Welcome back to the Messy Reformation.

My name's Jason Rice, and I'm the Associate Pastor at Bethel CRC and Chaplain at Central Wisconsin Christian in Waupon, Wisconsin.

My co-host is Willie Kroenke.

He's a member at PeaseCRC and Pease, Minnesota.

We're just a couple of guys who love the Christian Reformed Church and want to see Reformation happen in our denomination.

But we realize that whenever Reformation happens in the history of the church, things get messy.

And after the last couple of synods and as we move into this rebuilding phase of the Reformation, things continue to be messy in the Christian Reformed Church.

So we're taking the opportunity to have conversations with pastors and leaders throughout the Christian Reformed Church to find out what's going on in our denomination, but also to talk about what reformation and rebuilding might look like.

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With all that said, we're going to get to this week's episode, which is part one of our conversation with Brandon Seaver.

so Brandon why don't you just kick us off a little bit and tell us about yourself and your church and your family sure no problem I'm happy to be here I've been listening to the podcast for a couple years and appreciate all the work you do Jason and Willie and Dan too So my name is Brandon Seaver.

I live in Hudsonville, Michigan.

I attend Hillcrest CRC.

And this is my first go around there as an elder.

A little bit of the history behind my journey into this reform faith is that I grew up in what I would probably refer to as like an independent Baptist church.

And just kind of, you know, appreciated the instruction I had there.

Very, very godly family.

and great experiences in youth group and in summer camps and just, you know, feeling the Lord's presence in my life.

But I also, you know, God working in the ways that he does, I found it that I always had questions kind of about, you know, from that perspective of how, you know, not to put all Baptists and kind of into the same bucket, because, you know, we certainly have groups like Reformed Baptists who are more Calvinist probably, but something just didn't quite settle with me in terms of like salvation and just other questions and ecclesiology and soteriology, stuff like that.

I found myself, you know, with those questions and also coincidentally meeting who is now my wife, who is a tried and true kind of CRC girl.

You know, she was at Kelvin while we met right before she went off to Kelvin.

And then I was at another public university near the Grand Rapids area.

And, um, you know, of course we're going to churches together on the weekend when we were able to, and in a lot of the time that was CRC churches and, you know, overall, I would say, just kind of wrap up that aspect of my life with a little bow is that I really started to, um, understand what I feel like I always wondered about.

And the reformed faith had those answers for me.

And, uh, I really embraced that.

I, I stumbled upon sort of, what not stumbling is probably not giving it the the the credit that god deserves or providentially speaking the work of john piper rc sproul and others that just really they're teaching um the reformed traditions and faith the confessions and the creed like it just really all aligned and then when we moved um after college to big rapids michigan where we were both going to be working we attended a crc church there and um you know under the ken kraus as the pastor there.

And just under him and being a deacon there and building relationships with others and increasing my understanding of Reformed faith, it really just all kind of clicked together.

And I feel like that aspect of my life was satisfied.

And we moved down to the Grand Rapids area to be with family.

And our family was young and we were starting to make those decisions about school and churches for our own kids.

um settled at a CRSD church at Hillcrest and and been there ever since so a little over 10 years and so um yeah I've been this is my first term as an elder there and um yeah that's kind of my my journey to this point yeah that's great so you said you grew up in kind of an independent Baptist uh church like most of your life then until you like right before college then yep exactly yeah um you know going to you might know awana uh you know it's kind of like the baptist version of of uh cadets i guess um and going to you know different camps in the summer up in lake inn which um was always a great experience but you know you kind of see in hindsight we see the difference between their view on kind of like on the salvation piece um Yeah, I mean, sort of, you know, of course, trust in Christ as your savior, of course, but, you know, the sinner's prayer and then the sermons, like, I don't want to besmirch my memories of the church I grew up in.

I have fond memories there, but it was like, you know, every Sunday was a little bit of fire and brimstone, a little bit, you know, the altar call or the hand raise.

And, you know, I didn't really think much of it at the time, but a whole other world has opened up to me when I started to look into reading Sproul and reading Piper even.

And I know he's a Reformed Baptist, as I understand it.

But yeah, just I didn't know about the creeds and confessions.

It's just all this rich history that the CRC and, of course, other denominations, Presbyterian and so forth, have just was like, wow, this is, yeah, this is me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's not I say like we can we can draw distinctions between us and the Christian Reformed tradition and Baptists without, you know, smearing them.

I grew up in a independent Baptist church, a little Bible church.

That's where I came to faith from a fire and brimstone sermon.

And so I've seen a lot of beauty and benefit there.

And I've seen my parents and my brother, they're all Baptist, you know, they're reformed Baptist, but they're all Baptist.

