MERG – Using Historic and Ancient Worship Forms in Today’s Church
Is there a place in our present churches for Ancient Worship forms, Creeds, and Confessions to augment or enhance our corporate worship? Should there be?
Dr. Josh Brownfield says – Yes!
Back by popular request, Josh will be presenting this very subject at our next MERG …
DECEMBER 2, 2025 – 10am to 2pm
GRACE BAPTIST CHURCH, 1899 MARIETTA AVENUE, LANCASTER, PA 17603
($25 registration fee toward Speaker and Box Lunch)
COURSE DESCRIPTION: We live in an atomized and history-less age. Our culture champions self-created identity and purpose, but this has left people feeling adrift and empty. As Christians we are not exempt from these trends. We too have been marked by expressive individualism. We also struggle to speak of even the most central tenets of our faith. How do we as church leaders teach our people to not be confirmed to the world while we also faithfully pass on the pattern of sound words we have received? We can do this by helping our people cultivate proper intuitions through our corporate worship. We can also draw upon the inheritance we have in the historic creeds of the church in our worship. Through corporate worship we come to understand our place in God’s redemptive plan. Through the use of the creeds in worship we learn the grammar of our faith, give depth to our praise, and articulate our protest against the spirit of the age. Come and learn how worship deepens our roots in a rootless culture.
Josh Brownfield (Ph.D., Westminster Theological Seminary) is the pastor of First Baptist Church in Wycombe, PA. After completing his B.A. and M.Div. at Liberty University and Seminary, he pastored in Massachusetts. He also worked as a Field Consultant for the Baptist Convention of New England, before completing a Th.M. in Historical Theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. His area of research at Westminster was the era of English Dissent (1662-1688), and he completed his dissertation under Chad Van Dixhoom on the writings of the English Nonconformist Joseph Alleine. While a Ph.D. student he worked in the Westminster archives and served as student co-host for the Craig Center Seminar for Reformation and Post-Reformation Studies. He has published one article in The Confessional Presbyterian journal on the revision of the Westminster Confession in 1903, and contributed glossaries to the forthcoming collected works of J. Gresham Machen. He taught the Church History course at Chelten Church’s Center for Biblical Transformation in 2019. He is a member of the Evangelical Theological Society. He has served as pastor in Wycombe since March 2020, is married and has 3 children.
Offered as part of VCNMA’s ministry initiative MERG