And He commanded us to preach to the people, and to testify that it is He who was ordained by God to be Judge of the living and the dead. To Him all the prophets witness that, through His name, whoever believes in Him will receive remission of sins.
Acts 10:42-43
The Church Has a Historic Faith and Life—
We Need to Pursue It
For two thousand years, each successive generation of Christians has received a rich inheritance of theology, piety, and practice, which Jesus Christ has formed in his Church through his infallible Word. Unfortunately, many Christians today have become disconnected from much of that inheritance, to the detriment of their spiritual vitality, the worship due to our risen Lord, and the Church’s testimony of the Gospel to the world around us. I want to see that change.
Reformation Crowley’s Ridge is simply the name I have given to the idea and desire to pursue that change in Paragould and throughout northeast Arkansas. My hope is to see Christians become more deeply rooted in the historic faith and life of the Church as recovered and confessed through the Protestant Reformation, and through it to bear witness to the living God who gives life to sinners through his Son, Jesus Christ.
The First Step
God builds his Church by his powerful Word, so naturally the first step in moving this pursuit from an idea to a reality is to gather a group of people who want to study the Bible together. Whether you are already a Christian or you are simply curious about spiritual things, you are invited to come study the things of God with us.
Together we will study God’s Word in dialogue with the historical theology of the Church as summarized in the ecumenical creeds and the confessions and catechisms of the Reformation. Our goal is not only to learn about the Bible, but to know the Savior whom the Bible reveals, Jesus Christ, and to grow in our love for him and his Church.
Our Reformed Heritage
The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century was a work of God in which faithful men sought to recover and more clearly confess biblical truths that had become obscured or corrupted in the medieval Church. Central to that recovery was the doctrine of sola Scriptura—that the Word of God, contained in the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments, is the final and infallible authority for the faith and life of the Church.
The word “Reformed” refers to the Christian faith as it was recovered and confessed in that tradition: salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone; God is sovereign in salvation and in all of life; and the doctrine, worship, and practice of the Church are to be governed by his Word rather than by human invention.
A Personal Word
My name is William Barnett, and I am an ordained minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC). I was originally ordained as a Southern Baptist, but over time I became convinced that the Reformed tradition most faithfully expressed the teaching of Scripture. In 2022, I was received into the Presbytery of the Midwest of the OPC.
My family and I recently moved back to Paragould after a number of years away because we love this community and desire to see Christ’s Church strengthened here through renewed faithfulness to his Word and the planting of more faithful churches. My wife of eleven years, Hannah, and I live in Paragould with our two sons.
ReformationCrowleysRidge@gmail.com
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