Welcome to Chickasha Reformed Church.
Let’s go ahead and address the elephant in the room. Do we really need another church in Chickasha?
Obviously, I think the answer is yes. Or else we wouldn’t be making this video.
Chickasha Reformed Church has not been started in order to compete with other churches in Chickasha. We’ve had enough of that sort of thing. Our hope for CRC is to minister to Christians in Chickasha, regardless of what church they attend on Sunday mornings. The last thing we want to do is steal members of other congregations. We want to partner with other churches in Chickasha to minister to the thousands of unreached people in our own community. And we hope these videos are a first step toward that goal.
Sure, that all sounds nice. But what is Chickasha Reformed Church, really?
We are Reformed.
And what does that mean? I’m glad you asked.
The New Dictionary of Theology states that Reformed Theology is properly defined by the Reformed Confessions:
…the Belgic Confession (1561), the Heidelberg Catechism (1563), the Second Helvetic Confession (1566), the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England (1562, 1571), the Canons of the Synod of Dort (1619), the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms (1647) and the Formula Consensus Helveticus (1675).
In other words, Reformed theology is old. And in a world where everything is constantly changing, where, for example, people don’t even know the difference between boys and girls anymore, it’s wonderful to be part of a tradition that is rooted in historic Christianity.
At CRC, we are aligned with the Westminster Confession and the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession.
However, the Reformed confessions make it very clear that Scripture is our sole authority for establishing Christian belief. The Reformers called this Sola Scriptura, or Scripture Alone. The confessions are not additions to Scripture, they are summations of Scripture.
Another basic idea of Reformed theology is that salvation is by grace alone. Scripture teaches us that we only love God because he first loved us (1 John 4:19). In Paul’s words, we are saved by grace alone through faith, and that faith is a gift which God gives us, not something we gain by our own works (Ephesians 2:8-9).
We’ll talk more about these ideas in the weeks to come. So stay tuned.
We are Family-Integrated.
We live in a time of division. Our whole world is being divided. And unfortunately, this division runs all the way down to the most basic building block of society: the family.
Parents are constantly pulled away from their children. Sometimes that is unavoidable, but the church should be the place where we try to bring families back together.
In Paul’s letters in the New testament, he addresses the children directly (Ephesians 6:1-3). His letters were read aloud in the Sunday church service, which means that Paul assumed that the children were there to hear the commands addressed to them.
Families that worship together, stay together. And yea, that might mean you’ll have to deal with a baby cry or two during the service. But that’s alright. The Psalms tell us that God ordained the cries of babies to frighten our enemies (Psalm 8:2). Every time a baby cries in a worship service, it’s a reminder to all the principalities and powers at work against us that the Church is still alive and kicking. In fact, the Church is just getting started.
We are interdenominational.
Many churches today are called Non-Denominational. Interdenominational churches are similar with a few differences.
Non-denominational churches separate themselves from denominational labels altogether (Baptist, Pentecostal, Presbyterian, etc.). Interdenominational churches embrace denominational differences, and yet they do not believe that these differences mean that we cannot worship together on Sunday mornings.
In our church we have members who grew up as Methodists, some as Baptists, some as Pentecostals. We have some who align with Presbyterianism or Anglicanism. But they have come to Chickasha Reformed Church because they believe there is more that unites them than divides them. We’ll be worshipping together for all eternity, so we might as well start now.
Unity isn’t always possible. Sometimes God breaks things apart, and when He does we shouldn’t fight against His will. At the same time, Christ prayed in John 17:20-21 that the Church would be one even as Christ and God the Father are One, so that the world might believe that Jesus was sent by His Father. We should strive for that kind of unity wherever possible, without sacrificing the primary doctrines of our faith. We should pray that Christ’s prayer would be answered, and that He would start with us.
We should strive, not only within our own individual churches, but with all the churches in our community, to be united to such a degree that unreached people in Chickasha would believe in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And when that happens, we should all celebrate, no matter which church doors they walk into.