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Where Christ Feeds His People
The Church
Christ did not save you and leave you on your own. He put you in a body, and he set a table in it.
The church is not a building and it is not an audience. It is the people Christ has bought, gathered under his rule, united to him and to each other. He has appointed unglamorous means by which he gives his grace, and they have not changed.
The outward and ordinary means whereby Christ communicateth to us the benefits of redemption are his ordinances, especially the word, sacraments, and prayer; all which are made effectual to the elect for salvation.
Westminster Shorter Catechism Q&A 88
The preached word comes first. Not a talk about the Bible, but the Bible opened, explained and pressed home, with Christ held out in it. God has been pleased to save and to strengthen through this plain thing week after week.
Baptism is a sign and seal of the covenant of grace, marking the washing away of sin, union with Christ in his death and resurrection, and belonging to God’s people. The Westminster Standards hold that it belongs to believers and to their children, as the covenant sign always has. The water does not save. It signifies and seals what God does.
The Lord’s Supper is not a fresh sacrifice, and it is not a bare memory either. Christ is really present, not bodily but spiritually, and he is received by faith as his people eat and drink. It is a meal for those who trust him and grieve their sin, not a reward for those who have arrived.
And they continued stedfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers.
Acts 2:42 (KJV)
This is why membership matters. To join a church is to say you will be known, taught, corrected and cared for by particular people, and to place yourself under elders who will answer to God for your soul. Discipline belongs to that same care. It is not punishment for its own sake. It aims at repentance and restoration, and where the sin is private, it begins quietly and privately.
On worship, the Reformed hold what is called the regulative principle. God himself determines how he is to be worshiped, and we come with what he has commanded rather than with what we have invented, as WCF 21.1 states. In practice that means Scripture read and preached, prayer, singing, the sacraments and the offering of ourselves. This site holds it as the Reformed Presbyterian churches do, with the Psalms sung in worship without instruments. Other Presbyterians hold the same principle and apply it differently, and those disagreements are worth having honestly and without contempt. How God Is to Be Worshiped sets it out plainly.