Catholic Presbyterian

So I have been intending to do a post regarding my recent change in beliefs regarding the Liturgical Year of the Church. As many of you know for years I had been abstaining from all Liturgical celebrations such as Christmas and Easter due to my understanding of the Regulative Principle of Worship. However I have recently "flip-flopped" in my positions. I now embrace a full Liturgical Calendar based on scriptural principles that allows us to participate in the life of Jesus. I was going to do a big long time consuming post until....I came upon this little catechism regarding the Church year by Pastor Jeff Meyers and I had to say it wasn't time to reinvent the wheel after I read this. I hope you enjoy it! And Merry Christmas!!!!!!

A simple catechism (for children) explaining the Church Year and Advent.The Church Year
Q 1. Why do we have different seasons of the year?
A. God created the seasons for man’s use and enjoyment.
Q 2. What do Fall and Winter remind us of?
A. Fall and Winter remind us of sin and death because it is dark and cold.
Q 3. What do Spring and Summer teach us?
A. Spring teaches us that God brings light and life to the world through Jesus Christ.
Q 4. What does the church calendar chiefly celebrate?
A. The church calendar celebrates the life of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Q 5. Why does the church have her own seasons?
A. The church has her own seasons to teach the world that true life is found in Jesus Christ and to resist reducing life to politics and economics.
Q 6. How are we to sanctify the seasons that God created for our benefit?
A. According to 1 Timothy 4:5, we are to set apart the seasons with the Word of God and prayer.
Q 7. How has the church set apart the seasons with the Word of God and prayer?
A. The church has chosen readings from the Old and New Testaments for each season and has ordered the prayer life of the church to match the life of Jesus.Advent & Christmas
Q 8. What does the word “Advent” mean?
A. The word “advent” means “to come” and has to do with the coming of Jesus.
Q 9. What portion of the life of Jesus does Advent celebrate?
A. Advent celebrates the times leading up to the birth of Jesus as well as his coming again at the last day.
Q 10. How many Sundays are there in Advent?
A. There are four Sundays in Advent.
Q 11. What are the colors for Advent and what do they mean?
A. The colors for Advent are purple and royal blue. They remind us that Jesus is a glorious King.
Q 12. What do we pray for during Advent season?
A. During Advent we pray that Jesus our King would continue to come to us and serve us as he has promised.
Q 13. In our Advent prayers are we pretending that Jesus has not yet been born?
A. No. During Advent we are praying for him to come to us again and again as he has promised.
Q. 14. How did God fulfill his promises to his people in the Hebrew Scriptures?
A. God fulfilled his promises by uniting himself to our human nature in his Son, who faithfully lived a perfect life of service, died the death we deserve, and was raised to life again as the new man, and all this for our salvation.
Q 15. How has Jesus promised to come to us today?
A. In many different ways—to be with us on Sunday for worship, and particularly by the celebration of the Eucharist, to help us daily when we are in trouble, and at the end of the world to establish the new heavens and earth.

So I'm still cruising through Jim Jordan's book The Sociology of the Church and I seem to have hit another Ecclesiological pothole on Jordan's road to Catholicity. In commenting on the theological implications of "Do this as my memorial" Jordan says "The doing takes precedence over any theory of what is being done. If this simple fact were understood, it would be possible for churches to recognize one another and cooperate in true biblical Catholicity."(Jordan is not here trying to pit theory and praxis against one another, he's just placing the accent mark where the Spirit did in the text...we would be wise to do the same!)
Once again Jordan assumes much and defines little! He is saying one of two things here: either 1) The action of the Eucharist among a group is what makes the group a catholic church... or 2) he is assuming some other presupposed, yet not defined up to this point in the book, definition of what a church is and saying the of all existing churches in that sense are made catholic by the Eucharistic celebration. If you see a third way to take this please comment.
I take serious issue with number 1 above. Here's why: in the first place the command and entrustment of the Eucharistic rite was give to the Apostles in the upper room. As Catholic Reformed
Presbyterians(or any episcopal form of ecclesiology as well) we believe that the succession of the Church was organic from Christ, to the apostles, and then entrusted by them to faithful men, apostolically ordained and constituted elders in organic succession, just as Paul tells us the faith would be passed in 2 Tim. 2:2(and as laid out in our standards and BCO.) Thus we cannot assume that any group that comes together, I'm thinking of so-called "independent churches"(defined here as those with no succession from and submission to the duly constituted church as defined scripture and outlined above), under the name "Church" is necessarily a Church, scripturally and historically speaking, because they bring crackers, grape juice, bad hymns and a King James Bible together once a week. It was the action of the Eucharist in the visible apostolic Church that united all Christians together in the Heavenly presence of God to be certain(read Calvin on Worship in the throne room and the Eucharist, its excellent), but to say the same applies for a group that knows the apostolic visible body and refuses to submit to the πρεσβύτερος (presbyters/bishops), is to argue that a schismatic or divisive groups celebration of the Eucharist is not impeded by their inherently divisive constitution, which violates the 1 Cor. 11 principle of the supper ceasing to be the supper in its fullness for the divisive/schismatic party.
As for option 2 I cant really argue anything because I don't have his definition. If his definition was: A Church is all baptized individuals gathered together in the organic apostoliclly succeeded Body, than we would see eye to eye...But I have a sneaking suspicion this is not his definition...

