Confession_Memorials

Memorials

Memorials are intended to state the position of the CRE on issues which cannot be addressed effectively in constitutional language, but on which some sort of constitutional statement is desired. Memorials are intended to state the position of the CRE on issues which do not rise to a confessional level, or on issues concerning which a confessional statement has not yet been made.

1. A local congregation within the CRE is not excluded from membership if it is incorporated, but churches are strongly urged to avoid such status. The Lord Jesus Christ is the only rightful Head of the church (Eph. 1:22), and incorporation blurs that truth in that a corporation is judicially a creation of the state (Matt. 22:21).
2. In questions about candidates for ordination, the local session is not judicially bound by the recommendation of presbytery. But when the local church has sought the wisdom of the broader church, agreement with such recommendations is strongly encouraged.
3. While a formal seminary education may prepare a candidate for ordination, our confederation strongly prefers ministerial training, under the oversight of local church elders, which maintains high academic and theological standards (including training in the original languages of Scripture), and yet at the same time incorporates an apprentice or internship approach within the context of the local congregation.
4. Our process of confessional revision is established so that the differences between our churches may be resolved over time by a careful striving for like mindedness. The process is established to work in a slow and deliberate fashion so that we will be less susceptible to various fads and winds of doctrine (Eph. 4:14).
5. All things are to be considered and conducted under the Lordship of Jesus Christ, including education, and especially the education of our covenant children. God has neither charged nor authorized the state to educate children within its civil jurisdiction. God has commanded parents to bring up their children in the education and admonition of the Lord (Eph. 6:4, Deu. 6:7). Given the importance and enormity of the task (Ps. 127:3-5, Deut. 6:7-9), and the impossibility of neutrality in education (Prov. 1:7, Matt. 12:30, Lk. 6:40, Col. 2:1-10, 2 Cor. 10:3-5), we do heartily affirm the necessity of educating our children in a manner that is explicitly Christian in content and rigor.

   Government schools are, by decree and design, explicitly godless, and therefore cannot be considered a legitimate means of inculcating true faith, holy living and a decidedly Christian worldview in the children of Christian parents. Parents who do not fully understand the indispensability of Christian education should be warmly received into membership. However, the leaders of Christ’s church must thoroughly understand and plainly teach the divine imperative to disciple our children, the divine prohibition of rendering unto Caesar those who bear God’s image (Matt. 22:20-21), the divine warning to those who cause their little ones to stumble (Matt. 18:6) and the divine promises to those who raise their children in faith (Deut. 7:9, Ps.102:28 Ps. 103:17-18, Prov. 22:6, Lk. 1:48-50, Acts 2:39).

6. The doctrine of creation lies at the heart of Christian living, deeply embedded within our assumptions about worship, knowledge, faith, celebration, beauty, and redemption. In recent decades, many conservative evangelicals have been moved by the science of the day to oppose the historic view of creation in six sequential days of common length, several millennia in the past. Instead, they hold that the bare ideas of creation presented in Genesis have little to do with the actualities of creation. Falsely pitting poetry and symbolism against history, they distort the text of Scripture and divorce ideas from the created order in ancient gnostic fashion.

   Science changes like the wind, and therefore its authority ought to pale beside the Spirit-led, traditional exegesis of creation in six days of common length. Intimidation by apparently more sophisticated non-Christian knowledge-priesthoods is not new. Over the centuries, God has regularly tested the Church’s courage to stand loyal to His revelation over against the ever-changing sciences of the day, those “profane and idle babblings and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge.”