Lee Christoffels was ordained in the Christian Reformed Church in 1970. He has been preaching ever since — in Worthington, Minnesota, where his congregation has held services in four languages and watched the community around it change week by week; in Edgerton, where he now serves part-time in retirement; and in pulpits across the region whenever someone needs a preacher on a Sunday morning. Fifty-two years in, he still loves it. This episode is a conversation with a man who has seen everything the CRC has been through since the 1970s and has something clear to say about what holds.

Lee traces the drift that has shaped the denomination's current crisis back to a single question: what is Scripture, and does it have final authority? That question surfaced seriously in the 70s, when debates over biblical infallibility began to fracture the clarity the CRC had inherited. From there, Lee argues, the line runs directly through the battles over women in office in the 90s to the tensions surrounding Synod 2022. The problems were never sudden. They were the slow consequence of decisions made decades earlier, each one loosening the anchor a little further.

The conversation turns on one of the most misused phrases in contemporary church life: semper reformanda — always reforming. Lee insists the historic qualifier was never optional. Always reforming according to the word of God. Reformation is not evolution. It is not the church adjusting to its cultural moment. It is the church being called back — daily, personally, institutionally — to what Scripture actually says and what the church of the ages has always confessed. As Jason points out, the original Reformers did not see themselves as innovators. They quoted Augustine and Irenaeus and said: we are standing where the church has always stood. It was Rome that moved. That same logic applies now.

The episode ends where every episode ends: this is Christ's church and he bought it with his blood. Wolves will come. Keep a close watch on your life and on your doctrine. Preach the word in season and out of season. Lee Christoffels has been doing exactly that for 52 years. It is worth hearing from someone who has stayed the course that long.

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