Earlier this week the Eastern Ministerial Conference was held where many Canadian and United Reformed ministers and their wives were encouraged by speeches, devotions, scripture, prayer, song, and sweet fellowship. I was asked to give a presentation about the biography I wrote on my father.
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
My COVID19 project was to
write a biography on my father. I was invited to speak a few words to you about
it.
You might wonder how it came
about that I should write a biography on my father. I have Dr. John Smith (OT professor at CRTS) to thank
as he encouraged me to write it. I was telling him about how two of my sisters
had recently downsized and had both come across envelopes and files of letters
and other personal items that my father had left behind when he died unexpectedly
and suddenly in 1968. After a brief discussion on our siblings’ email group it
was decided that the stuff would come to me. When I told John about this, he
urged me to write my father’s biography saying that the stories of the early
Canadian Reformed immigrants needed to be told by my generation, while the
memories are still alive.
My father was the first
Canadian Reformed minister when he came to Edmonton, Alta., in June of 1951, at
the age of 35. My parents made the ten-day sailing from the Netherlands to
Quebec City and then the transcontinental journey to Edmonton. He exchanged a
small village pastorate, where he could make his visits by bicycle, for a parish
that effectively was the provinces of BC, Alberta, and Manioba. No sooner was
he installed in Edmonton a few days upon arriving there and he was off to the
Bulkley Valley and the Fraser Valley, and then to Southern Manitoba. He
traveled throughout the vast Canadian West by rail visiting the far-flung
churches and house congregations, preaching the Word, administering the
sacraments, helping to institute churches, and visiting the immigrant saints. It
would be later that year and the next before three colleagues came to share the
load of the work that needed to be done.
The book is mostly historical
and somewhat thematic. I wrote about my father’s family roots, his youth in
IJmuiden and his education in the Free University of Amsterdam, WW II,
including his father’s arrest for his work in the resistance against the Nazis,
both German and Dutch, and his eventual death in the Sachsenhausen
concentration camp. Then I wrote about my father’s church struggle in the
ecclesiastical liberation of ’44, his one Dutch pastorate in Mussel, Groningen,
his immigration to Edmonton, his decade there with its troubles that led to a
total burnout that lasted at least six months. Then about his recovery and the
call five years later to Cloverdale, BC.
He served there happily and fruitfully, but for a short period since he
died 2 ½ years after we moved to that small and lovely town.
The book consists of 11 chapters,
in which I tell my father’s story, and 11 appendices. Eleven appendices seem to
be a lot, but I included them since I wanted my father to be heard in his own
voice. My father was first of all a pastor, but he was a scholarly man. The
appendices cover topics related to the Dutch church struggle of 1944, Unionism,
immigration, space travel, Sphere Sovereignty, the relationship between faith
and science, philosophy, and include three sermons: an OT, a NT, and a
catechism sermon.
As I read my father’s
documents, I discovered that he often referred to Gal. 5:1—For freedom
Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again
to a yoke of slavery. I do not know that he
was conscious that he made reference to that text across the different issues
he dealt with, but it is a text that seemed to tie things together for him.
My
father, born in 1916, was bred in the context of the Réveil, of the first and
second secessions, and in a church milieu which proclaimed freedom in Christ.
He underwent his primary and secondary education in a confessional Reformed
school in IJmuiden, North Holland.
My
father’s first existential crisis was WW II, which broke out when he was 22
years old. Germany invaded the Netherlands and established Nazi rule. The
Netherlands was occupied territory and was made subservient to national
socialism, which militated against the reign of Christ. This became critical to
my father when Germany started rounding up young Dutchmen and transporting them
to German factories to serve there as slave labour for the war effort. He had
to go into hiding.
The
crisis became more poignant when my father’s father was arrested because of his
resistance work and was eventually shipped by rail in a cattle car to a concentration camp, Sachsenhausen, near Berlin. My Opa would have passed under the gates of
the camp which cynically proclaimed Arbeit Macht Frei (work sets you
free). This was a Nazi slogan which stamped the so-called “Deutches Reich.” In
his letters to his family, which he wrote from Camp Vugt in the south of the Netherlands
and then ultimately from Sachsenhausen where he died of dysentery, he encouraged
his wife and children to keep believing that as Christians they were free in
Christ no matter what their temporary circumstances may be, and to stand firm
in that freedom.
The
second major crisis, which tested his faith that we are free in Christ, was the
ecclesiastical liberation of 1944. In the late 30s and early 40s certain
theological opinions were given confessional status in the church. The General
Synod of the GKN had placed a yoke of slavery upon the churches. The flashpoint
was the doctrine of presumptive regeneration. The teaching that the children of
believers were to be baptized on the basis of the presumption that they had
been or would be born again was bound upon the pulpits of the churches. Many, such as my father, had no issue with
some holding to that theological opinion, but the sticking point was that it
was made binding, at pain of suspension and deposition. And indeed, many
faithful preachers and elders were deposed because they would not toe the line
of the synod. Office bearers, even some whole churches, were expelled for
teaching that we are to baptize our children on the basis that God has a
covenant with believers and their children. My father, and many others,
liberated themselves from a synodocratic church. With tears stinging their eyes
they set themselves free to remain in the freedom with which Christ sets us
free.
