What Do We Believe?
Our beliefs about God are too complex to be summarized on a web page. A much better setting to communicate these would be in a series of conversations over coffee. However, we realize that people want to know if our church is stable, grounded and Biblical. To that end, we offer a few of our essential beliefs below.
The Bible
We believe God inspired human authors to write the Bible to reveal Himself to us and provide us with an authoritative, beautifully complex guide to better understand Him, ourselves, salvation and our purpose and place in His world. For that reason, the Bible is central to our common life together.
The Basics
- We believe in the Trinity.
- We believe Jesus was fully God and fully human, sent by the Father to rescue us by his sacrificial death and resurrection.
- We believe that the Holy Spirit draws us by grace, recreates us from the inside out, makes God’s abiding presence real to us and equips us with spiritual gifts and energy to serve others.
- We believe that one day, God will finish the redemption that He started with Jesus and ultimately recreate heaven and earth for us to enjoy Him and each other forever.
- We believe that until that day, we are to follow Jesus and His way of life together
Salvation and Life-Change
Jesus + Nothing = Salvation
Regardless of our relative “goodness”, none of us has loved God and others in perfect conformity with His original design. If we are honest, we know we have fallen hopelessly short of that standard. No amount of good deeds, religious practices or “cleaning up” is going to save us. But, God sent Jesus to live, die and then conquer death so that he could offer us the gift of salvation based on Jesus’ work, not ours. Salvation is offered to us BY GRACE which means undeserved, unmerited and unearned. We accept it BY FAITH which means we trust God when He said that all we had to do was to believe that Jesus had done EVERYTHING necessary to rescue us completely. So, we reject any attempt to add to or contribute to God’s incredible act of grace. Salvation is NOT Jesus + church attendance or Bible reading or morality or the right political party. God’s salvation is Jesus + nothing.
Jesus + Nothing = A Changed Life
Although the Bible clearly teaches that salvation is by grace, through faith, it also clearly teaches that when a person experiences God’s radical grace and begins to trust Him for salvation and life…everything begins to change. These changes include a new heart, new values and convictions, new impulses to love and serve others and a new thirst to know God more deeply and personally. Personal transformation does not happen instantly or the same way for every person. In many ways, it is impacted by our willingness to engage the process of life-change with intentionality. But, change is inevitable. Our transformation does not contribute to salvation in any way. Instead, it demonstrates the work of God’s grace in our lives as we follow Jesus.