And so I appreciate them.

They're all godly men and women.

And yet we disagree on some things.

And that has a broad effect on how you see the world and how you worship and how you interact.

And so, yeah, we can tease each other.

John Piper has been a massive influence in my life as well, along with R.C.

Sproul.

And so I always kind of laugh because there's been this weird thing.

People have tried to almost smear some of the movement in the Christian Reformed Church that we're all coming out of the Young Restless and Reformed movement.

And it's like, why is this a smear?

Maybe it's a smear against the CRC for just not doing a good enough job of educating us that we had to go to the Reformed Baptists and the PCA to be able to find clear, beautiful understandings of the Reformed faith.

Yeah, sure.

I can appreciate that sentiment.

Yeah.

So what's your experience, Ben, in the Christian Reformed Church?

What were some of the things that stood out to you as you came in?

I think confessionality was probably the biggest.

You know, you're looking at these historic documents that were at a given point in time were done for very specific reasons where there was error that had to be refuted, right?

So you got the Belgic Confession emerging.

You got the Cannons of Dort and, of course, the Heidelberg, which goes across lots of reformed traditions you utilize.

I think that as I learn more about those documents, and of course, I'm still learning more about them, the truths that have historically held up over time, over centuries, those things, yeah, there's like little historical kind of cultural context where maybe there was a specific group in a certain country that the document was addressing.

But the foundational biblical truths of those documents really resonated with me.

And I see them, of course, like still very applicable to modern life.

You know, and another thing I would mention, too, this is not a creator confession, certainly, but really where I think my journey and kind of embracing Reformed theology really kind of culminated with when I discovered Machen's book, Christianity and Liberalism.

And that book I've read through it once.

And I could foresee that being a book that I would want to read through again and again.

I've turned to it several times.

As far as how we are living our faith currently in this modern culture, I've seen so many lessons learned there.

And then I would lastly just mention too, I forgot to mention earlier, I'll name drop, of course, C.S.

Lewis.

And just the profound impact on, and for so many Christians in their own lives, what he's had, just some of the insights.

And, you know, of course, in the writings that he's done are just been tremendously valuable.

So, you know, in Reformed theology overall, worship, liturgy, creeds and confessions, that historical aspect, there's like the faith of the fathers there and the saints before us, just I find beautiful.

find fulfilling and I praise God that I was able to be in that place.

Yeah.

And I think just listening to you talk about that, I've been thinking about this a lot lately that I think, again, this is something unique we have to offer in just our current cultural situation where, you know, there's this kind of unrootedness in the world because, you know, people are trying to get rid of, you know, no absolute truth and some of those kinds of things, no meaning purpose, you kind of lose all that.

So people kind of feel unmoored and kind of floating around a little bit.

And when they step into a church that has this rootedness and this foundation and historic teachings, they can feel it right away.

They could feel like, oh, there's something here.

There's a groundedness and something I've been looking for where I'm not, don't feel like I'm just kind of floating all over out in the world.

And so it is really, again, just a unique aspect of what we have in the Christian Reformed Church that I think the world is hungry for right now.

Yeah, I think you're right.

And Jason, with your work with youth and in my experience with youth and what that for me most recently has been just the blessing and the honor I've had to help lead some of the catechism at our own church is that you see this hunger in the next generation.

They want to know, mom and dad, what do you believe, right?

um just tell us what what do you think about this and so um i know we'll probably get into this more in a little bit but um several aspects of synod this year uh really spoke to that um you know and we've seen in our own church and i um you know one of the people who really helped prepare me for synod just giving me some insights amongst a few was uh cory nanderville that hillcrest and he you know the youth pastor there um you know i was helping with the catechism and he's spoken to this too it's just like the students are hungry for truth you know and i think for quite a long time it's been i mean i don't have this drc tradition to be able to speak to this from from my own perspective as growing up in it but i have no in talking with cory or our pastor kurt walters and some others in our classes that there's not a whole lot of that being done unfortunately.

I don't know about when Wisconsin or in your classes, but you know, we, I think it speaks to the fact that we're recognizing that we've got these beautiful truths and for, I think it's probably safe to say for, for many decades, they were kind of being just kind of put along to the side and not really emphasize as the next generation came up and, and now we're, we kind of are in the place where we're in.

Um, and hopefully we're, we're turning that around.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm, we can actually dive into the, because I think it's just a natural part of this conversation, because I was going to bring it up, the conversation around the banner, right?

That was one of the conversations that came up, and I found myself like jumping up and down going, I've been saying this for so long.

It's nice to hear this from the synod floor, and people just saying, no, we want the truth.

