A discontinuous Galerkin method for a two dimensional reduced resistive MHD model

•Discontinuous Galerkin method developed for symmetric form of reduced MHD equations.•Current and vorticity are evolved dynamically with DG scheme.•Continuous Galerkin method is used for the elliptic components.•Stable schemes without any tunable parameters are obtained using Crank–Nicholson scheme in time.•Application to tilt instability and current hole problem confirms validity of the approach.