God
We believe in a triune God, One Being manifested in three distinct Persons: God the Father, God the Son, Jesus Christ, and God the Holy Spirit. It is through the Father’s providential care over His creation and creatures, and by His authority and grace in our lives, that salvation and fullness of life is uniquely offered through Jesus Christ, and manifested in His children by the work of the Holy Spirit.
Scripture
We believe in the authority, inspiration, infallibility, and reliability of the Scriptures, and the responsible handling of the Word of God, which was related to men through the work of the Holy Spirit as He directed them, and supernaturally preserved throughout the ages so that we may be guided by them to find Truth in our lives.
Man
We believe that man was uniquely created in God’s image to worship and fellowship with Him, but through pride rejected God and fell into sin and slavery to sin. Man’s relationship to God is restored through the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross by God’s grace and mercy.
Salvation
Because of man’s sin, we are separated from the one and only Holy God. God extends His grace and mercy to us through the saving work of Jesus on the cross, Who shed His blood as an atoning sacrifice for our sins, that those who trust in Jesus can enter into eternal salvation, and worship and serve Him eternally.
Christian Life
We live in accordance with the Scriptures and are guided by the Holy Spirit, Who is fostering a lifestyle of repentance, compassion, prayer, service, worship, study of the Bible, and fellowship with other believers, testifying to the power of salvation, and sharing the Good News here and throughout the world, bringing together reason and faith to meet today’s challenges together in a mature, Christian community.
God’s Grace
Election is the gracious purpose of God, according to which He regenerates, justifies, sanctifies, and glorifies sinners. It is consistent with the free agency of man, and comprehends all the means in connection with the end. It is the glorious display of God’s sovereign goodness, and is infinitely wise, holy, and unchangeable. It excludes boasting and promotes humility. All true believers endure to the end. Those whom God has accepted in Christ, and sanctified by His Spirit, will never fall away from the state of grace, but shall persevere to the end. Believers may fall into sin through neglect and temptation, whereby they grieve the Spirit, impair their graces and comforts, and bring reproach on the cause of Christ and temporal judgments on themselves; yet they shall be kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation.
The Church
A New Testament church of the Lord Jesus Christ is an autonomous (self-governing) local congregation of baptized believers, associated by covenant in the faith and fellowship of the gospel; observing the two ordinances of Jesus (see Baptism and the Lord’s Supper below), governed by His laws, exercising the gifts, rights, and privileges invested in them by His Word, and seeking to extend the gospel to the ends of the earth. Each congregation operates under the Lordship of Christ through democratic processes. In such a congregation each member is responsible and accountable to Jesus as Lord. Its scriptural officers are pastors and elders. While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the offices of pastor and elder are limited to men as qualified by Scripture. The New Testament speaks also of the church as the Body of Christ, which includes all of the redeemed of all the ages, believers from every tribe, and tongue, and people, and nation.
Baptism and the Lord’s Supper
Christian baptism is the immersion of a believer in water in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It is an act of obedience symbolizing the believer’s faith in a crucified, buried, and risen Savior, the believer’s death to sin, the burial of the old life, and the resurrection to walk in newness of life in Christ Jesus. It is a testimony to his faith in the final resurrection of the dead.
The Lord’s Supper is a symbolic act of obedience whereby members of the church, through partaking of the bread and the fruit of the vine, memorialize the death of the Redeemer and anticipate His second coming.
Evangelism and Missions
It is the duty and privilege of every follower of Christ and of every church of the Lord Jesus Christ to endeavor to make disciples of all nations. The new birth of man’s spirit by God’s Holy Spirit means the birth of love for others. Missionary effort on the part of all rests thus upon a spiritual necessity of the regenerate life, and is expressly and repeatedly commanded in the teachings of Christ. The Lord Jesus Christ has commanded the preaching of the gospel to all nations. It is the duty of every child of God to seek constantly to win the lost to Christ by verbal witness undergirded by a Christian lifestyle, and by other methods in harmony with the gospel of Christ.
Family
We believe God’s plan for the expression of human sexuality is that of celibacy in singleness and within the covenant of marriage between a man and woman. We believe all sexual expression outside of this, whether pre-marital sex, adultery, homosexuality, promiscuity, or use of pornography is contrary to Scripture and is not in agreement with our faith and practice. God has ordained the family as the foundational institution of human society. It is composed of persons related to one another by marriage, blood, or adoption.
Marriage is the uniting of one man and one woman in covenant commitment for a lifetime. It is God’s unique gift to reveal the union between Christ and His church and to provide for the man and the woman in marriage the framework for intimate companionship, the channel of sexual expression according to biblical standards, and the means for procreation of the human race. The husband and wife are of equal worth before God, since both are created in God’s image. The marriage relationship models the way God relates to His people. A husband is to love his wife as Christ loved the church. He has the God-given responsibility to provide for, to protect, and to lead his family. A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ. She, being in the image of God, as is her husband and thus equal to him, has the God-given responsibility to respect her husband and to serve as his helper in managing the household and nurturing the next generation.
Children, from the moment of conception, are a blessing and heritage from the Lord. Parents are to demonstrate to their children God’s pattern for marriage. Parents are to teach their children spiritual and moral values and to lead them, through consistent lifestyle example and loving discipline, to make choices based on biblical truth. Children are to honor and obey their parents.
Government
We believe that Civil authority is God’s appointment and is designed for the benefit of the poor as well as the rich, for the defense of their rights and privileges, and that the Civil Magistrate’s authority extends no farther than to punish transgressors of civil laws without pretending to dictate or order the worship of the Eternal God, which belongs only to Jesus Christ, the Great Law Giver and Head of His church.