We don't want all this questioning.

We don't want any more like fluff or any, We just want the truth kind of straight up down the middle.

Tell us what we believe and why we believe it.

So, yeah, why don't you talk about that discussion a little bit on the floor?

Sure.

Yeah.

You know, it was a little bit ago, but some of these things are definitely still fresh in my mind because we're kind of moving into this space now for the next year where we're going to have to try to learn and live through this.

Right.

And see what how are these changes unfold.

But in terms of the banner itself, very robust conversation on the floor, of course, strong feelings on both sides.

But I was able to actually, towards the end before we voted, I was able to get up and speak a little bit to this.

And what I told the plenary group was that we have an opportunity here that I haven't seen the banner embrace for all of its faults and its positives that I would think that we could point out over the last, you know, many years that like we just spoke to our youth, this next generation is so hungry for truth.

And we have an opportunity to have a publication with the banner that can reach them more, that can speak to the youth and like find ways to embrace our confessionality and not just question it.

Right.

And, and have that be a source that our you can go to, you know, there, there were discussions on the floor about, well, you know, the banner is changing in terms of like the format that it has, you know, it was people spoke to, and I, you know, I'd had conversations over the lunch breaks and in the evening with folks who knew this was coming up and they would talk about how the banner, you know, was always just like people were starving for it.

They would go to their church because that's where it would come in and they would disseminate it from there and they'd go home and their parents would gobble it up.

And It's out a little bit less, but now we have an online presence too.

And there are other online forums that people are getting their information from.

And, you know, thinking about the banner from a big picture perspective for me, as you know, I talked about earlier with my background, not being in the CRC, when we were up in Big Rapids and I like, oh, there's this magazine, the banner.

Okay, I'll check this out.

And unfortunately, I don't mean this disrespectfully, but it kind of became just like the magazine that was like, ah, you might like flip through a little bit, but just kind of then recycle it.

Unless there was something like you knew from somebody else at your church that, oh, there's a really interesting article.

Someone's got a perspective you should check out.

But otherwise, it was like, just not really read.

And I, I mean, that with all respect to, you know, the people who have been involved, I know that I'm not saying that putting the banner together is not an easy job at all.

I know you wouldn't either.

But it just hasn't been something that I feel confident in that we could really promote to our youth and to help be a reflective representation of what our denomination believes.

And actually, you hear people, I don't know about you, but I've heard people, even as Senate this year, speak to it.

They almost are kind of like hesitant to show their non-reformed friends the banner, or they would have people come to them and say, is this what your denomination believes?

Like, I don't know what to tell you.

No, no.

Yes, maybe some people do, but it's our official magazine.

So shouldn't it promote officially what the church stands for?

Yeah.

And I just think we have such a unique opportunity with the banner.

So I'm not necessarily, I know some people have been so frustrated with the banner.

They're like, just kill it, get rid of it.

But I think, I think we have a unique opportunity because if you think of the changing landscape, right, there's, there's so much information out there, right?

You can find doctrine theology all over the place from a Reformed point of view and good stuff.

But you can't find Christian Reformed theology all over there, right?

We have an opportunity to present our unique voice in a clear, compelling, deep way through the banner and help people understand, here's who we are as Christian Reformed people.

Here's what we believe.

And that's what people are wanting, right?

And we don't need to try to make the banner some broad, like broadly evangelical thing.

We want just narrow, just dive deep into the Christian Reformed world and keep it there.

And surprisingly, like other people want to hear about that.

I mean, that's even what, not that we're as big as the banner, like our podcast.

We have a lot of people who listen to this who are not Christian Reformed, but they want to know about the Christian Reformed church.

And so they listen in and we're like, this is all we're going to talk about.

It's this teeny little Dutch reform denomination.

But people want to know, what do you believe in this denomination?

And so I think the banner has an opportunity to double down on that in the midst of this.

And I hope they do.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, well, let's back up a little bit, I guess, and talk.

Because this was your first time at Synod, right?

Correct.

Yep.

I was just going to say, I think, speaking of the banner, just got the most recent copy, you know, had skimmed through it a little bit.

I don't remember if I had heard this number as synod.

They probably mentioned it, but I think there were 80 people.

It was their first time there.

It was like roughly half.

Almost every year, there's about 50% of the delegates are first-time delegates.

Okay.

And so that's one of the reasons why you see us trying to put out content before synod, trying to help first time delegates.

Like here's, here's, let's do what we can to try to help prepare you for it.

I'll put a plug in real quick for that.

Just interject.

I do appreciate it.

One of the things I did before synod was went back and listened to some of the messy reformation priests and it recommended you like focus on these things.

