The quagmire Douglas Wilson has gotten himself into and, more importantly, the reason so many Reformed men seem to be confused about his status, is the ambiguity of terms like “church” and “Reformed.”

“Reformed” is often used as a synonym for “of Calvinistic persuasion,” but it also means, “congregation or member of the Reformed church.” Because of this ambiguity, many men that become Calvinistic start to claim being Reformed, and both they and others often forget that that is not the same as “being a part of the Reformed church.”

Likewise “church” has many denotations, but here what we need to distinguish is (1) congregation and (2) “branch of holy catholic church in apostolic continuity and succession” i.e. what is commonly referred to as a “denomination.” But denominations cannot be created by individuals. They can only emerge by leaven and succession from the one holy catholic church. A church [sense 1] is COMPOSED of individuals, but it is not CONSTITUTED as such apart from being so established by church [sense 2].

With that orientation, there are different ways to answer the question, “why is Douglas not a member of a Reformed Church?”

1. Because after he became a Calvinist, he didn’t see the need to join one. He would have had to resign his position in the Fellowship, and presumably he was too heavily invested.

2. After he steered the Fellowship in a quasi-Calvinist direction, he could have tried to steer it further into becoming a particular congregation of a Reformed Church. Why didn’t he? A good critical biography will need to explore this question in detail, but here are some hypotheses to explore:

a. There was no “exact match” of an existing church [sense 2] to the idiosyncrasies of his local fellowship.
b. He himself would have had to be approved and ordained, and that would have been a blow to pride, because it would expose the fact that he was not already ordained.
c. It is a lot more fun to tailor-make your own denomination, carefully hedging in your own power, putting adaptability in all the right places, rigidity in all the appealing places, and so forth. If only one COULD create one’s own denomination!

Because of the heavy influence of Roger Williams in American thinking about ecclesiology, Wilson was able to “get away with it” both in his own mind and in the minds of many others. The funny thing is, Williams himself saw the fallacy of it eventually, and had the honesty to back off, concluding that there simply was no organized church with the ordinances left on earth. See here for more details.

3. His fellowship in Moscow was not constituted as a church [sense 1] since it was not an extension of church [sense 2]; therefore, it could not experience a “Reformed settlement” in contrast, say, to an Episcopal church that would desire to do this.

Why?