(RNS) — At a church just outside Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Tuesday (Feb. 18), 33 ministers from the Christian Reformed Church in North America 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.
Having stated they will abide by the creeds and confessions of the RCA, each of the ministers was then offered a loaf of bread as a symbol of fellowship and welcome.
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…