What Canadian Reformed Christians believe, and how they worship
The Canadian Reformed Churches are a federation of more than seventy Reformed churches founded by Dutch immigrants in 1950, holding to the Three Forms of Unity, with two services every Sunday, catechism preaching and a strong commitment to Reformed schools.
2 Canadian Reformed churches in Fergus
What Canadian Reformed Christians believe
The Canadian Reformed Churches hold the Bible to be the infallible Word of God and confess it according to the Three Forms of Unity, the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism and the Canons of Dort, together with the Apostles’, Nicene and Athanasian creeds. What marks the federation is how seriously the confessions are treated as living documents. Office-bearers promise to teach nothing against them, young people profess their faith in their terms, and preaching is expected to stay within them.
Its founders came out of the Liberation of 1944 in the Netherlands, when Klaas Schilder and others were deposed for refusing to be bound by a synodical teaching that baptized children are to be presumed regenerate. The Liberated churches taught instead that God makes a real promise to every baptized child and a real demand of faith and obedience, so children are addressed as members of the church who must believe, not as outsiders awaiting conversion; and they held that a synod may bind consciences only with what Scripture and the confessions teach. Church life still carries this stamp: the covenant promise, the call to live thankfully, and a wariness of rules beyond the confessions.
Members also take the Belgic Confession’s articles on the true church seriously: believers must join a church where the gospel is preached purely, the sacraments administered rightly and discipline exercised. That gives a strong sense of belonging and, historically, some reluctance to join broader evangelical ventures.
Worship: what a service is like
Congregations meet twice each Sunday, morning and afternoon, and members are expected at both. The liturgy is fixed: a votum (“Our help is in the name of the LORD”), God’s greeting, singing, the Ten Commandments in the morning, prayer, Scripture reading, a sermon of thirty to forty-five minutes, prayer, offering, singing and blessing. In the afternoon the Apostles’ Creed is confessed, often sung, and the sermon ordinarily works through the Heidelberg Catechism one Lord’s Day at a time, so the whole faith is preached through roughly once a year.
Singing is from the Book of Praise, the federation’s own songbook, with all 150 Psalms set to the sixteenth-century Genevan tunes and 85 hymns. The organ leads; there is no band, no choir and no projected songs, and visitors often find the Genevan melodies unfamiliar. Families sit together; there is no children’s church, though many buildings have a cry room. Infants of members are baptized soon after birth with the liturgical form, and the Lord’s Supper is celebrated several times a year; guests from churches the federation recognizes are admitted after speaking with the elders beforehand. Dress is neat and on the formal side, though nobody is turned away for wearing jeans.
How Canadian Reformed churches are organized
Each congregation is governed by its consistory of elders with the minister, and served by deacons who care for the needy. Elders visit every household regularly and exercise discipline. Churches are grouped into classes, two regional synods and a general synod every three years; the Church Order, adapted from Dort, keeps authority local and treats broader assemblies as gatherings of the churches for matters they share. Ministers are trained at the Canadian Reformed Theological Seminary in Hamilton.
Young people attend weekly catechism classes taught by the minister from about age twelve until they make public profession of faith, usually in their late teens or early twenties. Families commonly send their children to parent-run Reformed schools; in Fergus these are Maranatha Christian School and Emmanuel Christian High School. The federation has more than seventy churches, most in Canada and a few in the United States. Locally there are congregations at Fergus North, Maranatha in Fergus, Elora, Guelph and Arthur.
Compared with Reformed churches
The Canadian Reformed Churches are one of the four federations described on the Reformed page and share the Three Forms of Unity, infant baptism, the Church Order of Dort and government by elders with the other three. With the United Reformed they are closest: the two are in ecclesiastical fellowship and have discussed union. With the Christian Reformed Church the differences are more visible: the CRC ordains women to all offices and has a broader worship style, while the Canadian Reformed have not changed on these points. With the Free Reformed the difference is one of emphasis, the Canadian Reformed stressing the objective promise of the covenant and the Free Reformed the personal experience of conversion. Beside churches outside the Reformed family, they stand out for two services, Genevan psalms and catechism preaching.