Keeping the Faithful: Patterns of Membership Retention in the Christian Reformed Church

Abstract

very demanding meaning system in North America; one that should find a modern, post-industrial society rather inhospitable. The fact that it does have little appeal to those who were not raised with it suggests that this contention is true. The question becomes, how are members retained in this uncongenial atmosphere full of alternative, perhaps more appealing, less demanding meaning systems. This analysis of a survey of former and present members of the Christian Reformed Church indicates that persons leave the CRC because they find the CRC community too demanding, constricting, and intolerant. Those who stayed members of the CRC cited commitment to its conservative Calvinist theology and worship as their primary reasons for continuing. They also mentioned the positive importance of the CRC community to them. Recent analyses of denominational growth and doctrine (Roof, 1976; Bibby, 1978; Hadaway, 1978; Hoge and Carroll, 1978 and Bouma, 1979) have resulted in a shift from the interest in how denominations attract members (sparked by Kelley, 1972) to an interest in how denominations retain members. Hoge and Carroll suggest that future analyses of continuing membership in Protestant churches . . should begin with an analysis of motivations generated by church life itself' (1978:107). This study compares those who left the Christian Reformed Church with those who remained members in order to ascertain its patterns of membership retention. As Hoge and Carroll suggested it appears that the quality of community life is a critical factor. The Christian Reformed Church (hereafter the CRC) is a small (nearly 300,000), steadily growing (17% in the last decade), non-fundamentalist Christian denomination which proudly proclaims to be conservative in its Calvinism. Sydney Ahlstrom has called the CRC, which has its roots in 19th and 20th century Dutch Calvinist immigrants to Canada and the United States, America's best example of conservative Calvinism (1972:754-755). An analysis of the sources of continuing growth in the CRC has made it clear that the CRC grows because it retains those members which have been born into it, rather than by attracting those who had been raised in another religious tradition (cf. Bouma, 1979). How does the CRC retain its members? There are several ways of seeking an answer to these questions. Exit interviews with persons who chose to leave the CRC would provide valuable information relevant to *An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the Meetings of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, in San Antonio, 1979. The author wishes to thank the departments of Sociology at Michigan State Uni