We are Psalm-singers

We sing the Psalms in our worship services! Are you familiar with this practice?

Of course, more explanation is probably required of our practice of singing the Psalms in worship. During our corporate worship services, we sing only the Psalms as they are inspired by God the Holy Spirit and fitted for worship of the Living God! The very God who inspired the Psalmists has entrusted these wonderful texts to the Church for edification and worship. We refrain from singing hymns and contemporary songs which are uninspired compositions of human authors for a host of reasons. 

This practice of a capella Psalm singing was much more widespread in past generations (many Reformed and Presbyterian denominations have added hymns only in the last 100 years) and it is only recently that it has become a rarity in Protestant denominations.  We continue to sing the Psalms every worship service! We find in them an incredible array of emotions. The Psalms capture, provoke, and comfort you in equal measure as you lift up your voice in song to the LORD God!

If this tradition is unfamiliar to you, we would encourage you to learn more about it by visiting our services and experiencing this practice for yourself - you may be surprised by what you discover about the psalms through singing them with us!

Are You Looking for a Reformed Church in Vancouver?

We invite you to visit us and learn more about what it means to be Christians holding to the Reformed creeds and confessions which have been studied, refined, and passed down through the generations. 

What does it mean to be Reformed? Are you just learning about the Reformed tradition? We'd love to explain this to you in person but over the next while I (Pastor Norm) will be posting more thoughts on what it means to be a Reformed Church in Vancouver, BC and what the implications are for us when we declare publicly that we are a self-consciously Reformed church. We are laying claim to a tradition that is longstanding and robustly biblical in our doctrine and practice of personal piety. 

Dr. R. Scott Clark helpfully explains, 

“What makes us Reformed is how we understand Scripture, and this understanding is summarized in our confession. If we thought that our confession was not biblical, we would not use it, and if anyone can show that our confession is unbiblical, the church ought to revise it to bring it into conformity with Scripture.” 
― R. Scott Clark, Recovering the Reformed Confession: Our Theology, Piety, and Practice

Are you searching for a church that values biblical preaching?

We believe that preaching must get to the heart of the matter... which is the heart. As the Puritan Thomas Watson put it, "Until sin be bitter, Christ is not sweet." This means that our sermons won't feel 'light' or 'fluffy' because the problem of sin in us is so great and the good news of Christ's ministry to us is so glorious! 

J. Gresham Machen’s words have particular resonance for our view of biblical preaching:

“The very center and core of the whole Bible is the doctrine of the grace of God—the grace of God which depends not one whit upon anything that is in man, but is absolutely undeserved, resistless and sovereign. The theologians of the Church can be placed in an ascending scale according as they have grasped that one great central doctrine, that doctrine that gives consistency to all the rest; and Christian experience also depends for its depth and for its power upon the way in which that blessed doctrine is cherished in the depths of the heart. The center of the Bible, and the center of Christianity, is found in the grace of God; and the necessary corollary of the grace of God is salvation through faith alone.”

Quote in Ned B. Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen: A Biographical Memoir (Grand Rapids, 1955), page 396.

Please visit us this coming Lord’s Day if you are searching for a church that values biblical preaching. We can promise you that we are profoundly committed to the faithful preaching of the whole counsel of God’s Word.

Check out our ‘Sermons’ page for more of an explanation of our view of biblical preaching

Are You Looking for a Christian Church?

At its heart, the Christian church is committed to the declaration that Christ Jesus is Lord of all. 

We unashamedly want you to hear and believe the message that there is one way to be right with God: by faith in Jesus Christ who came to save us from our sins and grant to us everlasting life that is free from the judgment which is due for sins committed against a most holy God. 

If you've considered attending a Christian church, you are on the right track. We plead with you to come hear the authoritative proclamation of the Word of God with which our hearts and souls are fed every Sunday. Come meet Christ Jesus as he is made known in the Word!

For consider well what C.S. Lewis so helpfully argues for in his classic book Mere Christianity. 

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” 
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Are You Looking for a Psalm Singing Church in Vancouver?

