Privileged, Reorganised, Divided, and Merged Away

The position of the church in the Dutch Republic is often misdescribed. It was the public church, the only one that could worship openly and the one whose ministers were paid from public funds, but membership was never compulsory and Catholics, Mennonites, Lutherans and Jews were tolerated in practice while excluded from office. It was privileged rather than established in the English sense, and a substantial minority of the population never belonged to it.

In 1816 William I imposed a new organisation on the church by royal decree, replacing the synodal structure inherited from Dort with a centralised administration answering to the state. Two secessions followed, in part over that and in part over doctrine. The Afscheiding of 1834 and the Doleantie of 1886 each took congregations out, and the two streams later combined into the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands, so that Dutch Calvinism spent the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a family of related bodies rather than one church.

The main body ceased to exist as a separate church in 2004, when it joined with the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands and the small Evangelical Lutheran Church to form the Protestant Church in the Netherlands. A minority that would not accept the union constituted itself as the Restored Reformed Church. The Dutch Reformed Church should not be confused with the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk in South Africa, a separate body with its own history.