If you're your first time, make sure you are looking out for this and that.

It was very helpful.

Awesome.

Well, I'm glad to hear that.

So let me ask the bigger, broader question, because many people would say, I have zero desire to ever go to Synod.

Like sitting in a week-long meeting sounds terrible.

So what about that made you think, yeah, I want to put my name in and go to Synod and be part of this?

That's a great question.

Yeah, there have been several people at my church who mentioned very similar to that.

For me, I guess I've, I've embraced the, the reality that I'm was people have called me a deep thinker.

And I feel like some of my skill set in terms of collaborating in navigating difficult conversations, being a deep thinker that can kind of look, try to, as best I can look at both sides of an issue.

Um, I felt like it's what I understood Sennett to be like, I could contribute something to that.

Um, it also just with my particular vocation and education, it kind of worked out well that I, I could kind of make a break away from what my day to day is and, and designate that time.

I know for some people, maybe it's a work related reason that makes them difficult to go to, but you know, that I would say that's maybe more of a secondary or third kind of a consideration for me.

But firstly, again, it was more like I, I, I wanted to be able to be in a place with other believers that I could offer my gifts as far as I kind of reflect on them being there to give.

And I just enjoyed deep conversations.

I enjoy I'm not a super great expert by any means, but church quality is interesting to me, to structure this DRC.

So that was, I wanted to kind of learn more about that.

I wanted to see how do people make decisions in this church?

And then where can I help?

And where does God want me to be?

And like, what committee and what topics are going to come up?

And how can I best be of use to the church overall?

Yeah, that's great.

Yeah, we can use more people like that, Brandon.

We'd love to have more people like that involved in Synod.

So did you add, as you stepped into in it?

Did you, uh, did you feel like that was what you were able to do there?

Was it kind of what you expected or?

Yeah.

Thanks for that question.

Um, it, um, I've told others, yes, it was exactly how I expected it.

Um, there were very high points, um, moments of tremendous blessing.

I got to meet some wonderful people across the world.

Um, and we've, you know, we've You had people from particular, just some great people from Canada that I was able to kind of in the same dorm kind of living with that.

We had great conversations in the evening, people from out west in different classes.

But also with the highs, there were some frustrating points.

I think I wasn't naive enough to thinking that it was just going to be sunshine and rainbows.

There were difficult moments where, you know, especially being new to Synod where I had to kind of try to learn why certain people were frustrated about something from a policy perspective.

Even myself being a little bit frustrated.

You know, you're kind of you're new on a committee and then you're in the fundraising sessions and you're trying to figure out, like, how are these mechanisms all working together?

What options do I have to speak against something or for something when somebody might be tabling a motion?

How does my committee work in the kind of at the micro level where you've got, you know, if people are listening for the first time and they're wondering, like, what's this committee stuff Brandon's talking about?

Why everyone is sent it as appointed to a committee, we know.

And, you know, the planning committee basically delegates certain topics and overtures that come before us.

And so learning about how those committee wheels work in turn, what we can and can't do.

And we're under, as you know, Jason, you've been there, you're kind of under a tight timeframe.

And some of the conversations are fairly intense and you feel like you're trying to fit a lot of stuff into a little bit of time and come up with a resolution so that people can have an understanding of what your committee is going to recommend.

And ultimately, you get to aspects like majority and minority reports, which I was on two minority reports in my committee that myself, along with some others, helped put together.

I reported on one of them to the plenary session, and learning a little bit about how that works was interesting.

So overall, I would say, as far as Synod in the rearview mirror goes, I was very, very blessed to be there.

it overall went kind of like I thought it would.

And I learned so much that, you know, I, I feel like if, if Lord willing, if I'm to go again in the future, I'm much more prepared to be effective, even more effective.

I remember my first day in advisory committee, my first time at Synod and I have been, and this was like, I had been a Synod nerd for a long time.

Like I had been watching the live streams of synod for like seven years and studying like just a stupid synod or studying synodical procedure rules of all of that.

And still, even though I had studied and prepared that much, I remember sitting in advisory committee and there was kind of a conversation going and, and somebody all of a sudden, like I make a motion to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And all of a sudden it was like, boom, done.

And we moved on.

And I'm like, hold the phone.

What just happened?

I wasn't ready to do that.

And just not being ready for some of those procedural things, um, threw me for a loop that first day.

And I'm like, Oh yeah, you gotta be ready to like make motions and, and all of that kind of stuff to keep the ball moving in the right direction.

And people who know how to do that well, um, can really, um, yeah, kind of navigate that quite a bit.

