Candidates for ministry in a denomination that drifts right

How is the CRC getting more conservative when there are fewer candidates for ministry from right-leaning institutions than left-leaning institutions?

My basic thesis that the CRC slowly drifted leftward from the postwar years to around 2009 and then stopped. By 2016, the CRC had begun to slowly drift rightward.

Despite this, yesterday, I showed that the CRC still ordains more candidates from left-leaning institutions than right-leaning institutions.

How, then, is the CRC getting more conservative when there are fewer candidates for ministry from right-leaning institutions than left-leaning institutions?

Today, I’d like to speculate about a five reasons this might be.

1. People leave seminary with the same viewpoint they entered with.

If people enter seminary leaning right, they leave leaning right. If people enter leaning left, they leave leaning left. It’s less likely that people will enter leaning right and leave leaning left.

2. More conservative members of churches decide to go to seminary.

More conservative people within right-leaning and left-leaning churches not only decide to go to seminary but also decide to pursue candidacy in the CRC. There’s a selection bias occurring.

If it’s true that people leave seminary with roughly the same viewpoint they entered with (point one above), then this would predict more right leaning candidates, too, even if they come from more left-leaning churches and/or classes.

3. Those who go to left-leaning seminaries usually leave the denomination.

People who lean left in the CRC and decide to go to any seminary are more likely to pursue ordination in other denominations. 

There’s a selection bias at work: people on the left self-select themselves out of the candidacy process.

4. Those who go to right-leaning seminaries are more likely to be more influential at classis and synod.

There have been a total of 33 graduates combined from all RTS campuses, Westminster west and east, and Mid-America Theological Seminary since 2000.

That’s not very many, an average of just a little over one candidate per year.

However, among these graduates:

• Chad Werkhoven, an RTS graduate, called for special discipline for Larry Louters on the floor of Synod 2022, and then at Synod 2023 gave a nearly line-by-line rebuttal to Paul De Vries’s appeal that Synod not take punitive measures. Paul swayed the moderates, but Chad almost swayed them back.

• Jose Rayas and Derek Buikema, president and vice president, respectively, of Synod 2022, are both Westminster grads. Rayas also served on the human sexuality committee. One or both of them will likely be officers at Synod 2024.

• Tim Kuperus, who chaired the 2022 advisory committee that dealt with the human sexuality report, is also a Westminster graduate.

• Blake Campbell, who interrupted Larry Louters’ speech at Synod 2022, is a Moody Theological Seminary graduate

• John Klompein was a delegate to Synod 2023 and served on Committee 7, which tackled overtures related to human sexuality.

• Steve Bussis, from classis Yellowstone, is on the Council of Delegates.

There are others, too.

I can think of a handful of people who have come from left-leaning seminaries who have similar influence in the denomination, but their work is hampered by a lack of the kind of coordinated organization that exists on the right.

It’s also true that there are many other prominent conservative voices in the CRC who received their M.Div. from Calvin Seminary, like Chad Steenwyk, Lloyd Hemstreet, and Tyler Wagenmaker, plus many other influential voices in the Abide Project and within Minnkota. We shouldn’t forget that most candidates do still come from Calvin Seminary.

Still, in very broad, relative (not real) terms, graduates from institutions more right-leaning than Calvin Seminary have more influence in the denomination compared to graduates from institutions more left-leaning than Calvin Seminary.

5. Pastors are more conservative than people in the pews.

As a number of people have pointed out to me, pastors, classical delegates, and synodical delegates are more conservative than people in the pew. 

There was a time when more education correlated with left-leaning views. This was probably true in the CRC, too. It’s unlikely to be true anymore. For example, in the 1980s and 1990s, for example, the average CRC pastor in Lynden, Washington was farther to the left than the average person in the pew. At least two of Lynden’s five CRC’s supported women in office in the late 80s, but I doubt 40% of people in the pew did.

Additionally, as a category, it’s possible that commissioned pastors are more conservative than pastors who take more traditional paths to ministry, though this is hard to prove.

All of the above is speculative.

Thanks for reading,

Kent