Reformation celebrations and commemorations are generally dedicated to looking back - looking back to a time when the Church, deformed, became reformed, returned to right doctrine - to biblical truth.

By the grace of God the winds of reformation have blown at different times throughout world history, when God's people, prone to wander, were turned from a broad or divergent path, back to the path of obedience.

While our church commemorations and celebrations generally reflect on the times of Martin Luther or John Calvin, on doc­trines such as the five solas, or on more recent, and more narrowly historical events such as 1834, 1886 or even 1944, the times that perhaps need some reflecting on are our present day and age.

To get a sense of where Reformed churches and where we are today, and where Reformed leaders believe there needs to be a wake-up or reformation call, we've asked a number of Reformed leaders to offer their assessment in 500 words or less. The question we asked is: In what one important area do you think the Church of the Reformation needs reforming today?

Forest, Trees and Reformation Today⤒🔗

Our Reformed family seems to face challenges especially on two fronts today: a conservatism that often loses sight of the forest for the trees and a progressivism that often loses sight of the trees for the forest. On the conservative side, sometimes the "trees" aren't even significant doctrines or practices but the underbrush of accumulated traditions that we no longer think through ("that's the way we've always done it"). On the more progressive side, the laudable call to be "missional" is often set against those inter-generational, covenantal practices that take time to develop and inculcate. Both, it seems to me, tend toward a laziness that simply takes as its starting point the relatively recent past of the American experience (immigration, revivalism, fundamentalism, the church growth move­ment, pop-culture, pragmatism, consumerism, etc.) instead of grappling in a fresh way with its own deeper resources.

This has led us, I believe, to both sectarianism on one side and doctrinal indifferentism on the other. On the more conservative side, were often found arguing over minutiae ("the way we've always done it") while there is sometimes a growing ambiguity about the very nature of the gospel. We seem to lack the inertia to move out of our ghetto and pres­ent Reformed Christianity in an engaging, welcoming way to outsiders. We even find it difficult to know how to relate to sister denominations. (The Dutch don't understand the Presbyterians and vice versa, for example, so slight differ­ences of emphasis can easily become obstacles to ecclesiasti­cal fellowship and perhaps even unity.)

On the other hand, the current tendencies of popular evan­gelicalism are also being felt in our circles. But these aren't our only options. The Reformation reminds us that we need to be constantly refreshed by the suffi­ciency of scripture, of Christ, of grace and of faith, and the glory of God as the goal of it all. This big picture - the forest, can help us think through which "trees" we need to protect and how best to reach out to a lost and troubled world.

M Horton

Reformed Reproduction←⤒🔗

The Church of the Reformation needs fundamental reform in the area of reproduction. Reformed Christians must reproduce by making babies, by making converts, and by transmitting the faith effectively.

1. Reformed families must have more babies. As a father of seven children, I sometimes hear people snicker, "Haven't you heard of birth control?" In Scripture children are blessings from God and arrows for winning spiritual warfare. But Reformed couples don't want too many blessings; they don't want a full quiver. Many oppose abortion but still take their cue from Planned Barrenhood and limit themselves to one or two children. Meanwhile, Muslims and Mormons are having large families. If churches are graying and shrinking while mosques are bursting with youth, God is judging our folly. We must reform our thinking about child­bearing in light of Scripture and obvious demographics. Reformed leaders rightly emphasize the cultural mandate and the Lord's claim on every square inch of his world. But few emphasize that the cultural mandate begins with the blessing of multiplying offspring. The fruitful, not the sterile, will fill the earth and subdue it.

2. Reformed churches must make more converts. North American society frowns on evangelism, saying that all religions are equal and that nobody should try to convert others. Even some church leaders and scholars say that there are other ways to eternal life besides faith in Christ. Such thinking destroys evangelism and undermines orthodoxy. After all, if the gospel isn't worth telling to others, it's not worth believing yourself. The Reformation focus on salvation through Christ alone takes on new urgency as we resist the temptations of pluralism and universalism. Reformed churches need renewed confidence in Christ, renewed con­viction that there is no salvation without him, renewed compassion for the perishing, and renewed commitment to carrying out the Great Commission.

