The Alliance of Reformed Churches

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The Ecumenical Institute at Bossey

Dr. Setri Nyomi, general secretary, World Alliance of Reformed Churches

The advantage of spending time at the Ecumenical Center in Geneva is that many organizations and staff people office here. For Monday and Tuesday we had a room reserved and various leaders and staff people came into the room for their briefing to our delegation.

I have already mentioned the General Secretary of the World Council of Churches and the General Secretary of the Lutheran World Federation. Before meeting with the General Secretary of the Alliance of Reformed Churches, the representative of LWF assigned to disaster relief in Haiti spoke with us. To date the ELCA has raised $4.6 million. Your contributions matter! The LWF fill focus now on shelter (both temporary and permenant). With the rainy season approaching and the potential for hurricanes, shelter moves to the top of the priorities, except that it competes with sanitation. Port au Prince is the largest city in the world with no sewer system. The septic tanks and cesspools have created a have created a dangerous situation.

Before leaving the US I asked Rev. Paul Miller, a retired Presbyterian Pastor, to give us a summary of the reformed church tradition. I have included his work below. Thanks Paul for helping out. We walked around Calvin's Church late one night after dinner, but unfortunately had no opportunity to visit. We found the brief time with the General Secretary of the Alliance of Reformed Churches informative and helpful. All mainline denominations face similar challenges both in the US and globally, with the global south remaining more conservative and the US churches experiencing internal strife.

I'll hand this off to Paul.

I suspect that both Ulrich Zwingli and John Calvin would be totally amazed to realize that their modest beginnings in Switzerland in the 1520’s (Zwingli-Zurich) and 1530’s (Calvin-Geneva) have produced a world-wide family of 75 million embodied in over 250 church denominations around the globe. This body is now known as the Alliance of Reformed Churches (Presbyterian and Congregational), a body which took from 1875 to 1970 to coalesce, largely and initially to integrate the work of global mission.

Ulrich Zwingli was a fiery preacher, initially ordained a priest who quickly became committed to reform. His impact in rallying the grass roots Catholic congregations in Zurich and immediate environs preceded Calvin’s work by about fifteen years. John Calvin who was born in France in 1509, trained as a lawyer at the University of Paris, came to Geneva in 1535 at the invitation of William Farel and stayed until his death in 1565 save for a three year forced exile to Strassburg, France 1538-1541. If Luther is the “heart” of the Protestant Reformation, Calvin is the “brains”. At 25 years of age, he wrote the Institutes of the Christian Religion which he continued to rework for the next twenty years of his life. For Calvin, God is sovereign and in the Institutes, he systematically reflected and argued for that sovereignty as revealed in the work of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit concluding in the fourth book of the Institutes how God’s sovereignty relates to the “body politic”

Luther’s concern, hence his anxiety was “how can I, an unrighteous man ever hope to stand in the presence of a righteous God”? Calvin’s passion was how can we as an unrighteous society reflect in our own communal life the justice, mercy and compassion of a just, merciful and sovereign God ? The question(s) you ask shape the direction in which you will move both theologically and politically. Calvin had a somewhat hopeful view of human potential and human society. He had a militant view of the Church as a witness to the sovereignty of God in all areas of life, no exceptions. When the 13 colonies stewed in their collective juices about breaking with Mother England, Presbyterians in our country were not hesitant causing the British historian at that time, Horace Walpole to write, “ the colonies have run off with a Presbyterian parson”.

Given Calvin’s reading of scripture and the Greek classics, he was persuaded that “authority should reside in ordered groups”, not in individuals (hence no bishops), not in the masses (hence more representative republican than democratic), a model later copied in part by our own country. The word Presbyterian comes from the Greek presbuteros which means elder, hence the authority of the Church resides in elders both clergy and lay. The word Reformed is taken from the Latin phrase. “ecclesia reforma semper reformanda” which translated is “the church reformed always being reformed”, which means we never arrive.

This reforming takes place by fidelity to the word of God and the witness of the Holy Spirit as ascertained by the ordered authorities of the Church and by the living out of the truth by all members in all of life. Calvin coined the phrase that all things are to be done “decently and in order” which means reformed churches tend to be sober, thoughtful, intellectual and theological. It has not been unfairly said that “Presbyterians worship God with their minds” the consequences being an emphasis on education, social responsibility and world mission with respect to justice and peace. We have been modest enough to know that we do not serve alone, that God continues to call us into that larger ecumenical family which is the Church Universal. We have something to give and much to receive.