Some people attend the Evangelical Reformed Church in Bucharest for curiosity, but stay for its message. Corcea thinks that Reformed churches have an advantage over Eastern Orthodox because both the liturgy and the Scriptures are intelligible. Besides, the congregation can sit down, while in Eastern Orthodox churches they stand the whole time. At the same time, Reformed worship is reverent and based on historical formulas and creeds which people can recognize.

No course of study or pastoral training prepared Rev. Mihai Corcea for the loneliness he experienced on the mission field of Romania‚ even though it’s his native land. It’s not a lack of companionship (he has a lovely wife and a young, energetic son). Rather, Corcea described his loneliness as “being overwhelmed by the opposition around me,” and not having other pastors nearby that share the same experience.
The Making of a Pastor
Corcea is pastor of the Evangelical Reformed Church in Bucharest, a mission of the United Reformed Church in North America (URCNA). He was born into a nominal Eastern Orthodox family and attended the local Orthodox church with his grandparents. When he was a teenager, Corcea’s parents began attending an Evangelical church and brought him along to worship. He soon became interested in reading the Bible and some Christian books. He later became convinced of the soundness of the Reformed confessions in 2006, while spending some time in Holland with a Reformed family.
After earning a degree in business management and marrying his wife Lidia, he settled in Bucharest where they attended a mainline Lutheran church. Slowly, he met other people who were interested in the teachings of the Reformation. Together, they started a mid-week Bible study.
Soon, it was clear that Romania needed a Reformed church. Corcea contacted several churches in Europe for support and advice, and received an answer from Rev. Andrea Ferrari, pastor of the Reformed Church Filadelfia in Milan, Italy (also a URCNA mission). Mihai and Lidia became members of that church and attended as often as they could, given the distance of over 1000 miles.
The consistories of both Milan and Santee, CA (the overseeing church) agreed that Corcea was called to be a pastor. With their encouragement, in 2013 he began his studies at Westminster Seminary California (WSC) in Escondido, graduating in 2016. After his ordination as URCNA minister, Corcea returned to his country. On August 7, 2016, the first service of the Evangelical Reformed Church in Bucharest took place in an office building.
“I soon learned that the place and format of the worship service matters much in Romania,” Corcea said. The visitors were few, and rarely returned. Things changed when he moved into an actual church building which he shares with a Lutheran congregation. “The cross on the roof makes a difference,” he explained.
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Written by R. Scott Clark |
Wednesday, October 12, 2022
Throughout the history of the church there has always been a theology of the covenants. The Reformation recovery of the gospel and the biblical distinction between grace and works made it possible for Reformed theology to construct a detailed and fruitful covenant theology.

Until recently, it was widely held that covenant theology was created in the middle of the seventeenth century by theologians such as Johannes Cocceius (1609–1669). In fact, covenant theology is nothing more or less than the theology of the Bible. It is also the theology of the Reformed confessions. In the history of theology, the elements of what we know as covenant theology; the covenant of redemption before time between the persons of the Trinity, the covenant of works with Adam, and the covenant of grace after the fall; have existed since the early church.
Indeed, Reformed readers who turn to the early church fathers (c. 100–500 AD) might be surprised to see how frequently they used language and thought patterns that we find very familiar. The covenant theology of the fathers stressed the unity of the covenant of grace, the superiority of the new covenant over the old (Mosaic) covenant, and that, because Jesus is the true seed of Abraham, all Christians, whether Jewish or gentile, are Abraham’s children. They also stressed the moral obligations of membership in the covenant of grace.
The covenant theology of the medieval church (c. AD 500–1500) was related to that of the early fathers but distinct in certain ways. In response to the criticism that Christianity gave rise to immorality, the early church tended to speak about the history of redemption as the story of two laws, the old (Moses) and the new (Christ). They tended to speak of grace as the power to keep the law in order to be justified.
This habit only increased in the medieval church. The major theologians argued that God can only call people righteous if they are actually, inherently, righteous. This, they thought, will happen when sinners are infused with grace, and cooperate with that grace, so that they become saints. In this scheme, sanctification is justification, faith is obedience, and doubt is of the essence of faith.
In medieval covenant theology the word “covenant” became synonymous with “law.” They did not speak of a covenant of works and a covenant of grace, as we do. Rather the grace of the covenant enables one to keep the law.
Late in the medieval period, some theologians began to stress the idea that God has given a kind of grace to all humans and made a covenant so that “to those who do what is in them, God does not deny grace.” In effect, God helps those who help themselves. The Reformation would not only reform the covenant theology of the early fathers, but wage full-scale war on the covenant theology of the medieval church.
When he rejected the medieval doctrine of salvation by cooperation with grace, Martin Luther (1483–1546) rejected the old law/new law understanding of redemptive history. He came to understand that all of Scripture has two ways of speaking, law and gospel. The law demands perfect obedience, and the gospel announces Christ’s perfect obedience to that law, his death and his resurrection for his people.
Not long after Luther came to his Protestant views, others were already reforming covenant theology along Protestant lines. In the early 1520s, the Swiss Reformed theologian Johannes Oecolampadius (1482–1531) was teaching what would later become known as “the covenant of redemption” between the Father and the Son from all eternity. He also distinguished between the covenant of works as a legal covenant and the covenant of grace as a gracious covenant. A few years later Heinrich Bullinger (1504–75) published the first Protestant book devoted to explaining the covenant of grace. Like the early fathers, this work stressed the graciousness and unity of the covenant of grace.

