Dutch Reformed Church Rejoins World Alliance of Reformed Churches After Renouncing Apartheid

On 13 October 1998, the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) rejoined the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC) after its general synod renounced apartheid. The readmission followed negotiations with the WARC, which had persuaded the church to renounce apartheid in its theological teachings.

The DRC had been suspended from the WARC at the 21st General Council meeting of the WARC in Ottawa in 1982. Calls for its expulsion had come earlier, as early as the 1960s, when the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, Joost de Blank, called for expulsion at the Cottesloe Conference in Johannesburg. That conference was convened by eight Afrikaans and English-speaking churches under the World Council of Churches to discuss racial segregation in South Africa after the Sharpeville massacre.

The DRC withdrew from the World Council of Churches after Beyers Naude advised the church to accept a final statement from the Cottesloe Declaration. The declaration rejected race as a criterion for church admission and rejected biblical justification for the prohibition of mixed marriages. In 1982 the WARC declared apartheid a status confessionis, a position holding that its theological justification was heresy. In 1986 the DRC admitted that it had erred in using the Bible as a foundation for racial segregation.

In 1990 the church declared its personal guilt and responsibility for the political, social, economic and structural injustices in South Africa. The source notes, however, that the DRC remained racially segregated, with White churches and White congregations still controlling large amounts of land and wealth in contrast with the churches of their Non-White congregations.

The WARC held back from admitting the DRC into the alliance for these reasons. A meeting between the DRC and the WARC was held in 1997, and it resulted in a 1998 statement in which the church denounced apartheid as wrong and sinful in its fundamental nature, effects and operations. The WARC then lifted the suspension of the DRC and readmitted the church in 1998.

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