The evening before Synod will begin in full swing, and delegates and ministry leaders will take the mic, Synod 2026 came together for the Synodical Service of Prayer and Praise at the Covenant Fine Arts Center at Calvin University. Tim Blackmon, pastor of Second Christian Reformed Church in Grand Haven, Mich., the convening church of Synod 2026, led the service.
Synod is the annual general assembly of the Christian Reformed Church in North America. It is meeting June 12-18 in Grand Rapids, Mich.
The service opened with the reading of Psalm 150, a call to all believers to praise the Lord. Worship continued with the singing of “Holy, Holy, Holy! Lord God Almighty,” accompanied by a brass quartet and the organist from Second CRC.
Continuing his theme from Friday morning’s opening plenary, Blackmon preached on two more parables of Jesus: the story of the mustard seed and of the leaven, Luke 13:18-21.
These twin parables, two of the shortest parables Jesus ever told, reveal the unexpectedness of God’s kingdom.
“A mustard seed is a speck,” small and visually insignificant. “If the wind blows it’s gone.” It’s like a fleck of dust. “By any worldly measure it’s nothing,” Blackmon said.
Leaven is also small and ordinary. “Every home has it, and it usually sits somewhere in the corner, in the dark.” Leaven is typically something “easily overlooked.” Blackmon emphasized that Jesus begins here, because the kingdom starts small. It is ordinary and unimpressive.
“If we're honest, we prefer big.” Blackmon contrasted the kingdom Jesus preached about at the time to the Roman empire, a far bigger and more powerful kingdom by earthly standards. A mustard seed is incredibly small, but in reality the plant grows, “nearly 5,000 times taller than the seed it came from.”
“The seed doesn’t just grow. It detonates. It is a biological explosion.” The kingdom of heaven doesn’t fit the categories of this world, Blackmon said. What we see as empty space, the leaven, or yeast sees as “a highway for super influence … transforming cell by cell, trusting the exponential math of proximity.”
In this kingdom, “the hidden, dark places are the laboratory of God. He’s at work where no one is looking.
Using a word from philosopher Dallas Willard, Blackmon said the kingdom of God is incommensurable—the outcome is at such a radically different scale than the beginning, it can hardly be compared.
“The ratio is off. The efforts cannot come from mere human efforts.” It is radically disproportionate, and yet, “the kingdom is disproportionately powerful.” Small ends up being the hiding place for the greatest work of God.
Blackmon admitted that past synods’ “meticulous documentation of our exponential decline” gets to him. “It makes you wonder about the future, when all you have is a mustard seed. This is exactly why these two parables are so critical to us tonight.”
“These two parables give us confidence in the hidden work of God.” You can see the end even in tiny beginnings. “You can have confidence in the future because God works in the hidden little ways. … What if our greatest struggles are a divine strategy for getting us where we need to go?” This allows us to have confidence in God’s word, in people's prayers, and therefore, have “a healthy disregard for the impossible.”
Even when some say it cannot be done, or the challenge is too great, we can see “a landscape of possibility because God loves to redeem and work through the incommensurability of the Holy Spirit.” His power is always at work.
Blackmon closed by praying over the congregation, asking God to help us trust his quiet work.
Elders and deacons of Second CRC then served communion, and the congregation closed with the hymn, “Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise.”
Synod 2026, the annual general assembly of the Christian Reformed Church in North America, is meeting June 12-18 on the campus of Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Mich. Go to crcna.org/synod for the livestream, photos, reports, and a live blog of synod proceedings and decisions. Find daily news and our video Synod Recap at thebanner.org/synod.