Creeds & Confessions

Source for creedsandconfessions.com — a searchable edition of the creeds, confessions, and catechisms of the church.

Ecumenical creeds	Apostles', Nicene, Athanasian
Westminster Standards	Confession of Faith, Shorter Catechism, Larger Catechism
Three Forms of Unity	Belgic Confession, Heidelberg Catechism, Canons of Dort
OPC Book of Church Order	Form of Government, Book of Discipline, Directory for Public Worship

Features

• Version toggle on the Westminster Standards — read the constitutional text or the 2025 Modern English Study Version, with an option to highlight what changed. The MESV is for study only and carries no constitutional authority.
• Scripture proofs in collapsible callouts, using the OPC lettered proof scheme.
• Section-level search at /search/ — filter by collection or document, use reference shortcuts such as WCF 3.1, and deep-link to the individual chapter, section, or catechism question. Scripture proof text appears in an excerpt only when the proof itself matches.
• Edition provenance on every document — organization, edition, authoritative source, verification date, and independent-site notice.
• Scripture reference tooltips via RefTagger.
• Ask: questions in plain words, answered by an AI model from this site's own text only, with every cited section linked. The toolbar's Ask button opens it in a side panel beside the page being read (citations open in place, and the panel stays open across pages); /ask/ is the full-page version. It runs as a separate Cloudflare Worker (assistant/), and stays hidden until assistant_url is set in _config.yml. See assistant/README.md.

Building locally

Requires Ruby 2.7 or newer (the github-pages gem does not support 2.6).

bundle install
bundle exec jekyll serve

The site is then at http://localhost:4000.

To match what GitHub Pages actually builds, keep Gemfile.lock committed and run bundle update github-pages rather than upgrading Jekyll directly.

Layout

Path	Purpose
index.md	Homepage
_pages/*.md	The twelve documents
_layouts/, _includes/	Local overrides of the jekyll-gitbook remote theme
assets/gitbook/custom-local.css	All site-specific CSS (callouts, version toggle, print)
assets/gitbook/custom.js	Accessible reader controls, version toggle, mobile section selector, RefTagger re-tagging
assets/search_plus_index.json	Liquid template that builds the section-level search index (also the Ask assistant's only source)
ask.md, _includes/ask-ui.html, _includes/ask-panel.html, assets/gitbook/ask.js	Ask: the full page and the side panel, which share one interface
assistant/	The Ask assistant's Worker, tests and model test; excluded from the Jekyll build
test/fixtures/westminster-text.json	Constitutional and 2025 MESV passages extracted from the OPC comparison PDFs

Notes for editors

• GitHub Pages builds this site with Jekyll 3.10, not Jekyll 4. Several things work locally on Jekyll 4 and do nothing in production — most notably an order: list under a collection, which Jekyll 4 honours and 3.10 ignores silently. Verify against the github-pages gem, not a newer Jekyll.
• Sidebar order comes from nav_order in each page's front matter, sorted explicitly in _includes/toc-date.html and _layouts/post.html (which also derives the prev/next arrows from it — page.previous/page.next follow Jekyll's own collection order and are wrong here). Group headings are emitted whenever category changes, so keep same-category pages contiguous in the nav_order sequence.
• The theme is pinned by SHA in _config.yml. Bump it deliberately; upstream has no tags.
• In the Westminster Standards, the constitutional wording is the ordinary, crawler-visible text. Each difference uses one <span class="text-variant" data-modern="…">constitutional wording</span>. JavaScript reads data-modern only after the visitor explicitly selects MESV; search engines and no-JavaScript readers therefore receive one edition, never concatenated alternatives.
• Do not hand-edit Westminster variant spans. Update the authoritative PDFs if needed, run script/build-westminster-fixtures.py, then run script/rebuild-westminster-variants.py.

Checks

These run in CI (.github/workflows/build.yml) and can be run by hand:

python3 script/build-westminster-fixtures.py --check
python3 script/check-variant-markup.py

Re-extracts the comparison PDFs to prove the committed fixture is current, then reconstructs and compares all 474 constitutional and MESV passages against it. The check also rejects legacy paired spans and known merged-word corruption.

python3 script/section-anchors.py --check

Verifies the short section anchors outside the Westminster Standards — #hc-q1, #belgic-1, #dort-3-4-2, #fg-3-3, #bd-2-b-3, #dpw-1-a-1, #nicene-381 — are present, unique, and numbered in sequence. Run it without --check to regenerate them after adding or renumbering a heading or church-order paragraph.

python3 script/check-generated-html.py _site

Checks one visible H1, one main landmark, one skip link, named buttons, edition panels, crawler-visible variant integrity, and labeled reader controls. Run a build first.

python3 script/check-links.py _site

Checks every internal link and #fragment in the built site, including the ~1,800 proof-marker anchors and all 826 search-index deep links. Run a build first.

External dependencies

The site loads RefTagger from api.reftagger.com to turn scripture references into tooltips. If that service goes away, references degrade to plain text — nothing else breaks.

With assistant_url set, the Ask page, the toolbar's Ask button, and the search page's "Ask this as a question" link call the assistant Worker, which calls an AI provider. The page names the provider and says how it treats questions. If the Worker or the provider is unavailable, a backup model answers; if both are down, the Ask page says so and points to search. Nothing else on the site depends on it.

License

See LICENSE. The confessional texts themselves are in the public domain.