A Missing Ingredient in the Recovery of Reformed Confessionalism

As much as God’s frozen chosen may overdo the awkward and embarrassing features of evangelical piety, it is still true that born-again Protestantism and Reformed confessionalism have different practices that, in turn, nurture different kinds of piety. Arguably, the best example of this difference is the Lord’s Day. To be even more precise, the evening Sunday (second) service is a spiritual discipline that reveals the differences between evangelical and confessional piety. Not only is refraining from weekday employment (or related activity) basic to Sabbatarianism, but belonging to a church that calls members to a second worship service that features preaching, prayer, and praise is a characteristic of Reformed confessionalism that makes evangelicals uncomfortable. It is not that the second service lacks zeal or conviction. It is simply too much to ask of busy families and Christians with demanding careers.

Perhaps the most telling section of R. Scott Clark’s Recovering the Reformed Confession is his discussion of the second Sunday service. For him the decline of Sunday evening services among Presbyterian and Reformed congregations is an alien piety that has crept in to confessional Protestantism. As opposed to a Reformed devotion oriented to the Lord’s Day with a morning and evening service based on word, sacrament, and prayer, evangelical piety (or what Clark calls Quest for Illegitimate Reli­gious Experience [QIRE]) looks to personal experience rather than cor­porate spirituality as evident during Sunday worship. “At least one of the reasons that folk no longer attend the second service,” Clark writes, “is that they do not see the point of it.”¹² Here he observes that pietism and mysticism nurture a sense that the believer accesses God directly, without using means.

Over against this disregard for mediated relations with God, Clark goes on to invoke both biblical teaching and historic Protestant con­viction—namely, that God uses preaching and the sacraments to make himself known and to commune with his people. The antidote to QIRE, then, is to “restore the means of grace to their proper place.”¹³ Likewise, Clark underscores the proper understanding of confessionalism when he argues it is much more than recovering Reformed creeds and catechisms. An important aspect of Reformed confessionalism is understanding that true piety and spiritual growth come from the use of public means of grace rather than through private or personal experience. With such re­gard for the means of grace, a Sunday evening service makes perfect sense (unless you go with the old Dutch-American practice among Iowa farmers of three services).¹⁴

Notes

12. Clark, Recovering the Reformed Confession, 327.
13. Clark, Recovering the Reformed Confession, 329.
14. John J. Timmerman, “On Being Reformed (1): Whatever Happened to Sunday?” Reformed Journal (Feb. 1981): 13–15

Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from Remembering the Reformed Confession, published by the Heidelberg Reformation Association. You can get a copy of this book in our shop here.

RESOURCES

• Subscribe To The Heidelblog!
• Download the HeidelApp on Apple App Store or Google Play
• Browse the Heidelshop!
• The Heidelblog Resource Page
• Heidelmedia Resources
• The Ecumenical Creeds
• The Reformed Confessions
• The Heidelberg Catechism
• The Heidelberg Catechism: A Historical, Theological, & Pastoral Commentary (Lexham Press, 2025)
• Recovering the Reformed Confession (P&R Publishing, 2008)
• Why I Am A Christian
• What Must A Christian Believe?
• Heidelblog Contributors
• Support Heidelmedia: use the donate button or send a check to

Heidelberg Reformation Association
1637 E. Valley Parkway #391
Escondido CA 92027
USA
The HRA is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization

Post authored by:

• Darryl Hart

  

  D. G. Hart teaches history at Hillsdale College. He is has written biographies of J. Gresham Machen, John Williamson Nevin, H. L. Mencken, and Benjamin Franklin. He is an elder in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and lives in Michigan with his wife, Ann.

  More by Darryl Hart ›