More and More Students Are Coming from Non-Reformed Backgrounds

How That's Impacting Lynden Christian High School

*note: this was originally an English assignment designed to learn how to write in a given genre (a newspaper article, here). There will likely be audience mismatch. But since I’m posting this pretty much only for CRCVoices, I don’t really care. I hope it’s useful.

Our High School has close historical ties to the Christian Reformed Church, which makes sense given that it was founded in a town that has had a lot of Dutch immigrants historically. But does our student body today still reflect of the religion of its founders? The answer seems to be no.

“The rule is 90% of families be committed to a home church,” said LC’s Director of Community Development Ezra Stump. It seems safe to say that this rule is being followed, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone is coming from Reformed Churches. Indeed, data from the LC’s central office on church attendance shows that although a substantial number of families come from Reformed Churches, the majority come from non-Reformed churches. The split is almost 40% Reformed and 60% non-Reformed. 

Mrs. Grycel, who became LC’s Assistant Principal in 1994, has observed this influx of non-Reformed students in real time. “When I was hired 25 years ago,” she remembered, “the school seemed to be much more Christian Reformed focused, and most students were attending Reformed or Christian Reformed Churches.”

A lot of the consequences of this change aren’t immediately obvious, but they are there. Mr. VanHulzen, who became a teacher at LC in 1999, observed that general knowledge of the Bible has gone down as less students raised in the CRC have come in.

He said that when he first ran Bible trivia in his classes, students were sharp on their knowledge. Of today, though, he said, “When I do Bible trivia now, I often get blank stares on basic stuff.”

But VanHulzen sees an even deeper change, one having to do with the guiding philosophy of LC. “More and more parents just view Lynden Christian as a good education, not a way of teaching their children how to interact with the world in a godly way,” he commented. He thinks that the Dutch educational tradition constructed by those like Abraham Kuyper, one with a heavy emphasis on teaching people how to be a “transforming influence in the world” as LC’s motto says, isn’t as prominent as it once was.

He said that this Kuyperian view was something he picked up from his time at Calvin College, and perhaps its fading has something to do with the faculty as well as the students.

“New hires to LC come from all different collegiate backgrounds, not just Calvin & Dordt,” Mrs. Grycel pointed out. Because of that mix of educational backgrounds, it would make sense that the Kuyperian educational philosophy of those Reformed colleges would not simply be imported like it once was.

Grycel herself was one of the first staff members to graduate from a college other than Calvin or Dordt, and one of the first to come from a non-Reformed background. Recalling her hiring process, she said, “Since I had attended a Methodist Church growing up, I was required to attend a theology course at Sonlight Church to have a Christian Reformed perspective”

Mr. VanHulzen sees some positive aspects to this shift though: “Because we have more diverse church backgrounds in the student body, we have a lot more interesting discussions”. The church attendance data reflected this diversity, where Catholic, Presbyterian, Baptist, Lutheran, and even Slavic churches made an appearance, and in no small showing either.  

But more than this, LC’s increased religious representation indicates that it’s fulfilling a need in the larger community. For many reasons, from class sizes to political opinions to education quality, it seems more and more families see a school like LC as a benefit to their kids. There’s been a lot of new people from a lot of different schools, and churches, coming into LC, and it’s been really cool to see lifelong students integrate with new students like myself and others during the past few years. There are no signs of that stopping, so may God keep using institutions like our school to for his glory.