"When we baptize a child, we say, "This child is received into the one holy catholic church'," said Wesley Granberg-Michaelson. "Not into the Reformed Church in America - into the one church of Jesus Christ. You give us the opportunity to see if we mean what we say."

With these words, Granberg-Michaelson, general secretary of the RCA, welcomed the Alliance's executive committee to Holland, Michigan at the end of July.

"We offer you hospitality," Granberg-Michaelson told committee members, "not because we want to be polite, but because we belong to each other. We want to know you, to hear your stories of faith, to encourage and be encouraged by you."

For the RCA, months of planning and special fundraising had paid off, and the pleasure was plain to see on the faces of those greeting the WARC visitors at Third Reformed Church in Holland.

The executive committee met in Western Theological Seminary. Established by the RCA in 1866, WTS is an evangelical and ecumenical community of faith and learning in the Reformed tradition, equipping students for Christ-centred, biblically based, theologically integrated, culturally sensitive and mission-oriented Christian leadership.

The RCA is the oldest of eleven Alliance member churches in North America - nine of them in the United States. A 300,000-plus church, it was founded by Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam (later New York) in 1628, and has the longest continuously organized history of any church in the US. Until 1776 it remained under the authority of the Netherlands Reformed Church, and it was known until 1867 as the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church. In 1875, it helped to create the Alliance.

RCA congregations are clustered in forty-six "classes" [or presbyteries] and eight regional synods across the US and Canada, with the biggest concentrations on the east coast and in the midwest. The church supports three liberal arts colleges with a Christian emphasis and two seminaries. It has a substantial international outreach, with over a hundred RCA missionaries working in education, medicine and community development worldwide.

John Chang, a leader in the RCA’s Asian-American community, was elected vice-president this year

"Finding new ways to share our beliefs - that's how a church that is more than 350 years old has stayed relevant," says the RCA. Proud of its Dutch roots, it now has many congregations where worship is in Korean, or Spanish. It accepts three historic confessional statements - the Heidelberg catechism, the Belgic confession and the canons of Dort - but in 1987 the general synod approved "Our Song of Hope" as a contemporary statement of faith, and this year it affirmed the Belhar confession as a modern confession worthy of study by the whole church.

"A biblical vision," says Granberg-Michaelson, "places a people deeply in touch with God's clearest intentions for them. And it brings them to the brink, asking them to follow - to walk through the Red Sea, or cross the Jordan, or go through Samaria, or go to the ends of the earth."

"A biblical vision also places the church face-to-face with the culture in which it lives and prays and witnesses."

Why did the RCA want to host the WARC executive committee? "I think the importance for the Reformed Church in America is to maintain the larger connection with the Reformed churches worldwide," says Doug Fromm, a New Jersey pastor who is the RCA's associate for ecumenical relations and played a key role in organizing the meeting. "We know what we're dealing with here in the States, but we don't always know what other Reformed bodies are dealing with in their own cultural contexts."

Setri Nyomi and CS Song with Doug Fromm (l) and Wesley Gransberg-Michaelson (r)

"Those churches are looking at issues with different eyes," Fromm told Hillary Whitcomb of the Holland Sentinel. While in the north churches discuss questions such as sexuality, elsewhere they are concerned with more basic matters: food, medical care, and survival.

David Baak, moderator of the RCA commission on Christian unity, agrees. "WARC demonstrates the strength of the world Reformed witness," Baak says. "It keeps us connected across our many boundaries."

Executive committee members were housed in Hope College. One of three RCA colleges, Hope is committed to an atmosphere of learning and research, scholarship and dialogue, faith and community, and caters for more than 3,000 students from the US and 40 other countries.

Hope is home to the North American branch of the Society for Reformation Research, with faculty members Janis Gibbs and Jeffery Tyler sharing responsibility for the posts of treasurer and membership secretary. The international society publishes the annual Archive for Reformation History and was extended from Germany to North America in 1947.

The Archive is "one of the most prestigious international journals on Reformation history," says Gibbs. It "began as a publication dedicated to scholarship on Protestantism, but has now broadened to include all religious confessions and movements of the 16th century."