The Christian Reformed Church (CRC) began ordaining women in 1995, the same year that the North American Division of the Seventh-day Adventist Church also tried — for the second time — to introduce ordaining women in the church.

Over half of the Christian Reformed churches now ordain female elders. Right on schedule, now the clamor in the CRC is for LGBTQ acceptance.

At a church just outside Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Tuesday (Feb. 18), 33 ministers from the Christian Reformed Church in North America (over half of them female) stood up to read aloud a declaration, officially accepting ordination in a rival denomination, the Reformed Church in America, and thereby gaining the freedom to be more accepting of LGBTQ believers.

The ceremony signaled a growing rift within the denomination which lost over two dozen churches in less than a year, according to a report by Religion News Service. The North Grand Rapids Classis, a regional group of congregations of the Reformed Church in America, plans to host another group ordination of reformed ministers in May, the report added.

The group ordination ceremony — the first of its kind — is one of the more public signs of an ongoing split in the Christian Reformed Church on the part of churches no longer willing to abide the CRC’s increasingly rigid stance on sexuality.

Why are these congregations separating from the Christian Reformed Church? Disagreement over the issue of LGBT membership and ordination sparked much of the separation from the church. The CRC denomination formally codified its support of Biblical sexuality in 2022. Last year churches were instructed to formally affirm this doctrine or separate.

Many are separating. I say “Let them go.”

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“I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that day, and not only to me but also to all who have loved his appearing” (2 Timothy 4:7-8).