Longtime Lyndenites reflect on how the Christian-dominated culture has evolved throughout history.
On the first day of Advent, the four-week Christian season of preparation and anticipation leading up to Christmas, the foyer of Lynden’s oldest church congregation displays a board reading, “What do you fear?”
The United Methodist Church was founded in Lynden in 1870, about 30 years before the influx of Dutch settlers in the area and a century after the movement began. In the current building, erected in 1964, stained glass branches into a tree beyond the pulpit.
Lights and candles sit on a table in the front, symbolizing the light of Christ, which Pastor Jeannette Conver says is how to see through darkness and fear. Throughout Advent, churchgoers will light them.
The “small but mighty” congregation rises and stands several times to sing hymns, and Conver jokes, “I won’t make you do jumping jacks.” Then, she tells a story of the angel visiting Zachariah and how he was at first scared.
With one of the highest number of churches per capita in the nation, Lynden is widely considered the “bible belt” of Western Washington. Some say the 16,000-person town has around 42 churches, but even generational Lyndenites and church elders don’t know for sure.
Robert Woodyard, pastor of the First Christian Reformed Church, said there are at least 30 church buildings, and several other churches meet in other spaces.
Marlin Hendricks, a Christian Reformed Church elder, said it’s sort of like the story of the stranded guy on the island. A rescuer comes, and he shows him his grass hut he sleeps in. The rescuer points to a second grass hut and says, “what’s that?” The stranded guy says, “that’s the church I attend.” The rescuer points to a third grass hut. “What about that one?” The stranded guy says, “That’s the church I attended before.”
A town built on scripture
In the late 19th century, Nooksack leader Selhameten Yelewqaynem — commonly known as Lynden Jim — offered his land in North Whatcom to the Methodists to build a school, which opened in 1892. Diminishing class sizes and funding led to the Stickney Indian Boarding School closing in 1914.
The turn of the 20th century brought citizens of Dutch descent, with a second surge after World War II. The Dutch Reformed churches they established went on to dominate the Methodists, Lutherans, Catholics and Baptists in Lynden’s religious life. Dutch settlers founded the first Christian Reformed Church in 1900 and both Lynden Christian School and Ebenezer Christian School 10 years later.
A common misconception, said Allen Likkel, former pastor of the Third Christian Reformed Church, is that these new citizens migrated directly from the Netherlands, but most of them were born in America.
It wasn’t until the 1980s, with street murals, windmills and decorations, when Lynden looked particularly Dutch.
“It’s kind of faux Dutch, all that stuff you see downtown,” Likkel said. “None of that existed when we grew up.”
The Dutch influence made the Reformed tradition a monolith among churches. While in recent decades the Christian scene has become more diverse, today, there are six Christian Reformed Churches in Lynden.
First Christian Reformed Church was the first Dutch Reformed Church in Lynden and the first Christian Reformed church west of the Rockies, Woodyard said. In 1925, when the First Christian Reformed Church filled up, it started the second one and then a third in 1936. Bethel and Mountain View Christian Reformed Churches started in the 1950s, and Sonlight Christian Reformed Church began in the 1970s.
“The Dutch were leery of becoming too American,” said Ron Polinder, a member of Sonlight Christian Reformed Church whose family first moved to Lynden in 1901. “And so the Dutch language was used in the church services.”
Each new Reformed church was a tad more American, he said, and they started speaking English as the new churches formed.
In Likkel’s summation, as far as theological differences, the Christian Reformed Church tends to look at the Bible in four chapters: Creation, Fall, Redemption and Restoration. The Reformed tradition emphasizes all four chapters equally. They have a strong creation theology. The church is community-focused, and the world belongs to God.
Generally, he said, revivalist and evangelical churches focus more on the two chapters in the middle: sin and redemption, “Jesus and me.” It’s a bit more individualistic in its approach.
According to Woodyard, in addition to Lynden’s six Christian Reformed Churches, there are two Reformed Churches of America, two United Reformed Churches, a Protestant Reformed Church, a Netherlands Reformed Church and an American Reformed Church.
This compares to Lynden’s two Baptist churches. Bellingham, for example, has seven Baptist churches and three Reformed.
The Reformed Church of America is the oldest Dutch Reformed denomination, coming to America in the 1620s. The Christian Reformed Church came in the 1850s with another wave of Dutch migration.
Likkel said that the second Dutch migration found that, with 200 years’ separation, the first didn’t speak Dutch anymore. And so, they started a new denomination closer to their Dutch roots.
In Lynden, “as separated denominations with different history and heritage, there is little relationship between the churches,” Woodyard said. “Nothing bad, no ill will, just different tribes with slightly different culture or reasons to exist.”
Life inside the belt
Lynden retains a culture of religion outside the church, regardless of denomination or even attendance, Polinder said. The streets are dead silent on Sunday mornings.
