Calvin's Geneva - a Pipe Dream? I Want that Pipe Dream Please!!!

Genuine Authentic Relationships.

In Calvin's Geneva, the company of pastors mutually covenanted themselves to one another to pray, worship, study, together on a weekly basis. And based on their mutual covenanted relationships, because genuine, authentic relationships could be built, once a quarter, the company of pastors met together to mutually discipline and hold one another accountable to doctrine and moral issues.

Here's a description of Calvin's Geneva from a paper from the Office of Theology:

After the public meetings of the preachers and their assistants, a session was held of just the compagnie des pasteurs, devoted to a discussion of current theological and ecclesial issues. The compagnie was also meant to be an instrument for censura morum (mutual censure), which was held once a quarter. Any office-bearer could take this opportunity to speak in a brotherly way about the doctrine or conduct of another. This mutual supervision, too, served the cause of unity in doctrine and life.


And the main reason why this worked in Calvin's Geneva is because they mutually covenanted themselves to meet weekly to pray, worship, and study together where genuine, authentic relationships could be built.

Flash forward several hundred years to today. Such accountability and mutual discipline is simply impossible in our current context in the PC(USA) because our presbyteries look and function so differently than the presbytery of Calvin's days. Because we do not know one another, the only way we know how to relate to one another is through rules - the Book of Order and the Book of Confessions.

Whereas in Calvin's Geneva it was a mutual consent to submit to the authority of the body, today we find ourselves bound and imprisoned by our rules.

Mutual discipline? Even though we've got the rules, because we don't have the genuine, authentic relationships where we have prayed, worshiped, loved on each other, we are impotent to disciplines one another.

There has got to be a better way of being the church than what we have today.

Could we get back to smaller presbyteries where pastors and elders mutually covenant themselves to worship, study, pray, and love on one another? Is that a pipe dream?

Why can't that be our reality?