Because Scripture is the Word God has actually given us, and Scripture is given to us in the form of books. When we preach consecutively through Mark or Romans or Ezra, the agenda for the next sermon is set not by the pastor’s mood or the news of the week, but by what comes next in the text.

This protects both the pastor and the congregation. The pastor cannot ride a hobby-horse for fifty Sundays in a row. The congregation receives the whole counsel of God — including the difficult, neglected, and uncomfortable parts — rather than a curated highlight reel.

It is also how the church has historically read the Bible: chapter by chapter, with the whole congregation listening together. We are not innovators here. We are simply trying to keep doing what Augustine and Calvin and Spurgeon all did from their pulpits, and to do it with a little less flourish.

The early church gathered weekly “to break bread,” and Calvin’s deep desire was for weekly Communion to be the practice of every Reformed church — a desire frustrated only by the city council of Geneva. We are recovering what the Reformers wanted but did not get.

The Supper is not an interruption of the service; it is the climax of it. The sermon proclaims the gospel in word; the Table proclaims the same gospel in sign and seal. To preach grace and then send the congregation home without the visible promise feels, to us, like a meal that ends before dessert. Each Lord’s Day we hear the Word, then we taste it.

We mean that the children of believing parents are members of the visible church, set apart by the Lord, and entitled to the sign and seal of the covenant in baptism. We do not require our children to make a credible profession of faith before treating them as belonging.

Practically, this means our children are baptized as infants, are present in the worshipping assembly from infancy, and grow up hearing the Word preached, the prayers offered, and the Supper administered — long before they consciously remember any of it. We trust the ordinary means of grace to work over decades, not weeks.

Trinity is a Presbyterian congregation, governed by a session of elders — ordained men, called by the congregation, examined and ordained by the wider presbytery. The session has spiritual oversight of the congregation. A board of deacons attends to mercy ministry and the temporal affairs of the church.

Above the session is the Presbytery of the Southwest, a regional body of pastors and ruling elders to which Trinity is accountable, and beyond that the General Assembly of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. No elder rules alone; no congregation is sovereign over itself; no session can be brought before any body but the church. It is a slow, deliberate, and ancient form of government.

Then come anyway. Sit in the back. Listen. Ask the pastor or an elder a question after the service, or none at all. We have no quarrel with people who are honestly working out what they believe. We have a quarrel only with the assumption that the question can be answered without ever sitting under the preached Word in the company of the saints.

Christians have always been made, not manufactured. They are made over years — in the slow, ordinary work of Word, Sacrament, and Prayer, in the company of older Christians, with all their doubts and questions intact.

The sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments are the verbal, plenary, inerrant Word of God — the only infallible rule of faith and life. Tradition, reason, and experience are gifts of God for the church’s good, but they are servants under the Word, never above it.

Baptism is the New Covenant sign of initiation into the visible church, administered by ordained ministers, with water, in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We baptize believing adults converted from outside the church, and the infant children of believing parents, on the basis of the unity of the covenant of grace across the testaments.

The first day of the week is the Christian Sabbath — a day for the public and private exercises of worship and for resting from our common employments and recreations. We keep it not as a burden but as a gift — one day in seven, given by the Lord, set apart for him and for our good.

The church is a spiritual society, distinct from civil society, with its own King, ministers, and means of grace. We labor in our common callings — as carpenters, lawyers, teachers, mothers — for the good of our neighbors, but the pulpit is reserved for the proclamation of the gospel, not for political program. We are quiet about many things our neighbors expect us to be loud about, and louder than expected about a few others.