Join the creedal revolution

Worship is not defined by its proximity or assimilation to the wider context. Instead, worship from its earliest manifestation in New Testament times has been marked by protest against the wider culture...

This aspect of Christian worship finds expression in various forms. The public reading of God's Word is one. God's Word comes to us from outside, confronts us with God's revelation, and challenges all human attempts to reach him by human effort or to remake him in human image. When the Word is read in the congregation, the claims of the world (whether the wider world "out there" or the inner world within ourselves) are repudiated and the claims of God are asserted in opposition to them.

Singing praise to God is another area of countercultural rebellion in the worship service. The world around us cries out to have our worship, the devotion of our hearts, to be praised by us for what it is and what it can do. Singing praise to God is denying praise to the world and thus denying the world's claims upon us.

Corporate reading of a creed or confession is a third aspect of this kind of rebellion. Because the great creeds and confessions summarize so wonderfully important aspects of the Bible's teaching, not least the sovereign kingship of God, which relativizes the claims to kingship of all creatures, their recitation is an act of defiance and an insult to creaturely arrivistes. As soon as the congregation says "We believe in God..." all other pretenders to the divine throne have been put well and truly in their place. Neither sex nor money nor power is God; there is only one God, the God whom the creed proceeds to describe.

Far from being a staid piece of outmoded tradiationalism, such a corporate action is a devastating blow against the cultural conformity that demands the church be just like the world, accept the same criteria of relevance, truth, and aesthetics as the world, and offer a gospel that accommodates at least some of the claims of the world. The recitation of a creed makes it very clear that, whatever the attittude of the heart of any individual church member, the church as a whole looks to God as king, not some creaturely pretender.

-- Carl Trueman, The Creedal Imperative (pp. 155-56)