3. Reformed Christians must model and teach the full coun­sel of God. As we have more children, we must impress the full range of biblical truth upon them. As we called more unchurched people to Christ, we must teach them every­thing Jesus commanded us. We must guide children and converts in a healthy pattern of home discipleship, making time every day to pray, read Scripture, and sing God's prais­es at home. Daily worship, long a healthy habit of stalwart believers, is fading among busy, distracted people. Reformation Christianity focused on giving the Scriptures to ordinary people, not just to experts. To remain Reformed and to reproduce the Reformed faith, we need to cultivate patterns of home discipleship.

For Reformed Christianity to grow, we must have babies and raise them right, and we must reach unbelievers and teach them well. It’s almost embarrassing to state something so obvious, but the decline of Reformed churches in Europe and North America makes it a duty to emphasize the obvious. We must repudiate anti-child attitudes and anti-evan­gelism thinking, and we must reproduce the faith through large families, aggressive evangelism, and a daily walk with God.

D Feddes

Reform, Not Revolution←⤒🔗

At the risk of sounding too much like an academic theolo­gian (though that's my calling!), I would like to begin by noting that the familiar slogan, ecclesia reformata semper reformanda est ("a Reformed church is ever reforming"), does not stem from the Reformation of the sixteenth centu­ry. Though I have not been able to hunt down the origin of this expression, so far as I know no sixteenth-century Reformer used this language in their description of what characterizes a Reformed church. It likely derives from a later period in the history of the post-Reformation church, and expresses the obvious truth that the living church of Jesus Christ must ever stand under the scrutiny and search­ing light of the Word of God. Until the church is perfected and consummated, she may never assume that her life and ministry measure up to the perfect standard of the Scriptures.

I make this somewhat pedantic point about this slogan because it illustrates a weakness in the contemporary Reformed church in comparison to the Reformed church of the sixteenth century. The Reformers of the sixteenth centu­ry sought to "reform" the holy, catholic Christian church according to the standard of Scripture. However, they were not revolutionaries who in the process of reformation neg­lected to stand in the great tradition of the Christian church. By our modern standards, they were extraordinarily well-versed in the history of the church, in the ancient creeds and confessions, and in the theological discussions of prior centuries. They did not read the Scriptures like a modern-day "Campbellite" who acts like he is the first to read them. The Reformers read the Scriptures within the church and viewed themselves as those who were recovering much in the Christian tradition that had been lost during the middle ages. If the Reformed church today needs to be reformed, there is no more pressing need than just this: a recovery of a histori­cally-informed, catholic vision of the Reformed faith.

This past summer I read a great treatise of the Reformation, "The Old Faith," which Heinrich Bullinger wrote as a defense of the Reformation against its Roman Catholic critics. As the title of this work suggests, Bullinger's argument was that the Reformed faith was nothing other than the ancient, catholic faith of the Christian church. Indeed, Bullinger maintained that it was the same Christian faith that goes back to the earliest beginning of the Christian gospel, when God promised the first Christians, Adam and Eve, the coming of a Savior! According to Bullinger, the Catholic criticism of the Reformation needed to be turned on its head. The Reformation, not the Roman Catholic Church, represented a true recovery and expres­sion of the ancient faith of the church. The real innovators, who had abandoned many elements of an earlier consensus in the church, were the medieval Roman Catholics! My proposal for the reformation of the Reformed church today, therefore, is that it rediscover and become better acquainted with the great catholic and Reformed tradition in which it stands. Unhappily, too many conservative Reformed and Presbyterian churches today are being troubled by innovators, would-be reformers who haven't taken the time to become acquainted with the tradition they would like to change. Reformation by the standard of God's Word is always needed in the church. Revolution is not.

CP Venema

What We Still Need to Reform←⤒🔗

Our Hearts. We are a people who are proud of our soundness of thought. We soundly argue that sound thoughts ought to lead to sound lives. But we, like the rest of the church, are, despite having portions of our minds transformed, conformed to the patterns of this world. We are haughty, proud, and such, we know leads to falls. In our rightful pursuit of the crown rights of King Jesus, in seeking after His kingdom, we have neglected to pursue His righteousness, or worse, defined righteousness as the ability to quote obscure theologians from centuries past.

