Thread: Church Planting á la Dordt

Scott Clark mentioned in passing in his new book "Recovering the Reformed Confession" what the Synod of Dordt approach to organizing a new church work was. I don't have the book at hand right now (on vacation!). It was somewhere in the latter quarter of the book I believe. Does anyone know what I am talking about? And more importantly, does anyone have a reference for this (since I believe Clark does not reference anything). Thanks.

Hi Sebastian,

Thanks for the great work you're doing in Heidelberg!

The passage of which you're thinking might be this one:

We are evangelical in another sense, in that we have always believed in the free or well-meant offer of the Gospel.93 This has been true since the sixteenth-century Reformation, in which, e.g., the Genevan Calvinists sent dozens of church-planting missionaries to Roman Catholic France and elsewhere to preach Christ to the nations. The evangelical spirit of confessional Reformed theology, piety, and practice is evident in the Canons of the Synod of Dort (1618–19).

This is from p. 219, ch. 6 (The Joy of Being Confessional"), of Recovering the Reformed Confession.

This info brought to you by the Bookstore at WSC where you can order your copy of RRC for only $17.36 (or just less than 5 venti-sized Starbucks lattes - where will those lattes be in a week? Well some of it will go to your middle. The rest.....(this is a family board). Where will RRC be in a week? In your hands, on your shelf, and in your heart and mind!.

One place to learn more about the Genevan missions is to check the standard biographies such as T H L Parker's John Calvin: A Biography. One could also read through his letters, or the minutes of the consistory. There are articles/chapters, I think, that address this topic also.

I remember reading that Gisbertus Voetius was the first to develop a "comprehensive Protestant theology of missions."

Joel R. Beeke and Randall J. Pederson, Meet the Puritans, p. 803:

While pastoring in Heusden, Voetius revealed his heart for missions. He was influential in persuading various trading companies to send missionaries with the Dutch ships to distant parts of the world. Moreover, as H.A. Van Andel points out, "Voetius attempted not only to sketch the outlines of a solid theology of missions, but he was also the first who attempted seriously to give missiology a legitimate scientific place in the whole of theology" (De Zendingsleer van Gisbertus Voetius, p. 19). It is remarkable that the greatest Dutch scholastic of Reformed orthodoxy developed the first comprehensive Protestant theology of missions.

On the missionaries sent by John Calvin into France and Brazil, see these threads:

Geneva and the Coming of the Wars of Religion in France (1555-1563) -- Robert Kingdon
Calvin's church planting endeavors
missionary books
Jean Crespin
Calvinism on the Frontier, 1600 - 1660

No, I found it now. It's on p. 341. RSC says:

"If we wait until everyone is theoretically Reformed before they are practically Reformed, the praxis will likely never arrive, and without Reformed praxis the theology and piety will likely never develop. This is why the Synod of Dort instructed ministers to conduct services, 'even if the pastors should be forced at first to preach before a very small audience, tot eh point of preaching to no one but their own families. If the pastors give an example with their own families, and consistently encourage others to do likewise, in particular those committed to the Reformed faith, there can be no doubt that, in the course of time, men will end up coming to these sermons regularly.'"

(I was wrong, RSC does reference the Acta of the Synod of Dort.)
What struck me here was that here we have a Reformed philosophy of church planting in a nutshell. Ever since thinking about church planting (and now doing it), I have wrestled with what a Reformed church plant should look like in distinction to evangelical church plants. What practical bearings should our commitment to the ordinary/ordained means of grace have? Certainly, this is where the Reformed have sometimes been ridiculed as starting a worship service by themselves (or with their fmailies) and then hoping the Lord would miraculuously bring the crowds into the church building...
Since we live in different ("post-Christian") times, especially in Western Europe, we cannot put a premium on the worship service as THE primary means of evangelism - so the reasoning goes. And there's some truth to that! What's the use of a clearly confessionally Reformed worship service, if people don't know about it and don't ever set foot in a church building? However, I was glad to see that even the Dutch Reformed gave us a rationale for starting (!) a church plant with regular worship sooner rather than later!
(As an aside, maybe that's why even today the Dutch don't think it's a church if it doesn't have a building with a steeple on top and a massive pulpit inside...! )

That is a great quote; and philosophy. Thank you for digging that up and posting it.