Church Creek Presbyterian

This October we will celebrate the Protestant Reformation as Richard Cooper once again brings us Reformation Minutes in our evening service. This year’s Minutes will focus on historical events relating to John Calvin and The Institutes. In addition to this, Pastor Walters will be using book one of Calvin’s Institutes as a guide in our study of God’s Word. Here’s a little back ground to whet your appetite.
On October 17, 1534, notices denouncing the Papal Mass were posted during the night on the streets of Paris and other major French cities. By penetrating security, a notice was even placed on the door to the king’s bedroom. Although Francis I, the king of France, previously had relatively conciliatory policies towards protestants, he responded to this perceived threat by persecuting the French Protestants. Two years later, twenty-six-year-old John Calvin published the first edition of The Institutes of the Christian Religion. Although not originally setting out to do so, Calvin dedicated his work to the king as a defense of the protestants then under severe persecution. He claimed that the protestants were no threat to the king or the peace of the country. Calvin writes in his prefatory address to the king, “We… do not cease to pray for the full prosperity of yourself and your kingdom, although we are now fugitives from home.” Before the king’s death in 1547 the persecution grew to be responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of French Protestants.
From its prefatory address to its final book on the means of grace, The Institutes was no arm-chair theology penned in years of tranquil reflection. Rather, it was a defense of reformed theology and a statement of the system of beliefs for which reformed Christians were giving their lives. Calvin’s original purpose in writing was pastoral, aiming at the edification and growth of common believers. “I undertook this labor especially for our French countrymen, very many of whom I knew to be hungering and thirsting for Christ; but I saw very few who had been duly imbued with even a slight knowledge of him. The book itself witnesses that this was my intention, adapted as it is to a simple and, you may say, elementary form of teaching.” The practical goal of edification and the conviction of the author and original audience alike that this work expresses doctrine worth dying for make this work not only a theological classic but devotional and inspirational today and for generations to come.
Pastor Michael Walters