John Calvin 500th Birthday

Sunday July 12th 4pm

 Grace & Peace Presbyterian Church will celebrate John Calvin’s 500^th Birthday with a worship service based on the reformed liturgy he implemented in Geneva, Switzerland. The Rev. Larry Sibley, professor at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia will preach on Calvin’s contribution to the reformation of worship. The public is cordially invited. The service will be followed by a short reception and then a question and answer discussion

 John Calvin (July 10, 1509 –May 27, 1564) was an influential theologian and pastor during the Protestant reformation. He was a principal figure in the development of the system of theology later called Calvinism. Originally trained as a humanist lawyer, he broke from the papacy in the 1520s. After religious tensions provoked a violent uprising against reformers in France, Calvin fled to Basel, Switzerland, where in 1536 he published the first edition of his seminal work Institutes of the Christian Religion.

Calvin was soon invited to help reform the church in Geneva, where he introduced reformed church government and worship. In order to instruct the common people in Geneva and France about worship, he published the Institutes, The Form of Church Prayers, A Short Treatise on the Holy Supper of our Lord Jesus Christ, and The Geneva Catechism in French, “wishing to benefit our French nation.” Widely distributed in France, all these books were soon banned in Paris. Calvin was influenced by the early church fathers and especially the Augustinian tradition stemming from the writings of the Apostle Paul and the other authors of the New Testament.

 The Presbyterian and other Reformed churches, which look to Calvin as a chief expositor of their beliefs, have spread throughout the world. Calvin's thought exerted considerable influence over major religious figures and entire religious movements, such as Puritanism, and his ideas have been cited as contributing to the rise of representative democracy in the West.