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OPINION | What did the Dutch Reformed Church really lose in Namibia? | News24
Le Roux Schoeman
05 April 2025
The Dutch Reformed Church recently “lost” one of its regional synods. But Le Roux Schoeman asks if it really did lose.
Last month, the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) officially went from being composed of 10 regional synods down to nine.
On a rainy day in Windhoek, roughly 80 delegates of the DRC in Namibia voted via closed ballot in a church hall in one of the capital’s suburbs.
They needed a two-thirds majority to sever ties with the DRC’s General Synod. They got it. Spirited, but isolated attempts at “revision” were down-voted by a clear majority earlier in the morning.
The final decision made mention of possible bilateral ties in the future, but it was clear: The Namibians wanted out.
The DRC in Namibia is small by DRC standards. Twelve of the 43 congregations don’t have ministers. Some positions have been vacant for years. The Western Cape region (NG Kerk Wes-Kaapland) has 221 congregations, while another small synodical region, Northern Cape (Noord-Kaapland), has 83.
Namibia has roughly 11 800 people on its books, scattered across congregations from Rundu in the north to Oranjemund in the south, near the border with South Africa. From an attendance point of view, it’s a church in decline. Its outgoing leader, the Rev Johannes Maritz, has conceded on earlier occasions.
There are growth points too. Like the DRC, they benefit greatly from prudent financial management over previous decades. They also continue to play a significant role in social work and education. Through involvement at the Namibia Evangelical Theological Seminary, they contribute to “that discipline whereby we stop talking nonsense about God”, as Dr Wynand Fourie reminded delegates of Herbert McCabe’s definition of theology during Fourie’s presentation at synod.
Despite obvious challenges, the Namibians seemed bullish about their future, framing the decision, as they have done since 2022, as something the DRC brought upon themselves and something that now allows the church in Namibia to be more effective in its own “unique” context and calling.
Spooked by hierarchy
The DRC traces its roots back to Jan van Riebeeck and the arrival of the reformed faith via Dutch Settlers in 1652. The General Synod was formed in 1962, at the height of apartheid, when the DRC was locked in an intimate embrace with the National Party.
Following its protracted farewell to apartheid theology and the gradual repositioning in modern South Africa, the DRC’s General Synod still ultimately represents congregations from all of its remaining 1 070 congregations across Southern Africa.
It meets, as it last did in October 2024, once every four years. In an organisation easily spooked by hierarchy and wary of central leadership, it’s the closest thing they’ve got to it. And its rotating chairperson represents the closest thing a group of Afrikaans Protestants will allow itself to get to a pope. That position is currently held by the Rev Jan Lubbe, a minister from Bloemfontein. An even-tempered man, Lubbe and fellow leaders responded with “sadness” to the news from Namibia.
Whether the DRC’s General Synod is in fact a governing body or just a group of people gathered in a marquees tent every four years is, however, one of the many, many bones of contention in the power struggle that was kicked off by one decision more than five years ago.
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The rupture in relations with the Namibians dates back to when delegates gathered for General Synod in Gauteng acknowledged on 9 October 2019 that there are church councils and ministers “who do not carry the conviction to confirm civil unions between persons of the same sex with integrity, as well as church councils and ministers who do carry the conviction to confirm civil unions between persons of the same sex with integrity”.
That impasse remains in the DRC to this day. To some in the church, the 2019 decision, and its updated version in 2023, remains a realistic solution to accommodate, rather than to coerce or split. To others, like the Namibians, it feels too roomy by far.
In their farewell decision last month, the Namibian leaders didn’t mention same-sex unions, ethical reflections on human sexuality or how to read the Bible. By now, all of that is baked into a posture they’ve assumed with regard to their colleagues across the Orange River, which is that they need to be converted on this point.
This raises the question of what exactly the DRC lost or gained in the process of resisting that strong impulse to evangelise from its neighbour.
Theologically unpredictable
Even if the churches stay friends after the breakup, the DRC loses thousands of Namibian congregants on some formal level and the deep historic ties that run through families and communities. It does not, however, lose a particular brand of theology, because whatever it lost on that front, is in ample supply across all of the remaining regional synods.
If anything, the Windhoek manoeuvre has emboldened some like-minded believers in the DRC who see this as the dawn of a new federal setup with synodical boundaries running along faith styles rather than geographical lines.
Church historian Prof Johan van der Merwe, writing for Kerkbode recently, even tables the idea that the General Synod could basically become a sort of council of churches. This is something Lubbe would strongly resist, based not on a need for control but on a theology of church unity and a longer view of history, that reaches back far past the 1962 unification.
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Has the DRC gained anything? The “broad church” approach, taken since 2019, has not so much succeeded in making the DRC either liberal or conservative as, from a “user” point of view, making it theologically unpredictable. As a visitor to a congregation, it remains something of a lottery, if not a mystery, what use and interpretation of Scripture you might encounter as far as marriage and human sexuality are concerned. But to many, this issue is not an organising principle in their religious life. And, of course, the coexistence of contradicting or even conflicting opinions is not peculiar to this denomination, this faith or this organisation.
Meanwhile, both churches are losing congregants to secularisation or more zippy faith outfits that are more loosely tied to recent history and epistemology. Of course, DRC church leaders don’t necessarily talk or think in those terms, but brand affinity seems to be low and losing altitude.
A reckoning
While a fair degree of schadenfreude can be observed online about all this from the ranks of vocal post-theists and less embattled faith organisations alike, a lot can be said about the DRC as a force for good in countless communities.
“While the opening of church membership signified the first steps in rejecting apartheid, the discourse around community involvement has become the primary way the DRC negotiates its place within South Africa,” writes Dr Louis van der Riet and Prof Cobus van Wyngaard in an 2021 academic paper titled The other side of whiteness: The Dutch Reformed Church and the search for a theology of racial reconciliation in the afterlife of apartheid.
A contributing factor to the slow-clap of its demise that the DRC has been receiving in some salient parts of the Afrikaans media is something (in psychological terms) shadowy living deep inside newsrooms and comment sections – something often more akin to a reckoning than a measured appraisal of a group of mainly moderate, well-pensioned older people trying to follow a radical Jew from the first century.
It’s as if, in the absence of PW Botha and the generals of the SANW, and amid the horrors and humiliations of life in 2025, it’s become crucially important to not let dominees get away with any monkey business or inflict more boredom and dogma onto a new generation. Fair enough, but surely some of all that is just our own stuff?
And now, with the increasingly hostile journalistic gaze upon its every move, church leaders like Lubbe and Maritz feel the pressure and church communication workers are tempted into spiritual bypassing or highly functional content. But why?
One reason is a strategy that has emerged out of the years of entrenched debate over such deeply held theological positions. This strategy combines pettiness and aggression and can make online religion surprisingly hazardous.
Enter Namibia.
The DRC has now lost some people and, in a sense, some power. But, what really won the day in Windhoek is the insistence that the Bible is clear to all about everything; coupled with an attitude that says: “Around here, no one will tell us what to do.”
The human cost of that victory will be felt on both sides of the border.
– Le Roux Schoeman is editor of Kerkbode.
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