There is a correlation between people who belong to a membership organization like a church and belonging to other membership organizations like serving on a community board, said Jeremy Dorrough, a member of North County Christ the King.
The rise of “folk religion,” of people claiming to be spiritual over religious, leaves out that community component, he said, which can make people more vulnerable to radicalization. Historically, all people were more inclined to participate in both church and civil organizations.
With Lynden’s expansion, the old timers have seen a clear cultural shift from when they were young.
“Lynden was far more conservative in that day,” said Ron DeValois, local historian and member of the First Christian Reformed Church. “It’s much more diversified. There were things that were never done on Sunday when I was growing up that are commonplace today. Nobody mowed their lawn on Sunday. All the stores were closed on Sunday. Nobody went out to eat at restaurants on Sunday as I was growing up.”
While the number of Dutch people has persisted, the percentage has gone down significantly.
“It used to be, guys like us, we knew just about everybody,” Likkel said. “It seemed like that. But now with 16,000 people, I go up town, I don’t hardly recognize anybody. The culture is shifting away from a common Dutch presence.”
About a fifth of students in Lynden attend the Lynden Christian School.
“You look for Dutch names in that directory, I bet it’s a third,” Polinder said. “You got (names) like Darwin there.”
However, Dorrough, who did not grow up in Lynden, still sees the Dutch influence.
“There are things moving to Lynden that popped out to me,” he said. “One I share often is people wanting to know what family you’re a part of, like what your last name is. There is still residual old Dutch and old families; they want to know if you’re a Polinder or a Hendricks or a Likkel or Brim.”
In the last two decades, Lynden’s population has surged from 9,000 to over 16,000 with the largest growth in nonwhite residents being among those identifying as Hispanic or Latino.
With about 500 people attending St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Lynden and a total of 3,000 Catholics in the county, it is now one of the largest denominations.
Lynden’s Catholic influence began in the 1890s when a pastor, Father Jean Baptiste Boulet, walked from Bellingham to serve individual families in Lynden, Sumas, Columbia Valley and Clipper in a two-month rotation. In 1910, a small church on the corner of Depot and Grover streets became the location for Sunday Mass until it moved to its current location in 1962.
However, the Lummi people were the first to practice Catholicism in Whatcom, said Olivia Phillips, Whatcom Catholic regional director of operations. The Lummi Nation had a Catholic priest since the 1830s.
Prior to the first church building erected in Whatcom County in 1861, there was a “mud structure” along the Nooksack River for practicing Catholics, she said.
Today, Lynden’s public school is about 30% Hispanic. Most of those families are Catholic.
While the growth of the Catholic Church locally is likely correlated to the Hispanic population, there is a shift nationally toward Catholicism, Phillips said.
“We also see people of all ethnicities coming to the Catholic Church, either who were previously culturally Catholic, who want to come back into the church or who are discovering Catholicism for the first time. So, trends we’re seeing within Lynden, I think, are similar nationally of what we’re seeing.”
According to the U.S. Religious Census, the number of practicing Catholics increased from 2010–2020, while in Washington it dropped by 0.9%.
An even greater shift has happened not because of migration but because of ideology, Dorrough said.
“Megachurches,” Protestant congregations with thousands attending each week, more than doubled in the 2000s.
The spirituality-over-religion shift has likely been a factor leading to the rise of the megachurch, Dorrough said, which are less traditional and more palatable to a newcomer. According to the U.S. religious census, “nondenominational” is the fastest growing denomination in recent years, second in size now only to Catholics.
“When we’re talking about all the Reformed churches in Lynden, that’s what, maybe 600 people? 700 people? So just take North County (Christ the King), it’s twice the size of that entire cohort of people,” Dorrough said.
The gradual proliferation of denominations has led to less collaboration in Lynden, Hendricks said. About 20 years ago, the Lynden Ministerial Association brought church leaders from different denominations together, and there is nothing like that today.
“Maybe you’d get all the Christian Reformed pastors in the same room, depending on whether they signed a certain document or not, but now there is no collaboration,” he said.
While there is less collaboration, there is less judgment about the other denominations too, Polinder said, compared to when he was a kid. Church-goers are still looked upon favorably by other church-goers, regardless of denomination.
Other factors in the modern era have become much more important than denomination, Dorrough said, such as political beliefs, ethnic identity, economic lifestyle and others.
According to Likkel, politics have divided churches in the last decade as much as spiritual ideology. Politics have influenced how and which churches collaborate.
“People determine how to be a Christian through a political lens, and that never happened before for us,” he said. “That’s what I would call religion Americana.”
— By Sam Fletcher
Also read in Salish Current:
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• “How local chaplains attend to patient care,” Sept. 18, 2025
• “Lynden art center to prioritize inclusivity,” June 2, 2025
• “‘Lynden’ documentary prompts conversations on diversity, division,” Aug. 23, 2024
• “Commentary, Pluralism, respect and the common good,” Aug. 6, 2024