In Going Dutch in the Modern Age, Wood has offered a detailed theological study showing the key steps that Abraham Kuyper followed as he attempted to create an ecclesiology that considered the fundamental importance of an institutional church, as well as the significance of a voluntary commitment to the corporate body in an organic church. Wood carefully demonstrates that over the course of his pastoral ministry, Kuyper moved from a “sacramental ecclesiology” within a public church to a “free-church ecclesiology” that supported a “believers' church ecclesiology” (25).

This impressive study of Kuyper has wider implications beyond one man's struggle to organize and lead a protestant denomination. Despite a European agreement in 1648 tying state churches to the monarchy (Cuius regio, euis religio), the Dutch Republic (1581–1795) did not allow any particular church official status, even though the Reformed exercised the most power. In post-French revolutionary Europe, when many states began rejecting or reducing the power of monarchies, the Netherlands founded one in 1815. King Willem I established an official connection with the Dutch Reformed Church, restricting the ability for doctrinal discussion or dissent within the church; with this, the era of free churches was born.

Kuyper wanted to keep the role of the institutional church central in modern society since it offered common grace to the nation, curbing evil and promoting the common good. Wood shows that in his early years as pastor Kuyper could not separate the institutional church, which represented the Dutch nation, from the organic church, the inner essence and the mystical body of Christ, where the truly redeemed belonged. He accused those who broke with the church as reducing the importance of the church as organic. He found that the European Réveil circumvented the church, and placed individual conversion and piety at the forefront. Rather, for Kuyper, the church was not a gathering of individuals but a “Mystical Body, which had a two-fold mystical organic bond established by God—first with Christ the head, and then between the members—virtually identical to Kuyper's organic church” (66).

In 1866 Kuyper found himself in a deep crisis, when, after a series of events, he formed a new denomination, the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerken, and then in 1892 amalgamated with other bodies to form a larger Gereformeerde Kerken in Nederland, with its own Free University in Amsterdam. While this was a necessary move to protect purity and Reformed doctrine, it did not fit with his ecclesiology. Wood makes an excellent point in showing that, “to leave the Netherlands Reformed Church, Kuyper needed to delegitimize it, and that required deemphasizing the church's institutional presence” (85). But Kuyper's free church was different than many others. While he developed a believers' church ecclesiology (voluntary membership, personal experience of the Spirit), what separated this from the growing number of evangelical churches was infant baptism, since it required no individual commitment (on the part of the infant), but, rather, was grounded in the sacramental element and covenant of the organic church. In Kuyper's theology, baptism is a “preparing grace highlighting the priority of the church, yet it did not forget about faith; the goal of the sacraments was to make faith possible, not to obviate it” (127). The believer's church was no longer public, an involuntary collection of all members of the Dutch nation, but private. “Private does not necessarily mean or imply . . . individual or individualistic . . . A church as a religious communion can be private and still be a corporate body” (157). Kuyper's believer's church did not abandon the role that the volkskerk played in reaching all members of the nation. He believed that God's work of redemption and restraint of evil was through Common Grace.

What may be missing in Wood's discussion of Kuyper's mature ecclesiology is his significant work outside the church. In 1872 Kuyper extended his influence through a national newspaper De Standaard, in 1874 he was elected to parliament, and in 1879 he founded the Anti-Revolutionary Party. It is also significant that he worked with Roman Catholics in the schoolstrijd to ensure that separate schools had state funding without restrictions on curriculum, and with this his party and the Catholics formed an alliance from 1888-1913. Finally, it is important to note that Kuyper became Prime Minister (1901-1905), with his determination that the state should also conform to Christian democratic principles (see James Bratt, Abraham Kuyper: Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2013]).

Wood concludes that in Kuyper's mature development of his “believer's church” ecclesiology he avoided what he saw as the errors of the day. First, he corrected the individualism born in the Réveil and the evangelical movement that heighted individual choice, which greatly reduced the corporate nature of the church as the body of Christ and its administration of the sacraments. Secondly, he avoided rationalism that neglected the sacraments, and thirdly, he avoided the opposite extreme of Roman Catholicism and Lutheranism that “made the church the mediator of grace and wrongly taught that the sacrament worked regeneration” (133). Lastly, he avoided his own earlier error in thinking that baptism was, in his words, “‘administered in the hope of subsequent regeneration whereas Calvinists have always taught that Baptism of infants should be administered on the presumption that regeneration has preceded’” (133). Thus, “regeneration came by a hidden work of the Spirit rather than by public ritual” (134). Kuyper's ecclesiology, essentially Dutch neo-Calvinism, can be seen as a new, revolutionary, and radical position in Wood's opinion. The new was “an ethos that oriented his adjustment of Calvinism to the social situation of the nineteenth century” (141). His ethos was tailored for a religiously plural society: while the church administers particular grace, it should not be marginalized; it also has a public role. The new responsibility of the state was to foster common grace without discrimination and allow freedom of conscience.