THE HISTORY OF THE REFORMED DUTCH IN EDMONTON
Harry A. Van Belle
The King's College
Edmonton, AB, Canada
I. ABSTRACT:
The identification mark of this religio-ethnic Dutch-Canadian community, formed in 1910 by Dutch immigrants from the Netherlands and the USA, is, and has been the centrality of the Reformed religion. It may, therefore, be called a religio-ethnic community (Driedger,1989:197). Originally, and until 1947, the church, specifically the CRC was the focal point of the life of the Reformed Dutch. During this period of the old-timers the community remained rather small, never more than 60 families.
From 1947-1960, the period of the newcomers, the community experienced a twenty-fold membership increase, due to a postwar influx of Reformed immigrants from the Netherlands. This immediately required the establishment of another half dozen new churches, with more to come. During this time, life in the community centered around the formation of a large number of Christian action institutions in education, labour relations, political involvement and banking.
During the seventies, the period of the settlers, the community was, perhaps, the most united and productive and a number of Christian organizations were added, notably in post-secondary education and in social welfare.
By 1980 the community had become institutionally most complete. Yet there were also signs that the community was about to enter a period of decline. Communal action within Christian institutions continued, but there is also evidence that the early enthusiasm was waning. The dozen churches which now made up the community were becoming so diverse in outlook and practice as to make communal action difficult.
The next two decades, which will be the period of the native born, will be crucial for determining the extent to which this community will be able to retain its religio-ethnic identity. During this period, those of their number who were born and raised in Canada, and educated in their Christian schools, will take up positions of leadership.
Relative to the Reformed Dutch communities in the USA, the community in Edmonton is rather young. It is, therefore, far too early to predict its demise. In spite of some decline, associational involvement (Lenski, 1961) remains relatively strong. Communal involvement (Lenski,1961)continues unabated. Endogamy, intra-community friendship and church participation still determine the bulk of the community members' social contacts and networks.
The character of this religio-ethnic community can be described in terms of a number of ethnic identification factors isolated by Driedger (1989:143-145). Ethnic institutional identification is strong in this community, as is identification with an ideology. Identification with historical symbols is not. Neither is identification with a (current) charismatic leader. In terms of identification with its ethnic culture, the identification with the Dutch language is virtually non-existent, except among the elderly. However, endogamy, choice of friends and participation in 'parochial' schools, in religion and in voluntary organizations are all strong determinants of this community's cohesion. As for identification with a territory, the original settlers formed an ethnic enclave close to downtown Edmonton. As urbanization, upward mobility and the size of their community increased, they moved toward the suburbs of the Edmonton metropolis, where they concentrated in several areas. This concentration was not motivated by an identification with a territory, however. The members of this community never were particularly fond of living next to each other. Rather, they are more interested in locating within the vicinity of the Christian school their children attend. Thus their reason for enclave formation is practical and instrumental.
Peter Berger's notion of the sacred canopy (1967) is useful for describing the central identifying factor of this community. According to Driedger (1980:341,1989:202), four stakes hold up the canopy, a religious ideology, an ethnic community, an ethnic culture, and the territory in which the group resides. It will be evident that for the Reformed Dutch in Edmonton the preservation and promotion of the Reformed religion is central to their life. All of the other stakes are instrumental for the furtherance of this goal.
II. DESCRIPTION:
A. INTRODUCTION:
Throughout this century large numbers of Dutch men and women have immigrated from the Netherlands to Canada.1 Quite a few of them came to Alberta,2 and of these a sizable number settled in the city of Edmonton. This in itself did not make them members of a Dutch ethnic community. To unite them into a 'people' (Gordon, 1964) they also needed to identify, together, in their host country with something taken from their home country. Moreover, this aspect of life from their country of origin needed to play such an important role in their lives as to form the reason why they are identified as a separate ethnic group.
This cannot be said for all the Dutch immigrants who have settled in Edmonton. Some of them have followed the general tendency of Dutch immigrants to rapidly become Canadianized.3 By far the majority of them, however, did take an aspect of their life in the Netherlands and made it central to their lives in Canada. This aspect is their Reformed religion. This religion has formed them into a 'religio-ethnic' community (Driedger, 1989) and the maintenance and promotion of this religion shapes their lives decisively, even to this day.
This is one of the reasons why we intend to explore the history of the Dutch in Edmonton by focusing exclusively on the origin, the growth and the possible decline of the Reformed Dutch in this city.4 The other reason is that the comparison groups of Dutch settlers in the USA, discussed at this conference, are also Reformed Dutch communities.
