Gather’s Good News

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Like most gas stations these days, the one I frequent has TV screens on its pumps.

Why we need TV screens on gas station pumps is beyond me, but that’s a topic for another day.

Anyway, on those TV screens on the pumps at the gas station, I often see a short segment called, “Tank’s Good News.” A mid-40s Instagram influencer by the name of “Tank Sinatra” (real name George Resch) shares uplifting stories of good things happening around the world to encourage and inspire his viewers. While I don’t usually leave my gas station viewings of his show feeling especially inspired to go and do likewise (because, it turns out, most of the things he shares are the sorts of things a Christian like me should be doing anyway), I do like that someone out there is telling people the good news of what’s going on in the world and not just the bad news.

And that’s how I felt at a recent CRC event I attended called Gather: Houston.

Gather

For those of you who aren’t aware (and I wasn’t until I was invited), Gather is a series of events the CRC has been hosting for the past year or so.

That’s because, in response to an overture from Synod 2023 about the declining membership of the CRC, the denomination has been inviting delegations of 10 people from five or six classes at a time to gather (hence the name) in major cities across the U.S. and Canada and share stories of the challenges, opportunities, and Spirit-led transformation they’re seeing in their local Christian Reformed churches, classes, and communities. In other words, the goal has been to learn, in response to that overture, what sorts of things God is doing in our churches, what common ideas or threads there might be present in them, and then, as a result, what sort of work or ministry God is calling us into as we continue to follow his lead in our denomination going forward.

Cynicism

Now, before I went to Gather, like many in the CRC I talk to these days, I’d allowed myself to become pretty cynical about the denomination in recent years.

Honestly, I’m a bit ashamed to admit it (especially as a pastor), but the past few years I’ve chosen to increasingly adopt a posture of, “Keep your head down, focus on the local church, and ignore the denomination, because it’s just a sinking ship.” I’d started to tell people that “Yeah, I’m committed to the CRC. But I don’t think I’ll need to be committed much longer, because I’ll be surprised if the denomination is still around in a decade.” In fact, in the weeks leading up to the Gather itself, I even let my cynicism infect my expectations for the event, more than once describing Gather to a few people who asked as “a last-gasp effort to try and save the CRC.”

After all, the simple fact is that, by any objective measure, the CRC has been experiencing a lot of bad news recently.

For instance, as that overture from Synod 2023 pointed out (Overture 12 from that year’s Agenda), our denomination has been hemorrhaging members for the past couple of decades. We’ve also been going through our biggest biblical and doctrinal upheaval since the women-in-office debates of the 1990s, this time over human sexuality. And we’re facing one of the biggest, if not the biggest, pastor shortages in our denomination’s history, with fewer and fewer people going into full-time ministry, an exodus of COVID and culture-war exhausted pastors leaving the profession, and an estimated 20-25% of our remaining pastors set to retire within the next decade.

Gather’s Good News

And yet, like Tank’s gas station good news in the midst of the bad news of the world, there is good news to be had in the CRC. A lot of it, actually. And that’s what I got to hear at Gather.

That’s because, during the three days I was in Houston with people from six different classes, countless communities, and all sorts of different CRC churches spread out across every corner of the denomination, I got to hear stories, in three different languages, of evangelism and new believers coming to the Christian faith. I got to hear stories of churches reaching out to their communities in creative and inspiring ways. I got to hear stories of longtime believers experiencing the proverbial “coin drop” and going deeper in their discipleship to Jesus. And I got to hear stories of how God is working to bring more and more people from all sorts of backgrounds into the CRC as we become a more truly Revelation 7:9 church.

And it all taught me something. Or, to put it more accurately, it all re-taught me something.

It taught me there are challenges in the CRC right now, yes. There are difficulties and question marks that we’re facing. There are significant issues and problems that we likely will have to face for a long time. But just because there are challenges doesn’t mean there aren’t also opportunities. Just because there’s some bad news doesn’t mean there’s not also a whole lot of good news. And just because there are some areas or issues in our denomination where we’re struggling right now doesn’t mean that God isn’t also still at work in our midst.

Because he is. Again, that’s what I got to hear at Gather. I got to hear all the things God is still doing and accomplishing in the CRC. I got to hear how he’s still at work in and through us. And I got to hear glimpses, bits and pieces, and hints of what he might still want to do in and through us too.

And far from it being the end of our denomination or the conclusion of God’s work with us or the denouement of everything he’s done in the CRC, it sounds instead like God might simply be getting ready to write the next chapter.

I’m excited for that. I’m excited for what it might look like. Cynical though I might sometimes be, I can’t wait to see what God will do in the CRC. Because if it’s anything like what I got to see and hear at Gather, I can tell you that, contrary to the bad news we so often hear about, it’s going to be a lot more like the good news, the gospel, that God’s been spreading for so long.

If you’d like to hear more about the kinds of good news that have been shared at the various Gather events, the CRC has filmed a series of 10 videos that tell the stories of what God’s doing in our denomination. You can view them, as well as find a formal description of Gather, here.