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The Barnabas Foundation, a financial advisory company in Orland Park, Illinois, with 168 client groups—most of them CRC-related—also has been criticized. But executive director David Vander Ploeg says that he and others simply carried out "due diligence" they owed their clients. Vander Ploeg says the foundation uncovered IRM's financial disarray during routine audits in the early 1990s, and the reduction of investments was simply responsible fiduciary management.

SETTLEMENT SCUTTLED: The sense of outrage among many small investors escalated when Christian Reformed Church officials opposed a Grand Rapids businessperson's offer earlier this year to buy IRM's obligations for five cents on the dollar. CRC officials say they felt they could find a better offer. But hundreds of investors who crowded into meetings in Michigan and California during the summer tied up denominational phone and fax lines to protest plans for court action and to demand acceptance of the deal.

Christian Reformed Church officials also came under fire for ignoring biblical guidelines that Christians avoid suing one another. In a July letter to investors, CRC's director of ministries, Peter Borgdorff, responded, "This is a tragic misuse of Scripture. Of course it is true that we should not seek to use the law in an adversarial way. There is, however, no biblical admonition prohibiting one from seeking the rule of law and the protection of the courts when such rule and protection are sorely needed."

In August, the court approved an 11-member creditors' committee to consider new offers for IRM. Its chair is Grand Rapids businessman Jay Mol, who says he is the largest individual investor in IRM. Since his appointment, Mol has been fielding anguished calls from hard-pressed individual investors and trying to decide which are merely facing "hardship," versus those who are in "dire hardship."

Meanwhile, VanderKodde is not worrying much about the fate of IRM. "I do a lot of volunteer work in hurricane and tornado relief," he says. "I'll keep doing that as long as the Lord lets me."

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November 16 1998, Vol. 42, No. 13