B. THE PERIOD OF THE OLD-TIMERS (1910-1947)
The Reformed Dutch community in Edmonton came into being in 1910 with the establishment of the Christian Reformed Church (CRC). Ironically, it took the death of two of the children of Mr. Hendrick Kipper, one of the founders of this church, to have its members become aware of each other, and, subsequently, to join hands together in forming a congregation. (In His Soil, 1985:2)
The church's charter members consisted of recently arrived Reformed Dutch immigrants from various parts of the Netherlands, together with a smaller contingent (20%) of Reformed Dutch immigrants from Iowa, Michigan, Massachusetts, South Dakota and Montana in the USA. (estimate from Soil:96-101) As we will see, this mix would soon prove to be a source of contention within the community.
It was Kipper who took the initiative in forming the church by writing Rev. VanderMey, minister of the CRC of Manhattan, Montana, with the request of coming to Edmonton to officially start the church. Classis Pacific North West of the CRC of America, mandated VanderMey to do so and on Oct. 21, 1910 he formally founded the church, which at the time counted 9 families and 1 single adult, or 19 adults and 23 children as its flock. (Soil:2)
During the following years a large number of new members were added from the Netherlands and the USA, boosting its ranks to nearly 60 families. These immigrants came in response to glowing accounts of life in Alberta written by Kipper in De Heraut, a religious weekly in the Netherlands, and by VanderMey in De Wachter, the church paper of the CRC in the USA. (Soil:3-5
However, the church did not remain this large for long. By 1916 its membership was already reduced to 25 families, and, for various reasons, it was destined to stay at this level of participation for some time to come. In fact, not until the late 1940's did the church again reach a membership of 60 families due to an influx of post-war immigrants from the Netherlands. ( Appendix A)
It was not as if the community lacked an influx of new immigrants from the Netherlands or the USA during the first four decades of its existence. Many came to Edmonton from outside Canada, and many more also came from other areas inside Canada, notably from Saskatchewan and other parts of Alberta, to join the church. The trouble was that, being mostly agrarians, they soon left the community in equal number. For many of them the Reformed Dutch community in Edmonton functioned as a transition point to the more outlying areas of Alberta. They only stayed long enough to scout the surrounding areas for land that might be suitable to establish a Reformed Dutch farming colony.(Soil:5,71; Palmer, 1985:149)
The formation of one such colony was responsible for the earliest decline in membership. Between 1911-1915 21 families, including the Kippers, moved to an area about 100 miles north of Edmonton. There they established a Reformed Dutch colony and called it Neerlandia. In 1915 they organized their own Christian Reformed church in that place. It became the first daughter church of the Edmonton CRC.(Soil:7, 77-90; A Furrow Laid Bare, 1985:36-59;Palmer: 149-152)
For many years thereafter, the Edmonton church functioned as the mother church for quite a number of small Reformed Dutch settlements all over Alberta, Saskatchewan and British Columbia. The pattern of involvement with these settlements was always the same. The Edmonton church would ordain one or two elders in these places and the minister of the mother church visited these settlements several times per year for pastoral care and to perform duties which only ordained ministers could perform, such as the administration of the sacraments and preaching. This pattern would continue until the outlying group was big enough to incorporate itself as a separate CR congregation, at which point it was expected to form its own consistory and to call its own minister. (Soil:13,17-19)
With such an unstable membership and so many obligations toward the outlying colonies, the Edmonton congregation was never well to do. Nevertheless, as a result of generous donations by CR congregations all over North America, it was able to build its own church building, already in 1914. For at least four decades thereafter, life in the Edmonton Reformed Dutch community centered around this church building. During that time the community was a church community.
But what kind of church was it? What were the issues that united and divided its members the most? Initially, there were two issues, the vroegdoop and the issue concerning the name of the church.(Soil:13-16) Both issues went to the heart of the community's identity and for that reason caused considerable strife among its members.
Since the issue about the name of the church is easiest to understand we will deal with it first. This issue essentially related to the composition of the community. The majority of the members, who had come to Edmonton directly from the Netherlands, favored the name, Gereformeerde Kerk of Edmonton, since this was the name of the denomination they had belonged to in the Netherlands. A minority of the members(20%), among which the minister, who had come to Edmonton from the USA, favored the name, Christian Reformed Church of Edmonton. They had good reason to suggest this name since the church was, in fact, a part of the Christian Reformed denomination. But this is precisely where the problem lay. The majority of the church members, specifically those who had immigrated from the Netherlands, while they were grateful for the help they received, preferred to keep their distance from the American CRC.(Soil:16) In this they were not motivated by a sense of Canadian nationalism. They had their reservations for theological and ideological reasons. This leads us to the other issue, the issue of the vroegdoop or 'early baptism'.
This dispute centered around the question whether or not a child should be baptized as soon as it is born, even if this meant that only the father of the child could attend the ceremony, since, because of the birth, the mother was still convalescing. Again, the majority of the members, those who had come directly from the Netherlands, favored early baptism. The minority from the USA, including the minister, did not. (Soil:13)
Ostensibly, and to an outsider, both these disputes represent a storm in a teacup, which, if reason had prevailed should have been resolved in favor of the minority opinion. But the underlying issues in these disputes were far from trivial to the identity of the community. To understand this, we must briefly recount the history of the Reformed in the Netherlands.
