"The abandonment of liturgical forms for heartfelt experience, so characteristic of low-church Presbyterianism, is a significant departure from the genius of the Protestant Reformation, and thus puts Presbyterians in the awkward position of trying to accommodate John Calvin and John Wesley. What many contemporary Presbyterians seem to forget is that the Reformation was just that, a reformation, not a revival.
You can tell the difference between the two, according to the Belgic Confession, Article 29, by determining whether the church uses the correct forms—namely, is the Word being faithfully preached, are the Sacraments being faithfully administered, and is discipline being properly administered? The Belgic Confession, along with the rest of the Reformed creeds from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, has nothing to say about the typical way we spot a revival, that is, by a large number of new conversions and greater earnestness on the part of believers. So for Protestant Reformers, the issue was not whether a church was dead or alive.
The Evangelical concept of dead orthodoxy was virtually unknown prior to the revivals of the eighteenth century. For the Reformers, the issue was whether a church was false or true. For Luther, Calvin, and Cramner, the way to distinguish the true Church was by looking above all at the forms used in worship and the ways in which ordination took place. These were matters that were unambiguous—either a prayer, sermon, or service of ordination conformed to the teaching of Scripture or it did not (conceding that Episcopalians, Lutherans, and Reformed Christians read the Bible in different ways at times on these points).
But to tell whether a church or person was spiritually alive, revived, or dead was not so certain. And unfortunately, ever since the First Great Awakening, Presbyterians have been more attentive to the invisible work of the Spirit rather than the visible work of the Church, an alertness that is doomed to frustration because of the Spirit’s mysterious movements."
— D.G. Hart, Rediscovering Mother Kirk
