This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
In October 1571, twenty three exiled leaders of the Dutch Reformed Church held the movement's first synod in the German city of Emden. They met abroad because persecution under Habsburg rule still barred Reformed congregations from meeting openly inside the Netherlands itself, so the church that would one day govern a nation was founded, out of necessity, on foreign soil.
The Synod of Emden did more than gather exiles. It established presbyterian church government for the movement, organizing individual congregations into regional classes answerable to one another, and it adopted the 1561 Confession of Faith, later known as the Belgic Confession, as the church's doctrinal foundation.
That foundation held. The presbyterian structure and the confession the Synod of Emden set in 1571 remained the Dutch Reformed Church's own government and doctrine for more than eighty years afterward, still in place when Jan van Riebeeck carried the church to the Cape of Good Hope in 1652.
What the Synod of Emden changed for the Dutch Reformed Church's spread was giving a persecuted movement a church order it could carry anywhere its exiles went. A gathering of twenty three leaders meeting in secret abroad produced the governing structure and confession that a colonial church would still be using when it crossed an ocean eight decades later.