The CRC as an institution

How denominations degrade

There are lots of ways of talking about church. Often we use theological language. “Bride of Christ.” Ecclesiology. That sort of thing.

But there’s another way—a more clinical way—that’s just as important, and that’s to conceive of the church as an institution, and in particular the CRC as an institution.

I got some good pushback on yesterday’s email which included this:

“What is the purpose of a denomination? What is the point of holding Forms of Unity, or entering into the Covenant for Officebearers? Does a denomination have no authority, no right, no responsibility to police its own?”

In addition to these, I also posed four related questions:

1. Why do institutions in general tend to drift leftward, and what about the CRC as an institution made it drift leftward for so long (until 2016)?

2. What functions do conservative groups, often majorities, have within leftward drifting institutions, specifically denominations?

3. Why do conservative groups usually fail to steer their institutions rightward?

4. Why have conservative groups been successful in steering the CRC rightward since 2016?

It’s this constellation of questions I’m going to try to work through in today’s post. 

(This post is very much first draft thinking. I’m about 80% confident in what I’ve written below, which is adequate enough for Friday night at 9:30.)

What is an institution?

To start, here’s a definition of what an institution is, from Douglas C. North:

“Institutions are the humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic, and social interaction. They consist of both informal constraints (sanctions, taboos, customs, and codes of conduct), and formal rules (constitutions, laws, property rights). Throughout history, institutions have been devised by human beings to create order and reduce uncertainty in exchange…. They evolve incrementally, connecting the past with the present and the future; history in consequence is largely a story of institutional evolution…” (source)

Let’s take a closer look at the bolded parts as they apply to the CRC.

5 traits of denominations as institutions

1. Denominations structure interaction

Our denomination structures how we interact with one another, both formally and informally. There’s a certain way to write overtures and speak at synod. There are official and unofficial ways we communicate together. The denomination provides us with a language of doing business together. North wrote that “effective institutions raise the benefits of cooperative solutions or the costs of defection.” Denominations do this, too.

2. Denominations provide constraints, like customs and norms

The CRC has its own set of customs and norms beyond what’s found in church order. It’s the stuff we might call “culturally CRC,” like playing Dutch bingo or joking about Google Docs being totally depraved at Synod 2023. These are the unspoken and spoken ways that we have collectively decided to interact together. These rules cannot be broken.

3. Denominations provide formal rules, like polity and confessionality

We also have our official, written, ways of how we go about things: our polity, our judicial code, our rules for synodical procedure. And we make sure we have a parliamentarian at Synod so we follow our own rules. 

Our discussion about code of conduct is really about whether it should be categorized as something in the category of “formal” or “normative.” Even the debate over the HSR is about what it means to define it confessionally—in a formal way that makes it harder to opt out of—or as pastoral advice. 

If you don’t like Dutch bingo, nobody makes you file a gravaman. But if you don’t like the HSR, you’ll probably need to.

4. Denominations create order and reduce uncertainty

As collective members of the CRC, we understand how to interact with like-minded people even when we have incomplete information about each other. Working with others always entails risk, even when you’re in basic agreement about what you’re doing together.

At Synod 2023, we paused a huge conversation for a year. A year! It was put on hold. We just stopped talking about it. And everyone was fine with it. Because everyone knows everyone else will generally play by the rules of the game, and we can pick it up where we left off at Synod. Though there was some ambiguity and not everyone knows what will happen, we all basically know the rules of the game.

There is often uncertainty about what will happen, but less uncertainty about how it will happen. Will affirming churches leave? Will the denomination split? I don’t know. That’s certainly an uncertainty. But I also know there are a finite number of possible outcomes that will become the reality. Just like when a pitcher throws the ball to the plate, it’s impossible to predict what will happen. But because it’s a bounded domain, we can predict that it would be possible to hit a home run, but it would not be possible to score a touchdown. Touchdowns are part of different domains. Our denomination provides the same kinds of boundaries, inside which certain, finite kinds of things are possible.

Some of what made Thursday of Synod 2023 so jarring was that, for a brief moment, the uncertainty-reduction mechanisms started failing. The institutional boundaries got blurry. People were crying and walking off the floor of Synod. Those who remained didn’t know what to do because the situation wasn’t normative—it hadn’t happened enough for norms to be established. Everything got really unpredictable. (Go back and watch the livestream, but instead of watching the person speaking at the mic, watch how the people in the background react.)

One of the reasons I thought Chad and Paul did such a great job chairing during that moment was because they both went into Dad Mode. The moment of uncertainty passed. Synod ended badly, but it could have ended much worse.

5. Denominations connect the past with the present and the future

We appeal to history all the time. We’re part of a larger story. Reminding ourselves of this is part of who we are. Many of the grounds in our overtures, for example, do this. And this kind of past-present-future connectedness governs how we think about what we permit. In the gravamina discussion, for example, we appeal to Kromminga and Boer. These appeals to history only make sense within the framework of our institution. They have no authority outside the institution. I can’t appeal to Kromminga and Boer when I’m talking to the contractor who’s fixing my deck. I don’t really care what Boer did with his deck, and neither does my contractor. Historical precedent only makes sense within denominational bounds.

