The church reformed and always reforming

Last night I attended Ray’s “Equipping Seminar on Catholics and Protestants”. It was so good. I was reminded of how blessed we are to have Ray with us as our Associate Pastor at The Bridge. I am so encouraged by the quality of his character and the depth of his insight. I think anyone who attended the seminar probably felt the same! The topic (the historical and theological differences between Roman Catholics and Protestants) is timely for a number of reasons. Given the number of people who came, it obviously is scratching an itch. Many in our church are coming from Roman Catholic backgrounds, have Roman Catholic friends or neighbours, or have our kids in Roman Catholic schools. However, it was also timely because yesterday was a big anniversary.

January 21, 2025 marks 500 years since the “Radical Reformation”, a lesser known but nevertheless pivotal development in the broader Protestant Reformation. You may have heard this story from me before, but bear with me. In 1517, Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg, Germany, protesting the sale of “indulgences” by the Roman Catholic Church. This was the match that set a spiritually dry wasteland on fire, the reformation quickly spreading through Western Europe. In Zurich, Switzerland, a man named Ulrich Zwingli led the Reformed church. A huge statue of him still stands outside the church in Zurich today, with Zwingli holding a Bible resting atop an enormous sword. This is obviously the exact kind of statue I’m hoping to have of myself outside The Bridge someday, especially the giant sword. There were a group of young men in Zwingli’s church, however, who didn’t think Zwingli was going far enough. As they read the Bible (something that generally hadn’t happened among the “laity” before the Reformation, as Ray pointed out yesterday), they saw that much of their church, reformed though it was, didn’t line up with the Bible. They wanted to see a fuller restoration of the New Testament way of life. One major aspect of this was baptism as an act of response to saving faith- meaning, something done consciously by believers rather than done for infants based on a parent’s decision. When Zwingli and the other leaders in Zurich rejected this out of hand, these young men re-baptized one another along with others who similarly longed for renewal. The date that re-baptism happened was January 21, 1525 (roughly 8 years after Luther’s 95 Theses and 500 years ago to the day yesterday). This act is seen as the launch of the Radical, or Anabaptist (literally, re-baptizers) Reformation. It’s a movement that gave rise to the Mennonite denomination, as well as helped spark later Baptist and other believer-baptism denominations.

Here’s what I want to focus on today. Within 8 years of the onset of the Protestant Reformation, there was already a kind of settled status quo that another generation longed to see new life breathed into. You could see a lot of church history in the last 500 years as a similar cycle as what took place in 1517 and 1525. A desire for spiritual and theological renewal arises (notice the re-newal- not “new” theology, but a restoration of biblical thinking rather than reliance on calcified tradition). The comfortable, established denomination might occasionally embrace this, but more often resists it, ultimately prompting the need for a fresh movement of the Gospel. And you know what? I thank God for His grace expressed in this. Yes, the multiplicity of denominations can be confusing, and even more seriously, can speak to division in the body of Christ. Not every new church movement has been borne of God-honoring motives. Many have been driven by what the apostle Paul calls “the flesh”. But I also see that the Holy Spirit has not allowed the church to simply calcify, to repeat that word again. Instead, over and over, the Spirit has breathed new life into the church, He has given re-newed vision and re-newed passion to emerging generations, He has brought re-formation to a spiritually decaying people. 

A fairly famous saying in Protestant history is “ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda” (the church reformed, always reforming). It comes from a Dutch pastor in 1674 and I think accurately expresses the constant need of the church for renewal. We tend towards decay. We tend towards trying to keep things under our control. We tend towards comfort. But the Lord is always calling us further and deeper in Him. Paul writes in Philippians 3 about his own mindset as an example for all of us: “I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus” (3:12-14). He encourages us in Ephesians 5:18 to “be being filled with the Spirit” (a more literal translation of the verb there). Keep pressing on. Keep being filled with the Spirit. Always be re-forming, more and more, into the “whole measure of the fullness of Christ” (Ephesians 4:13).

May that be true of us. May it be that we would welcome the challenge, from the Holy Spirit, often spoken through emerging generations, to be re-shaped and re-newed in Christ’s image according to the Word of God. May we not grow comfortable and complacent and calcified. May we be reformed and always reforming.