Looking Up – Professing Our Faith
Dear Hope Church Family,
This Sunday, just as we did last Sunday, we will welcome new members into our covenant family through profession of faith, membership vows, and the sacrament of baptism. To mark and accentuate this momentous occasion, we will add a feature into our liturgy: the recitation of a Christian creed. Creeds are a vehicle to publicly profess our common faith as believers – sometimes employing historic forms like the Nicene or Apostles Creed and sometimes using catechism questions and answers.
Why do we do this? What’s the point? What’s the value?
Professing our faith in worship forms us and enriches us in several ways:
Creeds cement when we are:
In the present, we connect to the past testimony of Christians who believe the same wonder-inducing, true Gospel of Jesus Christ, and we steward those riches towards the future of believers who will come after us to trust and proclaim the same bedrock truths.
Creeds galvanize who we are:
The historic creeds we use in worship encapsulate the depth and breadth of distinctive Christian beliefs that mark us out from secular society.
When we profess our faith together as believers in Jesus, we are cutting across the grain of culture that implores us to discover or create a truth about ourselves and pledge ourselves to fidelity to our truth at all costs.
We find our truth in the truth about Jesus and his church.
Creeds give us the bigger picture of who are together:
“When the church is summoned to rise and profess its common faith, it does so not in a cacophony of simultaneous personal testimonies, but in words that belong to the community of saints, including both the living and the dead.” – Ronald Byars
“Many are hungry for a sense of heritage and communion. Creeds articulate what our forefathers and foremothers in the faith believed and have passed down the ages to us. Creeds connect us to a Christian past, helping us realize we belong to something much greater than just what’s happening now.” – David Naugle
In a world infatuated with personal identity and recognition, the creeds recited corporately remind us of the countercultural value of belonging to the family of God and being citizens of Christ’s Kingdom.
So this Sunday, we will once again take the words of a Christian creed upon our lips in worship, and I am praying that we will be empowered to live our present place in the long line of God’s family, to remember who we are because of what Christ has done for us, and too savor the joy of doing all of this Christian life together in His name.
Grace and peace,
David