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It’s not enough to know what is good and what is true; we must come to love what is good and love what is true. We are now in the realm of the affections, and suddenly the parenting terrain is vast and the task before us utterly daunting. For now we will no longer be satisfied with filling our children’s heads with the information they’ll need to be able to succeed, but we will be aiming at something more profound and therefore more difficult: cultivating knowledge and virtue, right thinking and right feeling, understanding and desires.

My friend said something to me over breakfast that has been rattling around my old cerebrum ever since. We were talking about how different generations have approached raising Christian children and he said this about the approach of our parents: “It feels like they wanted to teach us only enough theology to sustain a personal spiritual life, and no more.”
We might call this the theologically minimalist approach.
There were plenty of exceptions, but in the broadly evangelical world, I think it was the norm rather than the exception. The important thing was to accept Christ as your personal Lord and Saviour. After that, we had some notions of personal piety like daily quiet time, but not much energy was spent setting a theological foundation or developing a compelling vision of Christian maturity.
I discern something similar in the way evangelical Christians often think and talk about parenting in our own day.
Parenting Minimalism
There seems to be an assumption that, beyond teaching the Bible and the gospel to our kids and praying that they come to saving faith, there isn’t much that would differentiate Christian parenting from non-Christian parenting. The content and pedagogy of their education can be pretty well the same; the books they read and shows they watch and music they listen to can be pretty well the same. In short, their actual cultural formation can be pretty well the same. This is a kind of parenting minimalism that actually makes some sense in a context where the broader culture still has strong vestiges of Christian influence, as was arguably the case until not that long ago. It might not have been ideal, but it seemed like it could work out decently well.
But, to be blunt, those days are well behind us. Even as my own generation, the millennials, was being formed and coming of age in the 1990s and 2000s, it became clear that not all was well. The shaping influence of the broader culture was already militating against the spiritual priorities of our parents. We heard the gospel at church (and perhaps at home), but were being shaped more fundamentally by the priorities of our peer groups, the media we took in, and the education we received.
The result? Millennials left the church at a higher rate than any previous generation.
Christian Paideia
As I started having my own children, I began thinking again about education. But education is not really the word I’m looking for. We have this entrenched modern notion that education is what happens during the school day and it relates to what fills the student’s head. It concerns that secular middle space where mathematics, literacy, and (maybe) history are necessary preconditions for gainful employment. That’s how most people think of education today—that thing you need to get a good job. And many Christians, not knowing any better, adopt this view.
We need a better word than education until it can be rehabilitated. One option is formation, which I’ve already used once or twice in this piece, but the problem with that word is how broadly it can be used for unrelated topics, such as industrial processes. Education is too narrow, formation a bit too broad, so let’s just reach over into another bucket—the Greek bucket—and use paideia. This is the word Paul uses in Ephesians when he speaks of raising children in the “nurture [paideia] and admonition of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4).
The idea here is of a whole-person approach to shaping the next generation. As Joe Rigney puts it, “Paideia is the all-encompassing enculturation and formation of a child into a citizen. Christian paideia, then, is all-encompassing Christian discipleship.” We find this idea clearly described in Deuteronomy 6, where God commands the Israelites to embrace a deeply thorough approach—when you get up, when you sit down, when you walk—to teaching their children.
We tend to think of education as relegated to intellectual knowledge, but paideia includes character formation and virtue as well.
It’s not enough to know what is good and what is true; we must come to love what is good and love what is true.
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