What we Believe

We believe in a generous God who made, sustains and loves all that is.

We believe that God is – in and of God’s eternal being – Love itself.

We believe that God became flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. To see Jesus, to hear from Jesus, God’s Son, is to see and hear God.

As Jesus always called God his Father, so we call God our Father. As Jesus gave the Holy Spirit, so we receive the Holy Spirit.

We worship and adore this one God in three persons: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

We love because God loved us first.

(1 John 4.19)

Growing into adulthood, Jesus gathered many friends, both men and women, taught, healed, cast out demons. He promised the coming rule of His Father and called people to repent and believe. He challenged the powers of oppression and was marked for death by the religious authorities of his day. He was betrayed by one of his closest friends, denied by another, and forsaken by all.

As beautiful as this world is, we also know it is marked by death, corruption, and evil. We human beings are also torn between our beauty as the image of God and our refusal to accept God’s desire for us. We want to love God. From the moment of our birth, we lean toward God’s light. Yet, too often we succumb to hard-heartedness, especially our willingness to blame others for our own failings. We look at the violence in our world, our families, our own souls, and proclaim that none of it is our fault. We sacrifice others in a futile attempt to feel better about ourselves.

We believe that God through his Son Jesus – the Christ, the Anointed One – has offered Himself as a perfect sacrifice. The Cross was the unjust execution of the only truly innocent man who has ever lived. Yet, it was there that Jesus took into himself the sin of all humanity, the violence in every human heart along with every flaw in the created order. God-in-Christ offered this sacrifice on our behalf – the Innocent for the guilty. We no longer need, nor are we permitted, to destroy others to justify ourselves. We can no longer hate ourselves, being now God’s redeemed and beloved children.

To seal this redemption, and to show us our own future, on the third day following Christ’s death, God the Father raised Jesus from the dead, not merely a resuscitated corpse, but with His body transformed – not a ghost but as the very substance and character of heaven, more solid than ever, full of glory, yet bearing still the wounds of His Cross by which his friends recognized him. He promised to return at the end of time when the creation will become new and we will be raised in His likeness.

In the meantime, we live here, in this world. We God’s children are now called to share this good news with the world, baptizing those who receive it in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. We are called to remember Christ’s death in bread and wine we now recognize as His Body broken and His Blood shed. We are called to see Him in every person and to love them as Christ loves us. We are called to work for peace and reconciliation wherever we find ourselves, to heal and bless in His name, to lay down our lives for His friends.