BELIEFS

We believe God has supremely revealed himself in the person of his Son, the incarnate Word. Moreover, this God is a speaking God who, by his Spirit, has graciously disclosed himself in human words. We believe that God has inspired the words preserved in the Scriptures, the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments, which are both record and means of his saving work in the world. These writings alone constitute the verbally inspired Word of God, which is utterly authoritative and without error in the original writings, complete in its revelation of his will for salvation, sufficient for all that God requires us to believe and do, and final in its authority over every domain of knowledge to which it speaks.

We believe in one God, eternally existing in three equally divine Persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, who know, love, and glorify one another. This God is infinitely perfect. He is the Creator of all things, visible and invisible, and is therefore worthy to receive all glory. He perfectly and exhaustively knows the end from the beginning, sustains and sovereignty rules over all things, and providentially brings about his eternal good purposes to redeem a people for himself and restore his fallen creation, to the praise of his glorious grace.

We believe God created human beings, male and female, in his own image. Men and women enjoy equal access to God by faith in Jesus and are both called to significant private and public engagement in family, church, and civic life. Adam and Eve were made to complement each other in a one-flesh marriage union that establishes the only normative pattern of sexual relations for men and women. In marriage, God gives husband and wife distinct roles which reflect the loving relationship between Christ and the church, the husband exercising headship in a way that displays the caring, sacrificial love of Jesus, and the wife joyfully submitting to her husband in a way that models the respect of the church for Jesus.

We believe that Adam, made in the image of God, distorted that image and forfeited his original blessedness—for himself and all his descendants—by falling into sin through Satan’s temptation. As a result, all human beings are alienated from God, corrupt in every aspect of their being, and condemned to death apart from God’s gracious intervention. The supreme need of all human beings is to be reconciled to God; the only hope of all human beings is the undeserved love of God in Christ, who alone can rescue us and restore us to himself.

We believe the gospel is the good news that God saves sinners through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Christ’s death is a substitutionary and propitiatory sacrifice to God for our sins. It reveals God’s eternal love, magnifies God’s lavish grace, satisfies God’s righteous justice, and appeases his holy wrath. Jesus Christ is the only mediator between God and people. There is no other name by which humanity must be saved.

We believe that, moved by love and in obedience to his Father, the eternal Son became human: the Word became flesh, fully God and fully human being, one Person in two natures. The man Jesus was conceived through the miraculous agency of the Holy Spirit, and was born of the virgin Mary. He perfectly obeyed his heavenly Father, lived a sinless life, performed miracles, was crucified under Pontius Pilate, arose bodily from the dead on the third day, and ascended into heaven. He is seated at the right hand of God the Father, exercising in heaven and on earth all of God’s sovereignty, and is our High Priest and righteous Advocate.

We believe salvation, the free gift of God, is provided by grace alone, through faith alone, because of Christ alone, for the glory of God alone. Anyone turning from sin in repentance and looking to Christ and his substitutionary death receives the gift of eternal life and is declared righteous by God. The righteousness of Christ is imputed to the individual, who is justified and fully accepted by God. Through faith in Christ’s atonement for sin an individual is reconciled to God the Father and becomes his child. The believer is forgiven the debt of his sin, liberated from the law of sin and death into the freedom of God’s Spirit, and kept by Christ to be presented before the presence of God with great joy.

We believe God by his Word and Spirit creates, guides, and preserves the Church.The Church universal is made up of all those who have become followers of Jesus by believing the gospel. A local church, overseen by biblically qualified elders, is a spiritual family of believers in Christ who are joined together in love for the worship of God, prayer, edification through the Word of God, fellowship, observance of the ordinances of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, restorative church discipline, and the shared mission of making disciples ofJesus. While the distinct role of elder is given only to qualified men in the local church, both men and women are encouraged to serve and lead. The Church exists to glorify God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This includes a commitment to see the gospel preached, disciples made, and churches planted in all the world.

We believe the Holy Spirit convicts the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment, and by his powerful and mysterious work regenerates spiritually dead sinners, awakening them to repentance from sin and faith in Jesus. All believers are in dwelt by the Holy Spirit at conversion, yet also called to be filled with the Spirit throughout their Christian lives. The Holy Spirit desires to fill each believer continually with increased power for Christian life and witness, and imparts gifts for the building up of the church and works of ministry in the world. All the gifts of the Holy Spirit at work in the church of the first century are available today and vital for the mission of the church, meant to be practiced in an orderly way for the building up of the church.

We believe in the personal, glorious, and bodily return of our Lord Jesus Christ with his holy angels, when he will exercise his role as final Judge, and his kingdom will be consummated. We believe in the bodily resurrection of both the just and the unjust—the unjust to judgment and eternal conscious punishment in hell, and the just to eternal blessedness in the presence of God in the new heaven and the new earth. On that day the church will be presented faultless before God by the obedience, suffering, and triumph of Jesus, all sin purged and its wretched effects forever banished. God will be all in all and his people will be enthralled by Him, all to the praise of his glorious grace.