Some of my final thoughts: I agree that the doing of the supper is where we should place the accent mark, just as Jesus did in his very choice of words. However it is to the apostolic fathers, the 12 minus Judas, and their faithful children that received "the faith once delivered for all unto the saints" (Jude 1:3) that this command was given. Just as the Great commission was given to the Apostles, and while we share in it in the priesthood bestowed upon us in our one baptism, it is always under the Authority of the organic, historical Church's succession of the πρεσβύτερος(presbytery) and/or ἐπίσκοπος(episcopate). This is where the keys have been placed, and sect in the world can duplicate those keys or can pick the Ecclesiological lock, no matter how hard they try.

In the modern evangelical church in America there are vast differences on what is considered to be "good worship" and what is not. Usually the "good worship" is distinguished from not so good, or even "bad worship", by the subjective affinities and predilections of the individual in conjunction with how they feel both during and after they leave public worship. As if this wasn't alarming enough, lets examine one of the widely held presuppositions or axioms of the American evangelical: personal autonomy. I will stipulatively define personal autonomy here in this way: The right to have the final word regarding what is biblical and how its to be understood and applied in the faith and life of the church. This is a truly democratic and individualistic approach, sadly it is also a radically unbiblical one. Since the average person in the pew does not actually have any ecclesiastical authority to implement their opinions upon every other "personally autonomous" worshipper in the Church, this ideology usually manifests itself in the modern fad of church shopping. You know the routine keep going from church to church until you find the one the one that most closely matches up with your idea of how you think things ought to be. I call this the wandering-one-man-magesterium-minstrel approach...mouthful huh? The ironic part of the story is that while all of this is in attempts to be free from tradition and inventions of men the average American evangelical just runs from one system of man made inventions to another. In an attempt to escape traditional or liturgical forms of worship that are supposedly dead or devoid of the Spirit, the average Christian is accepting that which is most culturally familiar to them and that which makes them feel good and is supposedly free of "tradition". Well Christians...somebody had to break the news to you sooner or later, so it might as well happen now...your service of worship at your local Church is most likely filled with traditions, all though they may only be traditions stemming back to the reformation, or the 20th century, or the so-called contemporary traditions(which is funny because its usually about 10-15 years behind the tide of the culture that people are in the other 6 days of the week), they are nonetheless traditions. Sadly these newer traditions often take there cues more from the affinities of the Church community, or perhaps a select few "staff" or members of the "worship team", and not the affinities or the expressed commands of the one being Worshiped, namely our Covenant God. All churches have a Liturgy, or way of ordering worship. Going to a so-called contemporary church one will be hard pressed to go in week after week and find little if any deviation from the previous weeks service regarding the order of worship. So the question naturally arises then... have you really escaped tradition? No! You have most likely substituted one set of traditions for the other based merely on your feelings at worse and your biblical convictions at best. This is the heart of sectarianism, the cancer of the Church. We must get back to the Bible and the Historic understandings of what worship is all about, or we will continue to run the risk of becoming like the folks that Paul was addressing in 1 Cor. 11:17-20, divisive Christians that aren't really practicing the true, Spirit filled, sacrificial and communal Worship of the Church. That is not freedom friends, that is bondage to our own concupiscent desires for personal autonomy, before the peace and unity of the Body of Christ, which is sin.