Until more of us can even name the fruit of the Spirit than can name the five points of Calvinism, we will continue to affirm the Confession, while confessing that we live like our neighbors. Until we stop sneering at piety, until we are more interested in dying to self than we are ascending to power, we will remain impotent. Until we learn that more important than a well-ordered worldview is a view of the world unhindered by the logs in our eyes, we will remain the blind leading the blind.

Reformation begins within each of us, as we pick up our cross and follow Him. It extends from there to the fami­ly, as we wash our lives with the water of the Word, as we raise His children in the nur­ture and admonition of the Lord. From there it reaches the church, where we together are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own special people. Only when we behave as sojourners and pilgrims will we then reach the world, that when they speak against us as evildo­ers, they may, by our good works which they observe, glo­rify God in the day of visitation. All His enemies will never be made a footstool, until we who are His friends first put to death our own flesh. That's why what needs to be Reformed is us...

RC Sproul

Recover What has Been Lost←⤒🔗

The notion Ecclesia Reformata, sed Semper Reformanda ("A church reformed, but ever reforming.") presupposes a church whose doctrine, worship, polity, and manner of life bears the clear impress of the Reformation. The accomplishments of the Reformation are known, conserved, and cherished. Only such a church may rightly be called ecclesia reformata, "a church reformed."

Such churches are rare today. Many churches of the Presbyterian and Reformed family have retreated from everything distinctive of the Reformation. Reformed doc­trines have been forgotten or repudiated. Reformed confes­sions have been supplanted by contemporary testimonies. The purity of Reformed worship has been corrupted by human innovations, both "traditional" and "contempo­rary." Reformed church polity has been compromised by abuses and defections. The Reformed way of life, shaped by the commandments of God, has been given up as a relic from a bygone era.

Consequently, it can be unprofitable or even dangerous to entertain thoughts of new ways to advance the goals of the Reformation. Unprofitable, because without a Reformed foundation there is really nothing on which to build; dan­gerous, because many of us are so ignorant of what we are doing that the result is not likely to be genuine reformation. We must therefore recover what has been lost. We must return to the landmarks of the Reformation. These land­marks include more than a handful of doctrinal points; in the work of the Reformers we find a concern for the whole counsel of God's Word regarding all aspects of the church's life and the lives of her members.

With regard to the church, the Reformation was a cam­paign on several fronts: doctrine, worship and polity, and piety. Reformed doctrine was formulated in the Reformed confessions, and we must be thankful for the current renewal of interest in these statements of faith.

Reformed worship was intended to be an encounter with God's Word at every point. Hence the content of every act of worship was found in Scripture, and not just the text of the sermon. Forms of salutation and benediction were taken from Scripture. Prayers were shaped by the promises and precepts of Scripture. The sacraments were administered according to the words of their institution found in Scripture. The praises of God were sung in the words of Scripture, using the divinely given and authorized "Book of Hymns" (Sefer Tehillim) included in the canon of Scripture.

In terms of biblical piety, Christians of the Reformation embraced and honored their calling to live according to all the commandments of God. They accepted the gospel promise with believing hearts, and labored to bring forth its fruit in their daily lives. They sought to bring themselves, their children, and their neighbors under the power of the gospel both intellectually and experientially. They aimed for "intelligent piety." They were prepared to live and even die for the Reformed faith. They shook the world they lived in and changed the course of history.

I would propose, therefore, as a step toward further refor­mation, to begin with the first things. Let us recover what we have lost through Reformed preaching and literature, and godly living, and then we shall have a foundation for others to build upon in time to come.

JR Beeke

Been There, Done That?←⤒🔗

Members of Reformed churches would likely not be surprised to know that John Calvin made worship one of the highest priorities of the Reformation, though it might cause a bit of a shock to learn that he ranked reform of worship above the doctrine of justification. The point is that most Reformed believers understand that worship is important to the gospel and that the Reformed tradition established a form of wor­ship that was different from Rome and other Protestants. The trouble is that agreeing upon the importance and singu­larity of Reformed worship does not yield services that are actually reformed according to the Word. For that reason, although the sixteenth-century corrected the church's wor­ship, services in Reformed churches today are in desperate need of reform.

