CTF 2025 - Why another conference?
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.