We are excited to introduce our guests and visitors to what it means to be part of a Reformed church. Inevitably, the question comes up, "What does it mean to be Reformed?"

Well, there are many aspects to this question but an important source of Reformed theology and piety is the 150 Psalms found in the Old Testament. This incredible collection of sacred scripture is a crucially important, and frequently overlooked, part of the Christian faith. 

In the Psalms we are shown how to worship the LORD God through a wide array of individual psalms that describe the holiness, righteousness, power, love, mercy, and steadfastness of our Holy God. 

In the Psalms we are shown how to respond to the circumstances of our lives, whether in the form of heart-wrenching lament, humble petition, exuberant thanksgiving, righteous confidence, holy zeal, or existential angst. 

In the Psalms, we come again and again to see the character and personal attributes of the 'Blessed One' of Psalm 1, the 'Forsaken One' of Psalm 22, the 'Compassionate One' of Psalm 23, the 'Victorious One' of Psalm 24, the 'Royal One' of Psalm 110, the 'Praiseworthy One' of Psalm 148. Who is this One who is foretold and anticipated in so many ways in the Psalms? From Jesus' own testimony in Luke 24:27, we know that these stanzas and descriptions referred to our Lord Jesus Christ! 

So should we sing the psalms? Yes. 

Should we frequently sing the psalms? Yes!

Perhaps you have neglected the psalms in public worship and would like to recover this aspect of Christian piety in your own life.

We invite you to join us as we sing the psalms together every Lord's Day as part of our worship in Spirit and in truth! Sing words inspired by the Holy Spirit. Sing words that are true in every sense of the Word.

Are You Looking for a Presbyterian Church?

We're an unashamedly confessional Presbyterian church!

What this means for us is that we are persuaded that the Word of God describes a doctrinal stance and a practical stance that we are compelled to uphold in all we do! We believe that the church is to be led by elders and preachers with connection to other churches who can hold us accountable and bring encouragement to us in our labours. We believe that the church is to be fed by the Word of God and that this is our sole authoritative standard for faith and practice in our church. We won't be carried away by the whims or fads of any given decade. We believe that the Westminster Standards (the Westminster Confession of Faith together with the Westminster Shorter & Larger Catechisms) are true and excellent summaries of the doctrine of Scripture. We are therefore confessional in our understanding of scripture because we confess (believe) in common ways of articulating the glorious truths of God's Word!

The rich history of the Protestant Reformation has especially deep roots in the Scottish Presbyterian churches that flourished in previous centuries. We are striving, in dependence upon the Lord, to maintain this rich heritage with its immense treasuries of devotional writings, doctrinal teaching, and scriptural study! We want our lives to be impacted by the lives of godly believers from the past and therefore our Sunday services are places where you'll hear voices from the past and our Wednesday night study is a place where we are very carefully studying church history!

Are you looking for a Presbyterian church or want to know more about Presbyterianism? We'd love to talk with you about it!

(Thanks for the photo, Aaron Burden on Unsplash)

Introducing You to the Westminster Standards

In "Welcome to a Reformed Church" Rev. Daniel Hyde offers a helpful intro to the confessional standards of our congregation:

"The Westminster Standards -- the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), the Westminster Larger Catechism (1648), and the Westminster Shorter Catechism (1648) -- were written during the brief period of Puritan ascendancy in mid-seventeenth-century England. The so-called "Long Parliament" dealt with the question of what form the English church would take. In January 1643, Parliament met to abolish the office of bishop, which practically ruled the Church of England. This led to the calling of an assembly of 121 theologians and elders ('divines') in July 1643. While Parliament expected a revision of the Church of England's Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion in order to unite the kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland, the delegates to the assembly came to see that something more was needed. In the summer of 1644, a committee was created to write a confession of the united Reformed faith in Great Britain."

photo credit: Photo by Luca Micheli on Unsplash

The Story of Pastor Norm's Calling to the Ministry

At a recent meeting of the City Hall Connaught Toastmasters Club, Pastor Norm gave a speech on his calling to the ministry of the gospel. If you'd like to learn more about our pastor, here's a little snippet into his life and leading up to this point. Enjoy!