The default attributes of institutions: fragile and chaotic

Institutions are fragile

Because we suffer from present bias, it can be difficult to see just how fragile even the sturdiest of institutions really are. For example, the average lifespan of a company on the S&P 500 was 32. By 2020, it had dropped to only 21 years. (source) Among the approximately 25,000 publicly traded companies between 1950 and 2009, the average half-life is only about ten years: “most companies will disappear within a finite time, typically of the order of a decade.” About 30% of all non-profits today will not exist within ten years. (source) 

Denominations are not the same as other kinds of institutions. People have more fidelity to a church or a denomination than, say, a brand. And CRC people are especially loyal. Still, even though churches—and certainly denominations—last much longer, as institutions, they’re subject to the same pressures that all institutions face. Rampant consumerism has begun to change that—the phrase “church shopping” makes sense to us, but my great grandparents would have found the phrase bewildering.

Institutions are incredibly fragile. In fact, the moment an institution forms is the moment it begins to fail.

Institutions degrade

It’s a universal law that entropy always increases. Though entropy normally describes the physical universe (the second law of thermodynamics), it’s also the default for institutions, too.

Entropy, broadly speaking, is disorder, uncertainty, or randomness. Things move from order and coherence to disorder and randomness. Order is not the natural state.

This happens in institutions, too. The moment an institution begins is when it’s most ordered. There’s complete buy-in by all stakeholders. It’s most effective. There’s unity around mission and purpose.

But as institutions grow, evolve, and become more complex, they degrade. Institutions naturally move from order to disorder, from clarity to ambiguity, from simplicity to complexity. 

Institutions (and denominations!) do this by:

• adding bureaucracy and unnecessary hierarchy; 

• duplicating roles, missions, and aims, thereby creating unhealthy competition;

• adding complexity;

• introducing layers of process, accountability, and checks and balances–which eventually calcify.

A sign of entropy is that things get done by committees instead of individuals (like the writing of overtures!).

What is clear is that these three things move in lockstep: 

1. entropy (which is default)

2. increase in institutional complexity/bureaucracy

3. leftward ideological drift

I don’t know if this is pure correlation or if one of these things is causal.

Conquest’s Second Law states that “any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.” It would be impossible to test this experimentally, but on the face of it, it seems true. And it seems true for the CRC—or at least it has, until recently. Much of what’s true about how institutions drift to the left is true of the CRC. So when the right accuses those in Grand Rapids of drifting leftward, they’re not wrong. Under what conditions can this leftward drift be reversed?

Conservatism fights against institutional defaults of fragility and chaos

Yesterday I wrote that “The right’s first choice is always to use institutionally-sanctioned means to undermine the institution itself.” I got some criticism for this phrase, understandably. But I don’t think the criticism is entirely fair. Anti-institutionalism is part of what it means to be conservative, and the primary way conservatives get things done is by resisting the default leftward drift inherent in all organizations. As the CRC drifts left, conservatives want to conserve.

Conservatism, for better or worse, is the corrective that prevents institutions, denominations, and the CRC from eventually degrading over the long term. The primary way conservatives are working to bring about change in the CRC is to use the mechanisms of the institution against itself. I’m not saying this is bad. And I’m not saying the left hasn’t done this. I’m only that the conservatives are better at it, and so far, it’s working.

Yesterday, I posed four related questions:

1. Why do institutions in general tend to drift leftward, and what about the CRC as an institution made it drift leftward for so long (until 2016)?

2. What functions do conservative groups, often majorities, have within leftward drifting institutions, specifically denominations?

3. Why do conservative groups usually fail to steer their institutions rightward?

4. Why have conservative groups been successful in steering the CRC rightward since 2016?

I’d like to try to answer each of these (combining #3 and #4):

Why do institutions in general tend to drift leftward, and what about the CRC as an institution made it drift leftward for so long (until 2016)?

Conquest’s Second Law applies to the CRC: “any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.” And this occurs by these three things moving in lockstep:

1. entropy

2. increase in institutional complexity/bureaucracy

3. leftward ideological drift

What functions do conservative groups, often majorities, have within leftward drifting institutions, specifically denominations?

Within institutions, conservative factions slow the process, working at the levels of institutional traits defined by North:

1. Denominations structure interaction

2. Denominations provide constraints, like customs and norms

3. Denominations provide formal rules, like polity and confessionality

4. Denominations create order and reduce uncertainty

5. Denominations connect the past with the present and the future

Why do conservative groups usually fail to steer their institutions rightward? Why have conservative groups been successful in steering the CRC rightward since 2016?

In general, I don’t know why conservatives usually fail to steer institutions rightward. Maybe it’s a self-selecting process: conservatives tend to be a bit more individualistic, so maybe they’re more likely to avoid groups and leave the institution. Additionally, the CRC has probably rewarded individuals on the left more than those on the right in the past fifty years with jobs and/or influence in the Establishment. Liberals tend to be more collective-thinking and cluster around groups. I suppose given a big group size and a lot of time, this could change the trajectory of an institution/denomination. But that’s just a guess.

In the CRC, as I’ve argued elsewhere, until recently it has been hard to organize outside the institution itself. But with the rise of the internet, it became possible to network and collaborate through unofficial means. No longer were conservative delegates showing up to synod blind and getting out-maneuvered by the delegates closer to the heart of the institutions. Conservatives could more quickly and more easily initiate their own plans and use these benefits against the slower-moving processes the left-leaning parts of the denomination were still relying on.

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Thanks for reading. Next week I hope to make the case for why Synod 2024 shouldn’t use a speaker clock, and then I’ll probably write about gravamina. Have a great weekend.

Kent