And so I remember the first day being like kind of a whirlwind, like, Oh, I was not ready for that.

I don't know why I should have been, but now, now thinking back, but.

Yeah.

And actually speaking of that, what kind of, when you're thrown off a little, when I, we became very apparent on two topics in my committee, which was a committee five, the congregational care and justice.

There were two topics that I, myself and a few others felt like we were going to have to move in a minority report direction.

If you, if anyone listening to this ever is fortunate enough to go to Sinning someday, hasn't been there already, you know, when you get into going the direction of a minority report, you change the trajectory of what you're going to be doing earlier on in that week.

So many late nights, but it was a labor of love, of course, you know, you have your little networking email system, and you might meet up personally with some of the people on your committee to say, all right, how are we going to tackle this minority report?

What do we want to emphasizing it.

And that's all done outside of the normal meetings, right?

So you're in up until 11 o'clock at night, midnight, possibly even working on some of this stuff.

And so you don't get to go, you know, have, um, you may be some, some fellowship time with others in the evening and visiting like some others may do, but that comes with the territory.

And I understood that that may happen.

And like I said, I don't, it was a labor of love for sure, but it definitely, I can speak to how synod, when people say it's very tiring, um, what I would say to that is, yes, it could be very tiring.

It depends on how involved you are in what's going on.

And for me, it definitely, I could feel that by the end of the week.

Um, maybe others, maybe not so much, but, um, yeah, that, that definitely made, made for a, um, a very intense week.

Yeah.

And it's good to just know everybody has a different role at synod.

I always say like Synod definitely functions like a body where, you know, yeah, you have people who like you who are like, all right, my role seems to be right now to be writing these minority reports and to be doing all this work outside the scenes.

And so my role is not to be like networking and fellowshipping.

And whereas like I've said this a lot, but like my very first synod, I was on a really like non-consequential advisory committee.

We had one overture to deal with and we dealt with it.

And like, they were ready to deal with it in like five minutes.

And I'm like, come on, we can at least give it a half an hour.

You know, we don't have anything else to do.

So I made us go longer.

But otherwise I'm like, so my job was networking, fellowship, hanging out, you know, going, talking to people, drawing people together.

So that was great.

You know, whereas the next year I'm chairing a committee and my work, like I didn't talk to anybody.

I was up till midnight, one in the morning, every night, trying to figure out how to pave a way forward for this committee.

And so, yeah, you have a different role and that's okay.

It's going to look different each year.

Yeah, very much so.

Yeah.

So you said you're on committee five, congregational care and justice.

What were some of the overtures that you guys dealt with in that committee?

Well, yeah, there were several that had some intense conversations.

If you if anyone listening has a copy of the banner that arrived to their house, they can read some of the summaries there.

A few in particular, one that as far as the highlight goes, was just the the consensus that we had around assisted suicide.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Medically assisted suicide.

And, you know, that which our report led to just I think it was a unanimous approval of the report.

And we really wanted to have very strong language too, because we knew some of the people on our committee from Canada even spoke to this because it had been fairly recent news how in the Canadian legislature, there was some movement to try to expand medically assisted suicide to what they call mature minors, which is like, oh, we're going to allow mature minors to make a decision about this now, right?

what's scary but we just categorically I think that we used the word deplore um which is the first time someone someone quick that that's probably the first time the word deplorable has ever been in a synod report which we were which for that topic we were happy to do um and um other topics um one that was a little more contentious uh that led to a minority report that I was part of was for virtual churches and um I have listened to a couple of the posts interviews you've done and some others have mentioned this too, that that topic is probably going to come back up again.

And I would hope so.

Um, you know, one of the lessons I want to kind of, um, put that in the parking lot of this room and kind of segue a little bit to speak to like procedure as in it.

One thing that I learned, um, is because I was the two minor report, one of them, we did this for the other one we did not, which was to have a preamble to our reports.

And if you're going to be on a minority report, you really only have an opportunity to give justification to the whole plenary as to why are you thinking the way you are?

Why did you do this minority report?

What's your justification and rationale?

Anything that you want to tell the body about why you made your minority report, put it in a preamble because that's how you're going to try to get everyone to listen.

because we did that for virtual church, but the other report I was on a minority report, which had to do with reaffirming local authority and baptism.

I don't know why in hindsight we didn't do that, but we did not have a preamble there.

And unfortunately with the procedural stuff on the floor, somebody tried to table a bit early on in the conversation and that motion to table to the minority report got rejected.

And so we weren't able to actually give more justification as to why we felt like we had a report that they should consider.

That's all we have for this week.

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Reach the word in season and out of season, and keep fighting the good fight in this messy reformation.

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