Kerux: a portfolio of Calvin Theological Seminary - Volume 41.5 - 30 October 2006

CRC old and dying or new and growing?

by Kevin C. Vande Streek, Contributing Editor

On Sunday mornings my wife, Amy, and I drive from our home in Alger Heights to Jenison in order to attend Ridgewood CRC with my parents and younger brothers. A few weeks ago, and for no particular reason, we visited Alger Park CRC, located just a few blocks from our house. As I was sitting in the service at Alger I noticed many similarities between Alger and Ridgewood, questions began springing to my mind.

Ridgewood and Alger Park have a lot of similarities with regard to the age dynamics of the congregation. If you were to guess based solely on what you saw from your vantage point in the pew, you might conclude that around 60-65% of the congregation is 50 years old and older. Perhaps 10-15% of the congregation is 0-12 years old and roughly 15-20% of the congregation is between the ages of 30-50. The people you wouldn’t see from your wooden pew are those in their late teens through their late 20s. Ridgewood is a sizeable congregation with approximately 600 adult members, and when I worship there I can usually count my peers on two hands. In terms of those dynamics, Alger Park and Ridgewood look very similar to me.

Now, this is not a gripe about either of these churches. I felt very welcomed at Alger Park and will visit there again in the future I will also continue to attend Ridgewood as I have since I was in high school. What I simply wanted to do was to run down a few rabbit holes, chasing after questions that visiting Alger Park simply stirred up in me. (So, if you attend either of these churches, or one with similar demographics, don’t take any of this personally. I’m simply being curious.)

It’s a big jump to go from two congregations in West Michigan to the entire denomination and superimpose random guesses of congregational ages onto all churches. I went to check the CRC yearbook, wondering if there were any statistics regarding the average age of a professing member in the CRC. No luck. I found myself back with my limited experience: two churches, plus visits to over 10 other CRC churches in the past, over half of which had demographics similar to Ridgewood and Alger Park. Still, this is really limited information, which led me to ask around a little bit. There’s no truer information found than what you get in the Student Center during lunchtime.

At the lunch table, I found more than 10 students who attend CRC churches in West Michigan. To them, I posed this question: “Would you say that, on an average Sunday morning, your church has similar demographics to those of Ridgewood and Alger Park?” Then I asked them to explain how similar or dissimilar they were. All but one student said that their churches resembled Ridgewood and Alger Park, in that, of the people attending their church on a normal Sunday morning service, around 55% of the population was 55 and older, and only around 5% of the congregation is between the ages of 18-32.

Okay, let’s say my numbers are off – after all, they’re rough and inadequate. Stop and think for a moment, though: what does your congregation look like on Sunday morning? And if you had to guess what the average age of a person attending a CRC on Sunday morning is (not necessarily a professing member, just anyone in the building on Sunday), from infant to 90 years old, would you guess the average age is 24? What about 35? Seems a bit low, doesn’t it? How about 43 or 48? Is that too old, or not old enough?

If we’re lenient and grant that these really rough statistics are generally true, then the CRC is an aging denomination heavily influenced by the baby-boomer population. What does this mean for pastoral ministry in the CRCNA for the next 30-40 years? In other words, if the CRCNA is an aging denomination, how does that influence and shape your ministry and mine? Over the course of the next 30 years, are we looking at a large decrease in the denomination as a whole, simply because of the death of our elders? How do we talk about death? How do we talk about life? Will you and I attend more funeral services than baptisms?

What am I getting at here? To be honest, I’m not really sure. I just thought all of this was really interesting and created further questions, which I will explore in the next couple of weeks.

My intention is not to be morbid or to ask questions that treat anyone flippantly or with disrespect. I am talking about my friends, mentors and grandparents, after all. I don’t take any of this lightly. I simply want to look ahead, as a future pastor in the CRCNA (hopefully), at what the needs of our denomination will be, and then, how we will prepare ourselves for it.