28 articles from 24 issues, 1998 to 2026
Right belief or right worship? Doctrine or doxology? Drawing on Chesterton, Athanasius, and Calvin, Richard Burnett presents orthodoxy as a costly, moving equilibrium, never stuffy and never still, that has carried the church through every storm.
The Ten Commandments aren't just a moral code; in Reformed worship they sit at the foundation of the service itself. Dorn traces how Bucer and Calvin built liturgies around them, and asks whether contemporary congregations have lost something by quietly setting them aside.
What makes a Reformed church Reformed? Small begins with Peter DeVries's wry novelistic portrait of a Calvinist boyhood and works toward a serious answer: shared Protestant emphases, yes, but with distinctive accents on Scripture, election, the priesthood of all believers, and worship as covenant response.
The opening worship service of the 2021 Theology Matters conference. Richard Gibbons preaches the welcome sermon, setting the theological frame for the gathering and inviting attendees into the conversation that follows.
A year into the pandemic, Burnett surveys what Western churches have learned about themselves: the limits of technology, the costs of physical absence, and the question every pastor is now sitting with: will the people actually come back?
What clergy wear in worship has changed in his lifetime, and Taylor isn't quite sure all the changes are improvements. Working from Lorimer's nineteenth-century painting of a Scottish Kirk ordination, he reflects on the theology of vestments and what gets lost when the gown disappears.
Online communion split Presbyterians worldwide during COVID. Taylor lays out why his own congregation declined the option even when their denomination permitted it, taking Paul's warning about the body of the Lord seriously enough to insist the body matters.
Nixon learned the limits of video calling during a long-distance courtship: the format is a poor substitute for actually being together. She brings that lesson to bear on the COVID-era church, where Zoom worship and live-streamed sacraments couldn't fill the space the gathered body of Christ left behind.
Lectionary preaching protects congregations from their preacher's pet agendas. Lectio continua, preaching consecutively through books of the Bible, was the Reformed alternative recovered from the Fathers. Old answers the practical questions raised by anyone trying to do it now: where to start, how long to spend, what to do with hard texts.
Late medieval worship was overrun with what Calvin called theatrical trifles. Ray follows Calvin's polemic into its sources and stakes, and asks what 'theatrical' looks like in modern Reformed worship that has long since stopped policing itself by the standard Calvin set.
Before the Reformation, Catholic worship had no congregational singing and no music in the language people actually spoke. Mills traces how Luther and Calvin recovered the song of the gathered people, and asks whether contemporary churches are quietly drifting back toward the silence the Reformers fought.
The PCUSA's Book of Order has long carried six 'Great Ends of the Church' that mark out what every Presbyterian congregation is for. Small reads them slowly, asks whether contemporary church life still recognizes itself in them, and offers a defense of orthodoxy that is anything but defensive.
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