By Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra
On the last Sunday in April, the roughly 450 members of University Reformed Church (URC) in East Lansing, Michigan, voted overwhelmingly to leave their denomination.
One of the reasons: the Reformed Church in America’s wavering approach to same-sex marriages.
The URC believes marriage is limited to a man and a woman. But denominations toeing the line on traditional marriage face a new problem: the growing number of pastors performing same-sex ceremonies despite rules and the ambivalent responses from denominational leadership.
According to URC pastor Kevin DeYoung, his congregation has wrestled for three years with the decision to leave the RCA. The RCA has been debating sexual ethics for much longer. Since the late 1970s, the denomination has been affirming that marriage is between a man and a woman. In 2005, the General Synod took action against a pastor who performed a wedding ceremony for his daughter and her partner, deposing him as a Professor of Theology and suspending him as a Minister of Word and Sacrament.
And in 2012, the General Synod approved their strongest statement yet in favor of traditional marriage, calling homosexual behavior “a sin according to the Holy Scriptures” and making performing same-sex marriages “a disciplinable offense.”
Read more at http://thegospelcoalition.org/article/churches-leave-as-denominations-break-their-own-rules
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The very next year, at the RCA General Synod 2013, that “strongest statement yet” was repealed with “repentance.”
THE RCA SHOULD CONSIDER DISBANDING AS A DENOMINATION.