When
my parents immigrated in 1951 my father was almost immediately drawn into a
debate of whether or not we may join trade unions. This had become a
controversy in the New Westminster Church, whose consistory had taken the
position that membership in a trade union is incompatible with membership in
the church. My father studied a number of trade union constitutions and
published an essay on it in the first yearbook of the Canadian Reformed
churches. He demonstrated that the trade unions of the day demanded obedience to
both past and future decisions of the union. He made the significant point that
we owe such allegiance only to Christ. Should we bind ourselves to decisions of
a union yet to be made, then, said he, we are allowing ourselves to be put
under a yoke other than the yoke of Christ.
In
1960 my father experienced a severe and sustained burnout. For six months he
was sidelined and out of commission. So severe was it that he could not endure
remaining in Edmonton. He convalesced, rested, and recovered in Carman, Manitoba,
and southern Ontario. His faith was shaken, but he was given the strength to
hold on to Christ. Even in the depths of his despair he held on to Christ, for
he knew that he had no other recourse but to hold on to the one who had set him
free through his death on the cross.
In the first half of the 1960s the churches
were embroiled in a controversy related to the form of subscription. As we all
well know a minister has to promise, at both the local church and classis, that
his teaching will be in harmony with the Reformed confessions. Should his
teaching diverge from this standard, and should he not conform his teaching, he
will be removed from the ministry. Rev. Cornelis de Haan of the Winnipeg church
refused to sign the classis form, and he was, therefore and eventually, removed
from the ministry. By signing this form a minister promises that he will only
preach and teach the freedom found only in the teaching that we are free in
Christ, and that any other belief is slavery.
My father’s greatest academic
love was the study of philosophy. His introduction to this field of inquiry was
born at the Free University as he followed the lectures of Dooyweerd and
Vollenhoven. He was given the opportunity to devote himself to this study after
we moved to Cloverdale, BC, and he enrolled as a part-time student at Western
State College (now University). There he focused on analyzing and critiquing
secular western philosophy and, through lectures, benefitted especially the
university crowd in the Fraser Valley in the late 1960s. He published several
articles in the youth magazine, In Holy Array, two of which are included
in my book. The great difference between secular western philosophy and the
Christian message is where they both look for freedom. Whereas the former seeks
it in man the latter finds it only in Christ. Again Gal 5:1 rose to prominent
significance: Christ has set us free whereas human philosophy is an enslaving
yoke.
When my father died in 1968 he
was busy with publishing a series of articles on the Open Brief. The Open
Brief was a statement signed by twenty-five Dutch ministers of the
GKN-Liberated. In my father’s assessment the statement sought to undo the ecclesiastical
Liberation of 1944. The signatories wanted more latitude in doctrinal issues
than the Form of Subscription, in their opinion, gave them. My father clarified
what was at stake in the Liberation of 1944. The signatories called the
Liberation nothing but a matter of human ideology rather than yet another
example of Christ’s freeing his people—as he had done in the first secession
(1834) and the second secession (1886). Signing on to the Open Brief, said my
father, led people from freedom in Christ to the slavery of man’s opinion. He
ended his unfinished articles by asking:
Is that the easy yoke of Christ? Is this His light
burden? No, not at all. It was and is a yoke of bondage. By this horrible
synodical usurpation [of the synodocratic GKN] God’s redeemed people were
compelled to ascribe more power and authority to the general synod and its
ordinances than to the Word of God.
Once again, my father set the
issue in the light of the gospel of the freedom of Christ. As men called to
serve in the midst of the Canadian and United Reformed Churches we can be thankful
to serve in the line of the two secessions and the liberation. In all three
instances the gospel of Christ who gives freedom was at stake. My father
understood that, and I am thankful to serve in this ecclesiastical and
historical context. I have had to sign the Form of Subscription several times
and always did so gladly. It is not burdensome to promise to proclaim the
liberating truths of the gospel.
I could reflect on more: for
example, his involvement with the birth of the Voice of the Church (our
evangelistic radio broadcast), our Theological College, Christian schools, his
sermons which proclaim freedom in Christ. But let me end by returning to
Galatians 5:1—For freedom Christ has set us
free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.
Often people will say, “Don’t
just stand there; do something!” On the basis of this text of Scripture it
might be just as good, and perhaps it is even better, to say, “Don’t just do
something; stand there!”
Thank-you.
