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In an open letter posted to its website Feb. 18, the , a graduate school in Toronto, Ont., announced a decision of its board of directors Jan. 15 “to discontinue ICS’s status as a Denominationally-Related Educational Institution of the Christian Reformed Church in North America.” Signed by the school’s president, Ronald A. Kuipers, and board chair, Dan Beerens, the letter says the board made the move because of what it described as the past several synods of the CRCNA silencing “parishioners who oppose the CRCNA’s adoption of the Human Sexuality Report (HSR) and, by giving it doctrinal status, effectively expel(ing) all those whose Christian consciences call them to dissent from the HSR and its conclusions. Because of our concern for these persons as well as for the overall well-being of LGBTQ+ people in the church, we decided that we could not support a denomination that shuts down difficult conversations.”

Kuipers said they informed the CRCNA of this decision the same day as posting the open letter, communicating by email at 8 a.m.

General secretary Zachary King and executive director-Canada Al Postma issued a joint statement Feb. 19 saying they received the communication “with a heavy heart,” noting, “For nearly sixty years, we have been partners with ICS in promoting Christian graduate education from a Reformed perspective. This relationship dates back almost to ICS’s founding in 1967 as the Association for the Advancement of Christian Scholarship.” Synod 1968 approved a request to recommend that association to the churches for financial support, and the school made its first report to synod in 1978, the same year “synod also formally approved the AACS—after 1982, ICS—for inclusion in the listing of denominationally related educational agencies,” the statement from King and Postma said. “We grieve that this partnership is no longer wanted in the same way. We also wish ICS God’s richest blessings as they pursue our shared value of distinctly Reformed Christian scholarship.”

Synod 2022 received the report (known as the HSR) of the committee to articulate a foundation-laying biblical theology of human sexuality and recommended it to the churches, in a 74% majority vote, as a “useful summary of biblical teaching” on human sexuality. The only portion designated as confessional is the definition of unchastity—that it includes homosexual sex. That interpretation was upheld by Synod 2023, and in 2024 synod made rulings on gravamina, the Church Order tool used by officebearers to express a difficulty with part of a confession, eliminating the possibility of maintaining a settled conviction against a teaching of the church long term. A goal of this process, synod said, “is to restore an officebearer to doctrinal unity or reveal where our standards may be in error. This process may also reveal that an officebearer is doctrinally located elsewhere in the larger body of Christ.” The changes to the gravamina process “ensure a more pastoral approach to resolving confessional difficulties, allowing sufficient time for thoughtful discernment and fostering a nurturing space that prioritizes pastoral care and mutual understanding,” synod said (Acts of Synod 2024,).

As a denominationally related educational institution of the CRCNA, ICS prepared a yearly report for the agenda of synod. In 2024, it read, in part, “On behalf of all who participate in and benefit from the academic ministry of ICS, I wish to thank the CRCNA for supporting ICS’s efforts to be an academic witness to the story of hope and renewal that our Maker and Redeemer calls us to embody.”

In the Feb. 18 open letter Kuipers and Beerens say, “For us, the inclusion of sexual minorities is part and parcel of the healing and transformation God calls us to enact. Scripture gives many examples of God’s people dramatically reforming traditional positions in their efforts to be faithful to this same ethical call. In kindred spirit, we strive to honour the image of God in LGBTQ+ persons. We believe that, in so doing, we can both help end the needless harm inflicted on persecuted sexual minorities and affirm the blessings these persons bring to the Church and wider society.”

The Christian Reformed Church’s human sexuality report also calls for recognition of the image of God in each individual, for example on of the Agenda for Synod 2022, “Individuals who identify as transgender or have gender dysphoria need to be received without judgment as persons made in God’s image, valuable to God as they are. In other words, they need to be welcomed with unconditional love.”

In addition to the open letter, ICS posted three letters of support of its action and position, from Nicholas Wolterstorff of Michigan, Janet Wesselius of Alberta, and Mark Vander Vennen of Ontario. Wolterstorff is a former professor of philosophy at Calvin University in Grand Rapids and two-term board member of ICS, who has co-taught several courses there. He has spoken publicly about biblical justice and same-sex marriage since 2016. He wrote that he hopes ICS’s action and his own writing “in support of that action, will stimulate the sort of discussion that the CRCNA has tried to shut down, of how to embrace in love those who find themselves to be LGBTQ+ persons.”

The CRCNA, through Synod 2024, admonished congregations and classes acting or speaking publicly against the church’s teachings about what constitutes unchastity. Congregations working within the framework of the church’s teachings, such as a nine-congregation hospitality cohort formed in 2023, have been encouraged.

ICS president Kuipers told The Banner, “Although we are discontinuing our formal relationship with the CRCNA, we hope to continue to serve CRCNA parishioners” in several of the ways they had been, which include “supporting the professional development needs of K-12 Christian school teachers and administrators; … hosting conferences, seminars, and courses for lifelong learners; … (and) training leaders to take up teaching positions at CRCNA denominationally related educational institutions.”

“In addition,” Kuipers said, “we hope to serve those who find themselves disaffiliated/expelled/alienated from the denomination because of synod's recent decisions, providing them with an alternative space for dialogue, one that we hope will become salient to CRCNA parishioners because of the public stand we have taken.” He pointed to a course on gender, sexuality, and the Bible the school is offering this fall.

King and Postma noted that as the “official status of ICS is regulated by a 1977 decision that appointed synodical liaisons to certain ‘accredited agencies,’ … synod should be prepared to respond in some formal way” to the Feb. 18 communication. That would likely happen at Synod 2025, which will take place June 13-19 at Redeemer University in Ancaster, Ont. “It should be recognized,” King and Postma said in their statement, “that synod does not have any immediate authority over ICS or its decisions, and so cannot do more than express its sentiments about the changed nature of the relationship.”