My family and I had driven cross-country in late May, a couple weeks after school was out, settling closer to our roots in the Pacific northwest. It no longer seemed right to attend convocation, a celebration of Reformed teaching, when we were in the process of embracing the Catholic faith. Nor could I have guessed, prior to my fourth and final year at seminary, the reason for my absence: that only a week before convocation, I’d knocked on the door of the local parish church and announced to the surprised priest and secretary our intention to seek communion with the Roman Catholic Church.
I never could’ve guessed during those years that I’d be absent from my own convocation that I’d instead be five thousand kilometers away, shovel still smelly in the garage, hollering at the kids so I could watch the ceremony on live-stream from our dinner table. That was where I’d completed my Master of Divinity program in April of this year, having planned for the last six years to be a Reformed pastor. Meanwhile, mid-September back in Hamilton, Ontario, is convocation time for the Canadian Reformed Theological Seminary, a small but lively seminary tucked away in a neighbourhood on the west mountain.
Mid-September here in British Columbia’s West Kootenays is the season for shoveling bear droppings from your backyard, droppings full of the ripe plums you didn’t get around to harvesting in time (there’s a proverb in there somewhere…). “They shall ask the way to Zion with their faces thitherward.” – Jeremiah 50:5 (KJV). He and his wife, Arenda, and three children hope to be received into the Church at Easter, 2017. This meant that the final step was to return to the bosom of the Church the Reformers had left, to seek her not with the hardness of hostility and prejudice, but with the softness of a child turning to his mother in loving obedience. He found that the Reformed faith remained strong insofar as it held to its Catholic roots and insofar as it was worked out according to its own principles it weakened and became unorthodox. In his fourth year of seminary, Jeremy discovered that the search for the fullness of the Christian faith that had brought him from the Vineyard back to being Reformed was incomplete. Sometime later, he decided to pursue the ministry, and completed a Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of the Fraser Valley in 2012 and a Master of Divinity at the Canadian Reformed Theological Seminary in Hamilton, Ontario in 2016. He drifted from his Reformed roots in his early twenties, spending a few years in a Vineyard church but ultimately returned to the Reformed tradition. Jeremy de Haan was born and raised in the Canadian Reformed Churches, a denomination grounded in the Dutch Reformed tradition.
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