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CTF 2025 - Why another conference?

Jim Butler · 2024-12-20 · 428 words · 3 min

CTF 2025 - Preview

So we're discussing the conference 
coming up in the end of April for Chapter 2 of our confession, 
I should say our shared confessions between the Westminster, the 
Savoy, and our Baptist confession of 1689, the Second London, with 
significant overlap to the Belgic in terms of the theories and 
concepts. I've got a bit of a summary here, 
a few questions and points to talk about. So in the first one, 
the purpose of the confession, sorry, the purpose of the conference. 
Why did we start the conference? What do we intend to achieve 
with the conference? What's the vision behind it? 
Over to you. Well, we started the conference 
as a means to promote edification of the saints and specifically 
we invite pastors and laymen and consistory members and the 
people of God in general to study those things most surely believed 
among us. So, that's kind of a subtitle, 
or at least it's been appended to our confession of faith. And 
we thought that a conference was a good way to promote that 
fellowship, to rally around central doctrines of the Christian faith, 
which is what the 1689 basically is a summary of, those chief 
things that Christians ought to believe. And we thought it 
would be helpful to just take a chapter per year and to invite 
some men that are specifically competent in those fields or 
areas. to be that means of educating 
the people of God so that we can know better what Scripture 
teaches and know what our Christian tradition teaches as well. I believe there was a California 
conference that was similar that kicked off 11 or 12 years ago. 
Can you speak to your experience with that, if any, and how that's 
translated into our conference? Yeah, well, a very similar format 
as Jim just mentioned. The idea there was to gather 
together primarily Southern California Reformed Baptist pastors, but 
also pastors from outside the Reformed Baptist tradition, and 
also lay people to attend and to take in theological discourse, 
lectures, presentations around a chapter of a confession progressively, 
like the conference that we're doing. So, yeah, it sort of served 
as a foundational pattern, you know, with that general collegial 
spirit, but also with an emphasis upon the fact that we are the 
you know, the inheritors of a received theological heritage, and we 
want to be faithful to the biblical conclusions of that received 
theological heritage and to educate our people and just to rally 
around, as Jim mentioned, those truths most surely believed among 
us. Excellent.