The question of whether women could hold ordained office split the CRC synod for years before it settled on an answer, and the answer it reached was to stop insisting on one answer at all. An earlier synod vote opening the offices to women was itself overturned in the early 1990s, a reversal a contemporary evangelical press report described plainly as a setback for advocates on both sides. In 1995, synod tried a different approach. Rather than rule that one reading of Scripture was correct, it recognized officially that there are two different perspectives and convictions on the question, both of which honor the Bible as the infallible word of God, and it let the offices of elder, deacon, minister of the word and commissioned pastor open to women, but only where the local classis and congregation chose to allow it.
That local option, not a synod-wide mandate, is what actually changed practice. Restrictions passed the same year kept women from serving as synod delegates or synodical deputies until 2000, and delegates could not be forced to vote against their own conscience on a woman candidate. Adoption spread unevenly: by 2000 eighteen of the forty seven classes had declared the word male inoperative in their own church order, opening ordained office to women locally, while others did not. Three women were ordained in 1996, the first year the option existed; twenty five years later, in 2021, the denomination marked its two hundredth and two hundred first women pastors, describing the path as still not an easy one for female candidates passed over for certain positions because of their gender, a local option rather than a settled denominational consensus.