, but today much of that is gone.” He estimated that CRC students made up roughly 70 percent of his school’s students, compared with closer to 90 percent decades earlier.

The article notes that, although the CRC does not operate parochial schools, Christian K-12 schools and Calvin have relied on congregational support so that families in need can afford tuition. GRCS has 37 supporting churches, all but one of them CRC. DeJonge said the system provided roughly $2.6 million in tuition support to families last year, and that about 30 years ago such a fund would not have existed because churches would have covered the cost themselves. More of that assistance now goes to CRC families whose churches cannot fully cover their costs. About six years ago, DeJonge said, GRCS started the Supporting Church Partnership Grant, which gave $10,000 in its first year and provided $567,501 to families in supporting churches this year. He said GRCS is glad to offer this help given the legacy of generous giving from CRC churches, a practice that echoes the call to share with those in need (Hebrews 13:16). Peterson added that rising health care costs and additional program requirements have pushed the cost of Christian education beyond the rate of inflation. LaGrave, according to Jonker, spends $450,000 on Christian education assistance for the 80 percent of its student-age congregants who attend Christian school.

Peterson said these costs help explain why fewer Christian high school graduates are attending Calvin. “Locally Calvin has significant competition from less expensive schools,” he said, noting that Grand Valley State University and Davenport University have changed their reputations and likely draw local students. He added that students considering middle-class jobs such as teaching or nursing do not want unmanageable debt, and DeJonge observed that students are weighing more colleges as they plan their next steps. Jonker said rising costs have also reduced class diversity at Christian schools. “Because support in my childhood church was cradle-to-grave support, meaning that almost all the church members gave generously to Christian schools their whole life regardless of whether or not they had children in school, the schools were able to accommodate people of middle-class means,” he said. He added that GRCS’s newer, school-generated support system has produced less class diversity but more racial diversity. Timmermans noted that the CRC has 16 new church plants, 14 of them mostly multiethnic or of non-European descent. “Our new churches look more like the landscape and less like the history,” he said. The article adds that many of these congregations lack access to Christian education, and their members are not accustomed to paying K-12 tuition, so the CRC and its schools must make the case for Reformed education.

Calvin faces similar challenges with its newer pool of prospective students. Hulst said, “We’ve had to shift toward being explicit about what it means to be Reformed.” She is optimistic that the Reformed vision of education will appeal to parents who want a Christian influence on their children’s schooling that is also intellectually rigorous. Jonker agreed that Reformed education offers a useful alternative to systems focused on performance. “I believe in Christian education. I see the challenges of it and I see its weaknesses, but we live in a world where children need instruction for their souls,” Jonker said.

Source: Read the original report