By no means everything has been said about the church's confession concerning itself which has been set forth to this point.

The confession of the Reformed churches also de­clares that all who, having been ingrafted into Christ, are members of His body are called to become co-laborers with Him in the gathering of His church.

Speaking thus about the church the confession im­perceptibly shifts from the universal church to the local congregation. It accentuates that those who are gathered by Christ must themselves become ac­tive together with Him in gathering and building up His body, the people of God, the church which He bought with His blood.

Indeed, Christ gathers His church by His Spirit and Word. This He does entirely and alone.

But for this world-embracing work He enlists His own, all His own.

By the power and under the guidance of His Spirit and Word He wills to make them His co-workers. To that end He commands all His own to disseminate the Word, proclaiming the Gospel, so that many may be called out of darkness into light and in this way be incorporated into the congregation which is being saved.

Integral to Gospel proclamation — indeed an es­sential aspect thereof — is the doing of it by men and women in whom Christ has been formed, who are living epistles read of men and from whom the fragrance of Christ now flows forth. In short, these are people who by their life and conduct demon­strate the trustworthiness of what they preach.

More specially and specifically Christ wills to gather, defend and preserve His church by means of Gospel proclamation in the assembled congregation and throughout the world. With this in view He through the Spirit has bestowed special gifts for that work upon some members of the church. If the church truly lives, it will discern and acknowledge such gifts and call those so gifted to the ministry of the Word, the eldership, and the diaconate. To the ministry of the Word is indissolubly joined that of the sacraments and the prayers.

Wherever this takes place, Christ's church assumes a specific and very simple "organization." It then appears among men in an organized and in­stituted "shape" or "form."

Now three things are of the greatest significance for a church which so manifests itself among men.

These are the pure preaching of the Gospel, the administration of the sacraments according to Christ's institution, and the exercise of ec­clesiastical discipline for the punishing of sins.

Involved in this is the calling that such a church corporately and each member individually order their life according to God's pure Word, reject all things contrary thereto, and faithfully acknowledge Jesus Christ as the only Head.

Now the calling of every believer — of whatever "state" or "condition" he may be — is not to remain content to be by himself but to unite with that church which manifests these marks. All believers are under obligation to join themselves to such a church to preserve its unity, to submit themselves to its doctrine and discipline, to bow the neck under Christ's yoke, and so to make themselves useful for the edification of the brethren, according to the gifts which God has given, as mutual members of one and the same body.

Since this is the calling of all believers, it is self-evident that it belongs to their "office," which is to say, their duty, to separate themselves from all those who do not belong to the church and to unite themselves with this congregation wheresoever God has established it.

Now especially in connection with that calling to work together with Christ in gathering His church in obedience to the Gospel we find woefully much neglect, sin, and misery among believers. Much of this results from historically developed situations, wrong leadership, ignorance, stubborn tradition, and spiritual sluggishness.

On the one hand there is a refusal to live and labor together in one and the same ecclesiastical commun­ion where Christ expressly asks for this. Let us cite an example. In our small country (i.e. the Nether­lands; tr.) we see six or seven ecclesiastical organiza­tions which all claim to confess their faith in the words of the Three Forms (i.e. doctrinal standards; tr.), which by their very nature and purpose are forms of unity. For various reasons they refuse to let themselves be gathered by and together with Christ — unwilling to remove from among them­selves whatever violates true communion with Him — and so unitedly preserve the unity of the church and together bow under His yoke. To the contrary, some of these churches have even cast out many whom Christ without doubt acknowledges as His own.

But on the other hand we also see everywhere a striving after and defending of an "ecclesiastical unity" not rooted in the full Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Gospel of God's justification of the ungodly through faith in the one sacrifice of Christ.

The worst sin in connection with the church is, however, its degeneration into an assembly which arrogates to itself and its regulations more authority than it ascribes to God's Word, which fails to ad­minister the sacraments according to Christ's pre­scriptions but either adds to or subtracts from them according to its own opinions, and which relies more on man than on Christ, even persecuting those who live holy lives and rebuke the church for its faults, its covetousness, and its idolatry. When such sins set their stamp on an assembly which calls itself church, it has become a false church.

Our confession declares that such a false church can be "easily known and distinguished."

The sins which disclose it to be false cry to the very heavens and manifest themselves so clearly that there need be no hesitation to designate such a gathering as a false church.

A corollary, to be sure, is that a church may only then be disqualified as "false" when its sins clearly give evidence of this horrible, God-dishonoring character.