The evidence for this conclusion comes readily from the practice of congregational song. Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) is as ubiquitous now as psalm-singing used to be. But the issue is not psalmody versus hymns, or even hymns versus praise songs. Instead, it is the ideology sus­taining CCM. On the one hand, many believe that contemporary music will be effective in reaching outsiders, even though the proclamation of the Word is supposed to be the means that God uses both to evangelize the lost and nurture His people. On the other hand, many judge the efficacy of worship on the basis of whether it is moving; since CCM is created precisely to nurture feelings of awe and inspiration, it appears to be the best music for worship. The trouble with this notion is that God is the subject of worship, not the worshiper, and so if the service is to be moving it should be so for the Almighty. I have not yet seen anyone argue that "Shine Jesus, Shine," is more mov­ing for God than "All People That On Earth Do Dwell," which is a good thing since such speculation could yield some theologi­cal whoppers. But such a comparison raises real questions about experience as the test for worship.

It does not help that North Americans have become so accustomed to popu­lar forms of music (mainly of the Top Forty variety) that they rarely hear other kinds. Contemporary popular music is inferior to most of the tunes (including chant) by which Christians have sung praise to God throughout the church's history. But to say that is to sound elitist and so shift the argument to aesthetics when the most compelling question for worship is "What does the Lord require?" And to ask that question is to show how hard the task of reform may be. It turns out that the worship wars are merely symptoms of a much deeper problem - namely, is Reformed Christianity chiefly a theocentric or a anthropocentric faith? For a long time the answer to that question was obvious to officers and members of Reformed churches. I am not sure that is still the case.

DG Hart

Reforming Demands Our All←⤒🔗

The Reformed church, always reforming, refers to the increasing growth in godliness that must follow believing reformed doctrine. If our truth is not unto godliness we are self deluded. The warning of the conclusion of the Sermon on the Mount is directed to such. Many will say, "Lord, lord..." They will be orthodox in their view of Christ but they never bore the fruit of the life of Christ.

Orthodoxy leads to orthopraxis. Our daily behaviour is structured within the great events of the Lord's accom­plished redemption. Paul in Titus 2 says, "Say 'no' to ungodliness and worldly passions, and ... live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age," (v.12). That is a moral exhortation, and you might find similar sentiments in other religions or in Stoic philosophy. But you will not find them in those systems of belief set in the context in which Paul sets them. The apostle looks back into recent history to the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. He says in verse 11: "For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men." In other words, grace has become incarnate in God the Son and has preached the Sermon on the Mount to men; that revelation of the divine grace teach­es us how to live. "It teaches us to say 'No' to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age." But Paul also looks ahead to another event in the future: "...while we wait for the blessed hope - the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ" (vv.11-13). Our eyes are on judg­ment and eternity, and so Christians are to live different lives, because of what God has done, once and for all, through Jesus Christ, and also because of what God promis­es that he will yet do through him.

We sing the great hymn, "When I survey the wondrous cross on which the Prince of glory died." Now that is Christian doctrine. We are affirming in those words that the cross of Christ is not the ordinary death of a criminal, but that it is an object of wonder and amazement because Jesus of Nazareth was the Prince of glory hanging on Golgotha. He died for my sins because he loved me. So how am I to respond? The hymnist says, "Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all." I daily reform my life. Henceforth my living (as someone saved by the Prince of glory's precious blood) is going to be different. I am not going to live for myself, but my soul and my life and my all is going to be for him, the one who died for me. The moment we believe in the cross work of Christ, the moment we are born again, we are going to change our way of life. We all have family members who are not Christians. There are people on your street who never darken the doors of a church. Many of those people, your family and neighbours, are simply grand people. They have splendid family lives; they don't fool around; they give themselves to caring for older parents and for their children. They are people of integrity in their jobs; they can hold a firm together by their dedication and they're greatly respected. We Christians also seek to live reformed lives as they do, but sometimes we feel they live more consistent lives than ourselves. They put us to shame. In what ways are we different as Christians? Or think of the righteousness of the Pharisees. In what spirit did the early Christians live so that their whole outlook was different from merely moral men?

• Firstly, our motives for living lives of self-denial are differ­ent from theirs. We live as we do in gratitude to God for what he has done for us in Jesus Christ.

• Secondly, our energy to go on denying ourselves, and turning the other cheek, and not retaliating is outside our own resources. It comes from a wholly different source, from our tapping the fulness of grace in the heavenly Lord Christ and in the indwelling Spirit of Jesus Christ.

