The church organised itself before it had a country to organise in. The Synod of Emden met in 1571 across the border in East Frisia, among refugees from Spanish rule, and its first article declares that no church shall lord it over another, which set the presbyterian pattern of the Dutch church against any return to a hierarchy. Its confessional standards were the Belgic Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism, and they remain so for the churches descended from it.
The dispute that made the church internationally famous began in the theology faculty at Leiden. Jacobus Arminius argued that election is conditional on foreseen faith and that grace can be resisted, and after his death his followers set out five points in a Remonstrance of 1610. The controversy became political, since the parties to it were also parties to a constitutional struggle in the young Republic.
The Synod of Dort, meeting from 1618 to 1619 with delegates invited from Reformed churches abroad, rejected the Remonstrance and issued the Canons, five heads of doctrine answering the five articles point by point. Those canons are the origin of the summary later generations learned by an English acronym that Dort itself never used. The same synod commissioned the Statenvertaling, the state Bible of 1637, whose language did for Dutch what the King James Version did for English.