Cornelis Hendrikus van den Berg was born in Hilversum on 4 December 1933. After studying theology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, he became minister of the Reformed Church of Lollum and Waaxens in Friesland in 1959. Five years later he moved to Aalten, where he was inducted as a minister of the Reformed Church on 5 July 1964.
Aalten was to be his second and final congregation. Van den Berg remained a minister there until his death on 9 June 1995. With almost 31 years in the same congregation, he was associated with church life in Aalten for an exceptionally long time. During this period he worked alongside several other ministers in the large Reformed congregation. When he arrived in Aalten in 1964, there were four ministerial posts; because of the size of the congregation, a fifth was added in 1966.
His arrival coincided with a period in which the Reformed Church in Aalten was still growing strongly. A few months after his induction, the new Zuiderkerk on Ludgerstraat came into use. On 12 January 1965, the building committee handed the church over to the church council. Alongside the Oosterkerk and Westerkerk, the Reformed congregation now had a third church building. The new church was needed in part because two Sunday services had already been held in succession at the Oosterkerk for many years.
Church life changed considerably during Van den Berg’s three decades as a minister. From the late 1960s, women could also be elected as deacons and elders within the Reformed Churches. Aalten’s first female deacon was installed in 1970, followed a year later by its first female elder. At the same time, contacts with the Dutch Reformed congregation became increasingly close. From 1972 onwards, these included joint services, exchanges of ministers between pulpits and joint church council meetings. This rapprochement was an early phase in a development that would ultimately lead to today’s Protestantse Gemeente Aalten.
Van den Berg was active beyond the Aalten congregation as well. He held an administrative role at the Theological University of the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands in Kampen, which trained Reformed ministers. In the university archives he is described in 1994 as president-curator. The board of curators represented the churches in the governance of the theological institution. In the final years of his life, the Aalten minister therefore also held a position of responsibility at national church level.
That role also came at an important time for the university. In 1986, the former Theological College had officially become a Theological University. In the early 1990s, discussion then arose about the future of church-based theological education, partly against the background of the Samen op Weg process involving the Dutch Reformed, Reformed and Lutheran churches. The university in Kampen would ultimately become part of what later became the Protestant Theological University.
Meanwhile, Van den Berg simply continued as a minister in Aalten. He spent by far the largest part of his ministerial career there. When he arrived in 1964, the Reformed Church was still a large, strongly pillarised religious community with three church buildings. By the time of his death in 1995, secularisation, cooperation with other Protestant churches and changes in the position of the church in society had already been under way for decades. His long ministry in Aalten therefore spanned an important part of that development.
Cornelis Hendrikus van den Berg died in Aalten on 9 June 1995, aged 61.