The list of acronyms for small to mid-sized Reformed and Presbyterian denominations worldwide can be eye-watering. In ecclesiastical fellowship on this continent alone are the OPC, the PCA, the ARP, the URCNA, the RPCNA, the ERQ, and more.

For the uninitiated scanning a church website, the acronyms may feel like a code to crack. But for anyone in the aftermath of flood, earthquake, or war who is helped by one of these churches, the acronyms may go unnoticed altogether. Pressed by need, the unity among like-minded denominations becomes more apparent.

The OPC’s ecumenical relationships often include such offering—and receiving—diaconal aid. As David Nakhla, administrator for the Committee on Diaconal Ministries, looks at his travel calendar, much of it revolves around ecumenical relations. “This excites me,” he said. When churches assist each other in this way, Nakhla said, they’re living out what they affirm. “Don’t just tell me you love me, show me you love me.”

Responding to Disasters with the URCNA

One prominent example is the love that the URCNA has shown to the OPC in its disaster response. Rob Brinks characterizes the URCNA—that’s the United Reformed Church of North America—as a church with “a lot of generous, compassionate-hearted people, especially when it comes to disasters.” Brinks is administrative director of Reformed Mission Services.

The numbers bear him out. In the last ten years, over one hundred volunteers from seventeen URCNA churches have served on OPC teams.

David Nakhla first met Brinks in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in 2012, when Brinks was delivering a large trailer’s worth of supplies from Michigan to the affected area in the Eastern Seaboard. At that time, both men were a few years into their respective positions—Brinks with Reformed Mission Services and Nakhla with the OPC’s Committee on Diaconal Ministries. Their jobs both began with a focus on mission trips for teens, and grew to include planning trips also for church members, some with specialized skills, to provide aid, and preparing more broadly for disasters through acquiring equipment and supplies.

In 2017, when Hurricane Harvey landed in Houston and Nakhla was on-site weighing what OP congregations and their communities needed that the CDM could provide, he phoned Brink.

“He wondered if I could come down and help assess what was going on down there. I jumped on a plane,” Brinks remembered. They spent four days together, making plans. As the OPC’s disaster relief began to take shape, the URCNA “probably provided more funds and more volunteers for Hurricane Harvey relief than the OPC did,” Brinks said—something Nakhla is quick to share as well.

Directing rebuild projects comes naturally to Brinks. A bricklayer and carpenter by trade for twenty-seven years, Brinks was first employed by his father-in-law, primarily a brick layer, who “never turned any work down.” That taught him, in addition to bricklaying, skills such as roofing, installing drywall and insulation, and laying subfloor.

In 2017, after Hurricane Maria, Brinks led a skilled team to Puerto Rico. And when an OP family’s home in Midland, Michigan, was flooded in 2020 and the CDM offered assistance to rebuild it, the committee brought Brinks onboard to help oversee the project. He traveled to Midland from his home in Hudsonville every few weeks for months.

Brinks quotes an African proverb to describe the cooperative relationship: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go with a group.” He continued, “That’s how David and I feel. We want to go far. Both with the two of us, and with the relationship between our denominations.”

Aid to Ukraine through the RPCCEE

But the ecumenical relationships of the Committee on Diaconal Ministries goes beyond disaster response. “More and more, we’re seeing interaction happen in times of trouble, in times of stress,” David Nakhla said. That’s been the case with a sister denomination in Eastern Europe.

In mid-2024, Pastor Imre Szöke traveled from his home in Miskolc, Hungary, across the border into Ukraine to visit church members, to deliver medicine and food, and to preach to people whose able-bodied men are fighting, hiding, or gone.

“I’ve been to Ukraine about twelve times in the last five years,” Szöke said. “As soon as you cross the border, you feel in the air that there is war in the country. You won’t find many men on the streets, and everything is unstable.” Szöke is stopped frequently at checkpoints, where soldiers are looking to conscript Ukrainian men. As a Hungarian, he can pass freely.

Szöke is the pastor located closest to Ukraine in his denomination, the Reformed and Presbyterian Church of Central and Eastern Europe, or RPCCEE, which is in full ecclesiastical fellowship with the OPC. “The name of our denomination is so impressive, but the denomination is very small, just twenty churches in Hungary, Romania, and Western Ukraine,” Szöke explained.

At the beginning of Russia’s invasion, refugees streamed across the border into Hungary, and the congregation in Miskolc housed over a hundred of them. Some stayed for days, some for weeks, some for a few months. “As many people God sent here, he always provided. We never had to turn anyone away,” Szöke said. “He only sent as many people as he provided funds or other means to help them. That was an interesting experience.”

Funds are tight for this new denomination. It was founded in 1998, when several pastors, including Szöke, came out of the state-sponsored Hungarian Reformed Church, due to its liberalization. “We had no other options than to leave,” he said. They grew to twenty congregations and fifteen ministers in two presbyteries by 2024. The denomination is unique in Hungary, because it has a professing membership, a presbyterian church government, and is self-supporting. “Zero government money,” Szöke stressed. “This is the first time in five hundred years [for a Reformed church], because the state church is always government funded. It’s a miracle, in a sense.”

The reason why the non-government-funded RPCCEE was, and is, able to provide for those in need is due in part because of the generosity of the OPC and other fraternal churches. “The OPC gave very generously twice—that was a great help. We received other gifts from New Zealand, South Africa, and the United Kingdom, because our little church would not have been able to support so many people,” Szöke recounted. “Of course, our small denomination tried to help as much as we can because people gave very generously, but we were also able to get help through ICRC contacts.” (The denomination became a member of the ICRC—International Conference of Reformed Churches—just last year, with the OPC as its sponsor.)

Mercy ministry is also noteworthy for the RPCCEE because inside the state church there is no such thing as a diaconate. Szöke, who had met Nakhla through ICRC meetings, invited Nakhla to speak at a conference in 2023 in Hungary on what a deacon is and does.

The congregation continues to reach out to those in need. In December, they organized an evangelistic meeting for Ukrainian refugee families—mostly women and children, because the border is closed to men aged eighteen to sixty—in Miskolc. The families each received small gifts, and a Ukrainian-speaking pastor preached in their language. “We hope to repeat that,” Szöke said.

Another outreach endeavor, a summer English Camp, is receiving support from the OPC through short-term missions. The church hosts the camp for free each year, grouping the attendees by skill level. “I thought, why don’t we invite a team of young people to interact with the kids,” Szöke said. An OPC team traveled to Miskolc in 2024, and it was a big success, he said. The kids who attended loved the interactions with the American teenagers, and the Americans in turn had the opportunity to sightsee and learn. Another trip is planned for summer 2025. “This project is very important. It helps us and it helps the team to experience Christian fellowship,” he said.

As founding member of a denomination that’s only twenty-five years old and navigating a war on its border and the challenges of outreach in a secularized country, Szöke is grateful for the relationship with the OPC. “I am thankful for the faithfulness of the OPC. It is a great gift of God to be faithful for ninety years,” he said.

The author is managing editor of New Horizons. New Horizons, February 2025.