Our Beliefs
When we look at what God has been doing through the ages, we realize that He’s weaving a magnificent story of hope and redemption for our entire world—and that each of us has a significant role to play in His story.
Before the beginning of time, God lived in relationship with Himself—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. When He created us, He created us to be relational beings also, living in harmony with God, each other, and creation. Our job description was to look after this world which He entrusted to us, having rule and reign over it.
Since we were created in the image of God, we were created with a will, having the ability to choose. Exercising our volition, we chose wrongly when we were tempted by Satan, and at that point, sin and brokenness—a fallenness from the beings we were originally created to be—became a state of being in our world.
God immediately intervened redemptively, first by clothing Adam and Eve–a balm to the shame they felt. The Bible, which we understand to be written by people who were inspired by the Holy Spirit, documents the countless ways God has sought to restore that close relationship with us. God patiently revealed Himself to the nation of Israel, refusing to give up on the people He had chosen to represent Him to the world, even when they demonstrated mankind’s inability to make consistently good choices.
God knew that His final act to restore our lost relationship with Him would require Him to send His son, Jesus. We believe that Jesus—conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of Mary, a virgin girl—was God, in human form. He showed us in tangible ways what it means to live life as God originally intended it to be lived. Through His life, His crucifixion, His death, and His resurrection, Jesus is our best and only hope for peace and reconciliation between God and mankind. Because of Jesus’ selfless act, we have been forgiven and God is no longer angry with us.
God continues to bring reconciliation: to ourselves, to each other, to creation, and to the world around us. The Holy Spirit affirms as children of God all those who trust Jesus, giving us the ability to live the life God intended us to live. The Holy Spirit does this by empowering us with gifts, guiding us, convicting us, comforting us, regenerating us, and bringing us back into relationship with God and one another.
God again shows the world who He is through His people, the church. As the church is grounded and rooted in Christ, practicing spiritual disciplines and celebrating baptism and the Lord’s Supper, we become a tangible expression of God’s love. We embody the resurrected Christ, who lives in and through us, to a world yearning to be restored to what God intended for it.
Our doctrinal statement is available for further reading.
Our statement on women and men in leadership is also available for further reading.
