Media Coverage
Minister who acted like a father now at center of a storm
Sunday, July 10, 2005
By John Chadwick
The Bergen Record


No one ever thought of the Rev. Norman J. Kansfield as a rebel.

The gentle Midwestern native quietly worked for decades as a librarian and professor at several Christian colleges before becoming president of the prestigious New Brunswick Theological Seminary in 1993.

Gray-haired and 65, he's known to North Jersey pastors simply as "Norm" and admired for his erudition and friendly manner.

He seems the very model of Dutch Protestant probity.

But on the day of his daughter's wedding, Kansfield crossed a line.

His daughter, Ann, tied the knot with another woman at a church in Northampton, Mass.

Kansfield officiated.

Clad in his church vestments, he read with emotion from the Book of Isaiah about a God who extends his kingdom of love beyond Israel to cover foreigners and eunuchs.

But Kansfield hadn't sought permission from the Reformed Church in America to perform a gay marriage. The denomination to which he has devoted his life voted last year to define marriage solely as a union between a man and a woman.

"We realized in making the wedding plans that there might be some dustup," Kansfield said last week.

He was being optimistic. The June 2004 wedding provoked a furious backlash that has devastated his family, damaged his career and divided the denomination.

In January, the seminary refused to renew Kansfield's contract, effectively ending his tenure as president. Last month, delegates for the denomination's annual convention, or synod, put him on trial, voted to strip him of his title of professor of theology and suspended him indefinitely from the ministry.

Kansfield's actions and the uncompromising response from the denomination's general synod have exposed deep fissures in the Reformed Church, a mainline denomination of 280,000 that has seemed relatively quiet compared with the very public battles over gay rights that have rocked the Episcopal, Methodist and Presbyterian churches.

"For gay people in the church, it's a little bit like in the military - don't ask, don't tell," said the Rev. Daniel Ogden of the Reformed Church of Oradell. "As a denomination, we see the centrality of the family as the central focus of our ministry. The homosexual community is seen as on the margins."

But after Ann Kansfield's wedding, sharp lines are being drawn within the denomination.

In some quarters, the opposition to gay marriage runs so strong that even pastors who know and like Kansfield applaud his punishment.

"I know Norm quite well, and I think his father's love for his daughter overtook him," said the Rev. Fred VanderMeer of Third Reformed Church of Hackensack. "There are times when you just have to say no. I believe marriage is only between a man and a woman. There's no halfway. You either accept it or you reject it."

A Clifton pastor who voted to sanction Kansfield said there was no ambivalence in his church.

"I'd say in my local church, there was no diversity of opinion whatsoever," said the Rev. Edward Suffern of Hope Reformed Church. "They were universally supportive of [the discipline] and universally concerned about his actions."

But others said the punishment was extreme.

"I think it made it difficult for good people to stay in church," said the Rev. Allan Janssen of the Community Church of Glen Rock. "I think there was a concerted effort to punish, and I find that unfortunate and not worthy of the church."

And some admire Kansfield for bringing a difficult issue to the forefront of a reluctant denomination. His actions produced results: Besides voting to punish Kansfield, the delegates approved a call for a denomination-wide dialogue on homosexuality and approved hiring a full-time facilitator to assist with the dialogue.

"Here it is 2005, and we haven't really had a dialogue on how inclusive the Christian community should be," said the Rev. Steve Giordano, a longtime Bergenfield pastor who moved last year to Long Island. "If you look at the example of Christ, he never excluded anyone. It was a dramatic and almost sacrificial effort by Norm that brought the message to the front burner."

Last week, Kansfield and his wife, Mary, were packing their belongings, preparing to leave the elegant 139-year-old president's house in New Brunswick.

Shocked by the punishment meted out by the denomination and stung by criticism that Kansfield had forsaken the Bible, the couple is moving to a rural home in Pennsylvania, where Kansfield plans to fish and contemplate his next move. He said he may seek a new trial next year.

"The hurtful part for me was receiving these very angry responses that said, 'Haven't you ever read your Bible?'" Kansfield said in his soon-to-be vacated private study, where the walls are lined with bookshelves that stretch to the ceiling.

A tall, stocky man who speaks with the exacting precision of a professor and the mild manner of a chaplain, Kansfield said he thinks about leaving the denomination. Yet he can't bring himself to sever the connection that has defined his life.

"I've never lived apart from the Reformed Church," he said. "Sixty-five years is a long time to give up on something because one general synod takes a negative view of something I've done."

The Reformed Church in America is one of the oldest mainline denominations in the country, dating back to the 1600s and the arrival of Dutch Calvinists. The denomination has long had a strong presence in New Jersey, with about 30,000 adherents and 130 churches.

Kansfield and his wife grew up in predominantly Dutch communities in the Midwest, gravitating at an early age to their families' Reformed congregations. They met at Hope College, a school affiliated with the denomination in Holland, Mich.

Neither of them see the lesbian wedding as a break with the Christian values they learned while growing up in church-run institutions.

"We don't understand the unwillingness of parents to stand by their children," Mary Kansfield said. "This is a deviation from what we were taught."

Indeed, Norman Kansfield said his decision to perform the wedding was an act of parental love, not a theological statement.

"It was a wedding gift I could give my daughter," he said. "And I have a stack of letters from pastors who say, 'I can understand why you had to do it.'"


ecclesia reformata, sed semper reformanda