Community Beliefs

Christianity, the body of Jesus Christ, is made up of individual people who work and worship together both in local places and across the world. There isn’t a centralized governing body that decides what every individual believes; we’re all responsible to God for growing and maturing in our faith and for finding the truth in the Scriptures. Local churches help believers to grow in knowledge and wisdom, but they don’t exist to define everything someone believes or to demand obedience to a set of dogmatic beliefs.

However, God has also made it clear in the Scriptures that there are some basic things that we must all believe as fellow Christians. These are the “things of first importance”, as Paul calls them 1 Corinthians 15. These are the things that we must believe in order to have fellowship with one another, things that define, create and maintain our relationship to the Father through Jesus.

• We believe that Jesus Christ is the son of the Living God, that he is incarnate Word of God (John 1.1), “the radiant image of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature”, and that he “upholds the universe by the word of his power” (Hebrews 1.3)
• We believe that Jesus Christ is “the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through [him]” (John 14.6). Jesus gave the Father perfect obedience, even to the point of death on the cross, and was the only one in history who could have been offered as a perfect sacrifice for sins. His willing sacrifice on the cross makes the forgiveness of our sins possible.
• We believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Three days after he was crucified and buried, the glory of the Father raised Jesus from the dead. 40 days after his resurrection, he ascended into heaven where he now sits at the right hand of the Father. One day, he will come back to judge the living and the dead.
• We believe that we are saved by grace through faith (Ephesians 2.8) and that there is no work we can do to be saved; salvation is a gift that God gives to us (grace) and which we are able to accept (faith) and, as such, it cannot be earned by any good works. This doesn’t mean good works aren’t something we should do, they just can’t earn salvation (Ephesians 2.10).
• We believe in the bodily resurrection of all people on the last day. Those who have come to Christ will be raised to honor and glory, receiving eternal life as the outcome of their faithful service to God. Others, having rejected the salvation that is in Jesus, will be raised into judgment and eternal separation from the Father.
• We believe those who “believe and have been baptized will be saved” (Mark 16.16). Baptism is not a good work done to earn/merit salvation, but a condition to which a truly penitent heart will submit. Peter said that baptism is in the name of Jesus for the forgiveness of sins (Acts 2.38) and that baptism links the believer to the resurrection of Jesus Christ, by which we are saved (1 Peter 3.21-22). We believe these things because this is what Jesus and the apostles clearly taught.