Even though more than 50% of the inhabitants of the Netherlands are, and have always been, Roman Catholic, Dutch culture has, from the inception of the Netherlands as a nation, been ruled by two religious-ideological forces (Schama, 1988; Dooyeweerd,1979). The first is Humanism, which finds its origin in the Christian Humanists like Erasmus, and the second, Reformed Protestantism, which is mostly based on the teachings of John Calvin. From the beginning, therefore, and next to the Humanist movement, the Reformed community was a dominant player in Dutch national life.
Ecclesiastically, Reformed Protestantism came to expression in the Hervormde Kerk, which, by the early nineteenth century had been proclaimed to be the state church of the Netherlands. With this proclamation the Hervormde Kerk had become identified with Dutch culture in general, which at the time was heavily influenced by the French Revolution of 1789.
For many Reformed Dutch Protestants of the nineteenth century, this church had lost its unique identity as a Reformed denomination, because, in their view, it based itself more on the ideas of the French Revolution than on the authority of the Bible, the latter being historically a central tenet of the Protestant Reformation. In line with their convictions about the state church, these people seceded in 1834 and formed their own denomination, called the Christelijk Gereformeerde Kerk of the Netherlands. Another group of Reformed Dutch women and men, who had identical concerns about the state church, instead chose to emigrate at about the same time under the leadership of Van Raalte and Scholte, to the USA where they established Dutch Reformed colonies in Michigan and Iowa. The Christian Reformed Church of America eventually originated from out of this group. Both those who seceded in the Netherlands and those who emigrated to the USA called themselves the people of the Afscheiding or the 'Secession'.(Soil:13,14;Christelijke Encyclopaedie, First Edition, 1925, Vol.I 59-61; Bratt, 1984:3-14)
In the latter part of the nineteenth century yet another group seceded from the state church in the Netherlands. The denomination they formed is called the Gereformeerde Kerken. They also called themselves the people of the Doleantie, or the people 'who mourn' (the apostasy of the state church). Since this latter group was led by Abraham Kuyper, a charismatic figure, who later became prime minister of the Netherlands, the members of this group received yet another name. To this day they are identified as 'the Kuyperians'.
Finally, most of the people of the Afscheiding and the people of the Doleantie united into one Gereformeerde denomination in 1892. Within this denomination the two groups were henceforth to be distinguished as group 'A' and group 'B'. (Soil:13,14; Christelijke Encyclopaedie, 1925, Vol.II, 299-301; Bratt,1984:14-33)
To make a long story short, the Edmonton Reformed Dutch community from the outset contained members of both groups. The majority of its members, who immigrated directly from the Netherlands, for the most part were Kuyperians, or members of the B group. Those who came via the USA hailed from the Afscheiding and were members of the A group.(The Banner: March 1,8,15, 1993)
Though these two groups had the essentials of the Reformed Faith in common, there were also some important differences in emphasis. What were these differences?
The people of the Afscheiding viewed the Christian life as a wrestling with God to obtain the certainty of one's salvation. With Kierkegaard they held that becoming a Christian was not easy. It involved a daily awareness of one's sinfulness, a conscious decision for Christ and daily repentance in the form of personal piety. For these reasons they placed a greater importance on the sacrament of communion where the focus is more on what we promise to God, than on baptism, where the focus is more on what God promises to us. This group also had a tendency to separate itself from the outside world in order to keep itself pure, whereas, inside the church its members were expected to adhere to a strict moral code. Finally, the members of this group of Reformed Christians also exhibited a tendency toward personalism, if not individualism. In practice this meant that they did not favor organized communal Christian action beyond the church, and, perhaps, the Christian school. Whatever acts of outreach they would perform, they did as individuals, and these attempts at outreach consisted exclusively of bringing the converted into the life of the church. (Soil:13; Christelijke Encyclopaedie I:59; Bratt, 1984:4)
The people of the Doleantie, the Kuyperians, had an entirely different view of the Christian life. They placed the emphasis on what God had promised. According to their understanding, in the beginning of time, God had made a covenant with his people to save them. From God's side every individual child born into the Christian community, is reborn, regenerated by virtue of being baptized, unless the conduct of this child in later life gave proof to the contrary. According to them, the free offer of salvation is the greatest certainty a Christian can count on from the time he or she is baptized. For this reason Kuyperians typically do not worry a great deal about whether they are saved. Salvation is God's business. Parents view their children as children of the Lord and nurture and teach them as such from the beginning and not as potential converts to Christianity. When these children have achieved the age of discernment, they are expected to appropriate this free offer of salvation personally through an act of public profession of their faith. It is true that they may also decline to do so, to their individual peril, but this in no way invalidates the offer of free salvation nor God's favor toward them up to that point in their lives.