• Thirdly, the instructions we receive in how we should behave come from a different authority. God has inspired the writers of Scripture and we accept this Book as the word of God. It binds our consciences to obey. It is an endemic part of our lifestyles to be submitting to the Bible.

• Fourthly, our purpose in living a God-fearing life is dif­ferent. We live to please our Saviour, and spread his king­dom, and honour our God by behaving in this new way. Men should see our good works and glorify our Father who is in heaven, said Jesus.

• Fifthly, our hope is different, that we are going to spend eternity with Christ, and those who have such a hope purify themselves in preparation for that goal.

The reformed church is always reforming.

G Thomas

Always Reforming in an Age that Hates History←⤒🔗

The term "always reforming" has often been used to pro­mote a casual and carefree attitude to the usefulness of the past; yet, ironically, perhaps the central difficulty which the Reformed church today faces in terms of her own self-pro­claimed agenda of being "always reforming" is the way in which she has unconsciously capitulated to contemporary society's dislike of history. We live in a world which for a variety of reasons tends to discount the past as inferior in all ways when compared to the present or even the future. American society is peculiarly prone to this temptation. Since the eighteenth century, with its iconoclastic views of tradition, intellectual life has been preoccupied with the new and novel as a means of critiquing and displacing the old and the outworn. Industrialism and the rise to domi­nance in the nineteenth century of the scientific paradigm for understanding knowledge brought in their wake a wholesale downgrading of the past and of previous ways of thinking and living. Then the modern creed of consumer­ism arrived, depending upon the constant reinvention of markets and products, on the ability to sell the public the idea that that which they bought last year, be it clothes, entertainment, appliances or whatever, is inferior to that which is available today. Further, the very concept of "America" as a set of values, not simply as a nation state, is a forward looking, eschatological one: the frontier, Manifest Destiny, the perennial optimism and hope in the bright future, the belief in the inevitable desire of the whole world, or at least the virtuous part of the world, to move towards the American future. Just listen to the rhetoric from politicians to see how often these kind of notes are struck, and then reflect on how this indicates the way in which in the American view of the world sees the past and even the present as, at best, mere preludes to future glories.

All of this is deadly in many ways to Reformed Christianity. Reformed Christianity depends upon a critical respect for the past that is neither idolatrous in seeing the past as perfect, nor nos­talgic in seeing the past as some age of innocence, nor icon­oclastic in seeing the past as having nothing to teach the present. The Reformed church is built upon her creedal and confessional heritage; it is against this background that the notion of "always reforming" needs to be understood. There are those who argue for a "respect" for the creedal tra­dition which sounds on the surface to be persuasive but when closely examined appears to partake of precisely the kind of consumerist relativism that is so typical of modern America: the church "buys" those bits she likes and leaves the rest unpurchased on the shelf as "out­moded". In the end, such people are not "reform­ing" the church, for their church credo has no con­tinuous content to be the object of such reform; she is merely reinvented time and again in the image of whichever theologian is flavour of the month. Then there are those who make no practical distinc­tion between the creeds and scripture itself, thereby representing a kind of uncritical counterpart to the first type and who can never be "reforming" because the church tradition not only informs the present; it exhaustively defines and limits the present, dooming the church to be a kind of reactionary anachronism.

But these are not the only options and we should not allow ourselves to be forced to choose between them. What the church that is "always reforming" needs to do is recapture once again an ability to appreciate the past, to see that theology is an ecclesiastical activity and that the context for understanding scripture must take account not simply - or even prima­rily - of the latest archaeological discoveries or scholarly trends. To do this would be to make the church's testimony utterly dependent upon the constantly shifting scholarly consensus. No: theological work in all its forms must also give appropriate place to history and to the church's historic testimony to scripture's meaning in all of her theological and ecclesiastical deliberations. To fail to do this and to claim such a failure as being true to the spirit of "always reforming" is specious in the extreme and nothing short of a tragic capitulation to the modern consumerist cravings for the new and the novel. The problem, of course, is that Western society is built upon precisely such cravings; and thus, to be always reforming requires the church to stand against the most subtle, insidious and, dare one say it?, most attractive influences and values of the modern world. With men and women, such things are impossible...

C Trueman