CALVINISM:  For some people it's just another irrelevant "ism."  For others it's the theological equivalent of a cuss word.  While still others enjoy pinning it to their chest in a desperate attempt to be taken seriously.  But in my experience, Calvinism, is either misunderstood by those who loathe it or irrecoverably reduced to little more than a wilting tulip by many who claim to love it ( there's more to Calvinism than the 5 points)

As a pastor, people often seek to engage me in theological conversation and sometimes the kind of  misplaced loving or loathing of Calvinism referred to above rears its ugly head.  From my point of view these misplaced expressions can almost always be traced back to one simple root - neither the lovers nor the loathers have actually taken the time to study their subject.  To put it another way, they haven't really taken the time to discover and develop their theological foundation. 

​In terms of my Systematic Theological position I am a Calvinist - it is a pure and simple fact that I nether try to hide nor flaunt.

Why am I a Calvinist?
 
Because I took the time to investigate Calvinism and other systematic theological positions so as to assess them in light of the Bible.  In my case this investigation eventually gave birth to a Calvinist.
 
To state it negatively, I became a Calvinist not because I was trained in it from childhood (I wasn't).  I became a Calvinist  not because I had friends or family who were Calvinists (I didn't and they weren’t).  I became a Calvinist not because I started my theological training at a Calvinistic Bible College (I didn't).  I became a Calvinist not because I was desperately seeking a guru to follow other than Jesus (I wasn’t).  
 
I became a Calvinist because I actually took the time to read Calvin in his own words and to weigh his teaching in light of the Bible.  And so morning by morning on a big British double-decker bus between the village of Kirkintilloch and the city of Glasgow, I read Calvin's Institutes, and by the end of that winter I became convinced that the things I read were true and profoundly helpful in so far as they accurately represented the teaching of the Bible. 

I highly recommend this sort of exercise to anyone willing to read and wanting to grow in their Christian understanding.  Try it and see if you don’t experience a similar result.  

​I am fully convinced that if a solid theological foundation can be discovered within a public bus on its way to Glasgow, Scotland it can be discovered anywhere.
 
A helpful and easy to read encapsulation of Reformed teachings can be explored here .

My point in mentioning  all of these things is to stress that I have greatly benefited from the Young Restless and Reformed Movement – and not because I came of age in a church that was in any way sympathetic to the teachings of the Reformation…  but because I compared the teachings of the Reformation with the Bible and found that they made sense.  


But now, perhaps, you're asking, what is this movement about?  What are its hallmarks?  How can I identify a church shaped by the Reformation?  Below I offer some key distinctives that may be helpful. 
( adapted from http://www.federaltheology.org/sof.htm )

Americans are addicted to the latest fads and trends.  

We are always on the lookout for the next big thing and eager to cast off yesterday’s styles as old fashioned, irrelevant, and out of date.  In such an environment it is incredibly important that the Church embraces its innate transcendence while avoiding the temptation to rely upon trendiness.  To be trendy today is to be irrelevant tomorrow – just ask Vanilla Ice.

Secondly, historical continuity matters because bible believing Protestants have a more solid historical foundation than any of the other branches of Christianity.  Yes, the Protestant Reformation did not begin until the 16th century but it was at its heart a movement to return the Church to her historic, biblical, and apostolic roots. 

Moreover, historical continuity matters because the Bible teaches that God’s redemptive purposes have been and are being worked out in history.  The God of the Bible is involved in an ongoing, hands-on relationship with His creation and has been since He first spoke it into existence.  Therefore a knowledge of redemptive history as well as a willingness to let this history inform our activities in the present is of tremendous importance for the modern evangelical church.

4.    The Dragon of Confusion

My friend Alistair Begg often says, ‘the main things are the plain things.’  There is great wisdom in that, you know.  And yet, how confused we often are when it comes to the elements of our worship services.  Someone wants to do a liturgical dance.  A group of young people want to do a drama.  Here comes a man with a gift for whistling.  A cat-lady wants the pastor to add a pet-blessing element to the service once in a while.  A group of old timers suggest a concert of Southern Gospel quartette classics for Lord’s Day worship…. And on and on it goes…

What is a poor pastor to do?

He simply must point his people to the Bible…  to the main things…. to the plain things…

He should patiently ask his people, “What were Christian worship services like in the Bible?”  And together they can discuss the following points:

The Christians sang the Bible.

They read the Bible.

They preached the Bible.

They prayed the Bible.

They administered the sacraments in light of the Bible.

