Sunday morning always feels a bit hectic. The family moves on a compressed timetable. Not only does breakfast need to be eaten, but outfits need to be chosen, teeth brushed, hair put in decent order — the whole family prepared to head out the door together. Some Sunday mornings, after the youngest is put in nursery and the kids are seated next to us, my wife and I look at each other with wide eyes and breathe a sigh of relief. We made it.
Though difficult, we try not to let the compressed timetable harry our hearts. Once everyone has finished breakfast, the Bible comes down from the shelf. For six mornings of the week after our Bible reading, we work as a family on memorizing Scripture. But Sunday is different. Instead of reaching for the little booklet of memory verses, we grab the hymnal. In that hymnal, marking the hymn we’ve been singing that week, is a wrinkled piece of paper, worn with years of handling. Tape reveals the places where it has fallen into the hands of our children in various stages of toddlerhood. I pull out that paper, and the small chorus of voices begins to confess: “We believe . . .”
What We Confess
What do “we believe”? Each week, we recite together the Nicene Creed. The Nicene Creed — an expansion of the earlier Apostles’ Creed — was recognized as a true confession of the church’s faith at the Council of Nicaea in AD 325. That council gathered to respond to false teaching concerning the divinity of Christ. The main figure of controversy was Arius, who taught that there was a time when the Son was not. In the following years, some additions were made to the form of the creed in response to a new controversy with the Pneumatomachians (“Spirit-fighters”), who denied the divinity of the Holy Spirit. These changes were confirmed at the Council of Constantinople in 381 (which is why historians refer to the final form of the creed as the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed) and reaffirmed at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. In short, the church has recognized this creed for over 1,500 years as a true confession of the faith as taught by the prophets and apostles in Holy Scripture.
Our family first began reciting the Nicene Creed as a regular part of family worship rhythms when our firstborn was about four years old and our second-born was two. We started with a lengthy period of memorization. When the bishops gathered at Nicaea and again at Constantinople, their primary concern was the defense of the faith. Their phrases, particularly those confessing the divinity of the Son, heap upon each other like so many mountains of biblical truth with their tops in the clouds, making the language of the creed difficult to remember. Yet we labored at it consistently. When we began, we devoted several weeks to daily practice. Once we could get through it together, we gradually increased the number of days between repetitions. Along the way, a few Trinitarian controversies had to be ironed out. For example, we believe in the Holy Spirit, not the holy salad. Now, most Sunday mornings, we confess our Trinitarian faith without hiccup or heresy.
Why do the words of a fourth-century church council echo around our twenty-first-century kitchen table? Why not just stick to memorizing Bible verses?
Why We Confess
The practice of publicly confessing creedal faith is less common in churches today than it has been in the past. We expect it perhaps at a baptism service or maybe in the context of the Lord’s Supper, but many Sundays pass without the whole congregation joining in a corporate declaration of what we believe. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with this. We have no explicit command to recite a common confession whenever the church — let alone the family — gathers for worship. But what do we lose when this practice recedes?
We confess what we believe as a family each week because we want the whole scope of the biblical drama to inform our thinking and invigorate our worship. Memorizing specific Bible verses, wonderful as it is, does not serve quite the same end. By keeping the creed in our heads, we seek to hold fast the vast teaching of Scripture, from what we believe about our triune God to the hope of the resurrection and restoration of all things.
For centuries, the Nicene Creed has helped the church understand “what accords with sound doctrine” (Titus 2:1). It places clear boundaries around true and false teaching about the triune God and his work “for us and for our salvation.” In short, it contains the essentials of the faith. In our family, we use it as a catechetical tool, building into our children (and ourselves) an understanding of the world we inhabit (“We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible”), the work of salvation accomplished by the eternal, only-begotten Son (which the creed outlines from the incarnation to the current reign of Christ and the promise of his return), the work of the Holy Spirit, the nature of the church, and the hope of the new heavens and earth.
“By confessing together, we guard against an overly individualistic understanding of Christianity.”
These terse statements of belief pack in even more than a broad gospel outline. They trace out the biblical doctrine of God as Trinity: “one God, the Father Almighty . . . one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God . . . the Holy Spirit . . . who proceeds from the Father and the Son.” They declare Scripture to be the clear word of God, which he fulfills: All the Son’s work takes place “according to the Scriptures”; the Holy Spirit is the one “who spoke by the prophets.” They guard against a provincial view of the church: “one holy catholic [meaning universal] and apostolic church.”
We pray that our weekly practice will also reinforce in us other benefits. By confessing together, we guard against an overly individualistic understanding of Christianity, recognizing that the faith we hold is also the faith of our brothers and sisters throughout the world. The Christian life is not merely a personal affair; it is corporate, the common life of the body of Christ. By confessing together, we learn to submit to authority. Our faith is not something we get to define for ourselves. It is given, and we gladly receive it. Using a historic confession of the church teaches us to gladly receive the proper authority of the church, training us to humbly listen to the whole body of Christ spread out in space and time. We learn that the careful thinking of our forebears in the faith is not something to debunk but something to treasure and listen to with patience and humility.
How We Confess
What does our actual practice look like on Sunday morning? We begin with a brief catechism.
Question: “What is the creed?”
Answer: “The creed is a summary of what the Bible teaches.”
Question: “Why do we say the creed on Sunday morning?”
Answer: “We are confessing together with the church what we believe about God.”
We want to demarcate the creed from Scripture for our children, helping them to recognize that Scripture is our final authority in all things. And we want to build into our children a love not only for the local church but for the universal church across the globe and across the centuries. When we’ve completed our catechism, then we confess our faith.
As parents, we confess prayerfully, asking our heavenly Father to draw our children into a love for the deep and astonishing truths of the gospel. And we confess in hope, looking with eager expectation toward that for which we so desperately long: “the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13).
Will You Confess?
Lest you get the wrong idea, our post-breakfast confession is rarely a straightforward affair. It is frequently accompanied by spills, reminders to our older children about how to participate, and not-always-successful attempts to intercept the two-year-old’s endeavors to transfer a whole bowl of Cheerios from his tray to the kitchen floor. We don’t expect perfection, and that is not our aim. Rather, we want to raise our children “in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4) and one day send them out confident in the faith they confess.
By confessing the Nicene Creed together, we’re joining a time-honored, church-strengthening, God-glorifying means of doing so. Might you consider joining us?
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