And the God of the Bible was pleased.

“Why don’t we just stick with that too?”  The pastor can ask.  In so doing the pastor is helping his congregants slay the dragons lurking in the shadows of corporate worship.

 In a bygone day children came to church dressed like little adults.  They sat in pews alongside of adults.  They sang the same hymns as adults.  They were expected to be quiet, attentive, and reverent just like the adults.  Of course, this arrangement required patience and charity on the part of the congregation... but I think this model made the Church of a bygone day much stronger than the average contemporary congregation. 
  
Today in many parts of the church world the expectations we have of children are abysmally low.  Is this because American Christianity’s view of children has been shaped more by American culture than by the Bible?  I’m not sure.  Whatever the reason, the result is that we no longer dress children like adults, we don’t ask them to sit alongside of the adults, and we certainly don’t think they are capable of singing the same hymns as adults….  And so we simply whisk our little prepubescent blobs of sunshine away to something called Children’s Church. 

            Is this wise?

            Is this helpful? 

            More importantly, is this practice Biblically defensible? 


 Yes, I know that children are children and they can be restless and even disruptive during church services but is this sufficient reason to amputate children from Christ’s Body?

 At All Souls Church we believe it is NOT.  We believe children are to be welcomed into the Body of Christ just like adults.  Yes, children do need to be instructed at their level, and we have special times set aside for this, but these times do not interfere with the corporate worship of Christ’s Body. 

 Here are a few reasons for our rationale:

I’ve sometimes heard preachers talk about children as being “the future of the church.”  But that is only half right…  Surely they are the present of the church too.  Therefore, if they are in the church shouldn’t they be ministered to as part of the church.

Someone from the peanut gallery objects, “But kids don’t have the understanding to get Big People Church.”  This may be so, but since when have intelligence tests ever determined who we let into our services?  Should the fact that children have the understanding of children be held against them?  By this reasoning we could argue that the senile, the mentally retarded, or even the person who lacks a high school diploma should be excluded…  but this would obviously be wrong.  If there is any place on earth where the “weak and foolish” should be accepted with open arms, it is the church.

I contend that the church of the future depends upon children being ministered to in the church of the present.

By this I mean that what happens in a typical Lord’s Day service needs to become part of a child’s regular experience.  Yes, I understand that this is easier said than done.  Kids are rambunctious and church is…   well…  strange.  That is to say, what happens in church each Lord’s Day is NOT normal.   Pastoral prayers, public scripture readings, corporate singing, sermons, etc., do not typically happen outside of a church setting and therefore MUST become normalized in the lives of our children.  How does this happen?  I can think of no better way than by simply giving children regular exposure to these things – i.e. having them sit through church services.

Unless children grow up in an environment where it is normal to see a man read the bible and where it is normal to listen to a sermon, they are very unlikely to see these things as normal when they become young adults.  We’ve all heard teenagers dismiss church services as “weird” and perhaps we’ve wondered why.  But wouldn’t you think church was weird too if you had spent the totality of your formative years being whisked away from normal Church to a world of flannel graphs, vacuous songs, and moralistic stories?  I would…  and for a long while I did, thanks to Children’s Church.

I contend that church must be normalized in the minds of children through their regular attendance of and participation in Lord’s Day Worship Services.

The Lord has given His Church regular means of grace for their collective benefit.  According to ch.21 of the Westminster Confession of Faith: 

“The reading of the Scriptures... sound preaching…   singing of psalms…  receiving of the sacraments instituted by Christ, are all parts of the ordinary religious worship of God.”

Elsewhere we read that these things are done “to put a visible difference between those that belong unto the Church, and the rest of the world.”  As far as I can tell this must include both the old and young of a given congregation.  The Lord has placed no age limits on the means of grace.

I contend that the regular means of grace are for both big people and little people and are to be received together as one body.

For Americans, segregation is a painful word…  that’s why I deliberately use it here.

America has a dark history of racial segregation and thankfully great strides have been made to right the wrongs associated with it.  Sadly there were even many churches in the past who were segregated along the “color-line.”  But as anyone with a modicum of Biblical knowledge knows, the Bible lends no support to the idea of racially segregated congregations.  It’s bitterly ironic therefore, that we Christians are not quite as quick to recognize other forms of segregation.   Surely age segregation within the Church has no more biblical warrant than racial segregation and I would contend that it is equally as destructive to the Church because it fragments the body of Christ.  Surely, the old and the young are members of one body – Christ’s body.

I contend that God has designed it this way and that we need each other. 

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