what we believe

We believe that the Bible, comprising all sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments, is the complete, sole, and final written Word of God. It is verbally and plenarily inspired, meaning that not merely the thoughts but the very words are God-breathed. Paul tells Timothy that “all scripture is given by inspiration of God” (2 Timothy 3:16); the word he uses is θεόπνευστος (theopneustos), literally “God-breathed”, the Scriptures are the very breath of God put into words.

We believe the Scriptures are therefore inerrant and infallible in all that they affirm, without error in the original autographs, and wholly sufficient for faith and life. “The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever” (Isaiah 40:8). Holy men of God “spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost” (2 Peter 1:21), the word for moved, φερόμενοι (pheromenoi), is the same picture as a ship carried along by the wind. Scripture is not the word of men about God, but the Word of God through men.

We believe in one God, eternally existing in three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the same in substance and equal in power and glory. “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD” (Deuteronomy 6:4). The Hebrew אֶחָד (echad), “one,” is a word that can hold a compound unity, as a man and wife become one flesh. Even in the first verse of the Bible, the noun for God, אֱלֹהִים (Elohim), is plural in form yet governs a singular verb, a seed of the truth that would later flower: “Let us make man in our image” (Genesis 1:26).

We believe God is holy, sovereign, eternal, unchanging, all-knowing, all-powerful, and everywhere present, and that He is love. “I am the LORD, I change not” (Malachi 3:6). What He has been, He is, and He forever will be.

We believe in the full deity and full humanity of the Lord Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God. We believe He was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of a virgin (Isaiah 7:14; Matthew 1:23), truly God and truly man in one Person.

We believe He lived a sinless life and perfectly fulfilled the whole law of God, never once breaking it in thought, word, or deed. “Which of you convinceth me of sin?” He asked, and none could (John 8:46). He “did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth” (1 Peter 2:22), and He came “not to destroy, but to fulfil” the law (Matthew 5:17).

We believe He died on the cross as the substitutionary atonement for sin, the just for the unjust, bearing the wrath of God in the place of sinners. “It is finished” (John 19:30), one word in the Greek, τετέλεσται (tetelestai), a term written across a paid debt: “paid in full.”

We believe He rose again bodily from the dead on the third day, in the same body now glorified, and that He ascended into heaven, where He sits at the right hand of the Father and ever lives to make intercession for His own (Romans 8:34; Hebrews 7:25).

We believe that God created the heavens and the earth out of nothing, by the word of His power. The verb of Genesis 1:1, בָּרָא (bara), is used in this form of God alone, He brings into being that which was not.

We believe the creation took place in six literal, twenty-four-hour days, followed by a day of rest, as the plain reading of Genesis 1 teaches and as the fourth commandment confirms: “For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth” (Exodus 20:11). Each day is marked by “the evening and the morning,” and the Hebrew יוֹם (yom), joined to a number and to “evening and morning,” everywhere means an ordinary day.

On the age of the earth we hold our convictions humbly. We are certain of the how, six real days, but we do not claim to know the precise when. God may well have created a mature world, with systems and stars and soil already functioning, as He made Adam a grown man and not an infant. We hold the six days firmly and the calendar loosely, and we do not divide over what God has not plainly told us.

We believe Adam was the first man, specially created and not descended from any earlier creature, and that there was no pre-Adamic race of men. “The first man Adam was made a living soul” (1 Corinthians 15:45); “by one man sin entered into the world” (Romans 5:12). The only created order of beings before man is the angels (Job 38:4–7).

We believe God created mankind in His own image, male and female (Genesis 1:27). He made biological man and biological woman, two distinct and complementary sexes, by His deliberate design and with no exceptions. This distinction is not a social construct but a created reality: “male and female created he them.”

We believe marriage is the covenant union of one biological man and one biological woman, for life. “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh” (Genesis 2:24; affirmed by Christ in Matthew 19:4–6). It is the union of one person to one other person, not more.

We believe God created sexual intimacy as a good gift to be enjoyed solely within that marriage, between husband and wife. “Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled” (Hebrews 13:4).

We believe the marriage covenant is meant to be lifelong, and that the one biblical ground our Lord names for the dissolution of a marriage is adultery, sexual unfaithfulness, “saving for the cause of fornication” (Matthew 19:9). The word there, πορνεία (porneia), is the broad term for sexual immorality.

We believe that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23), and that salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, and not by any work of man. “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9).

We believe that those who repent and trust in Christ are born again by the Holy Spirit (John 3:3), justified, declared righteous, the Greek δικαιόω (dikaioo) being a courtroom word, “to declare righteous,” and adopted into the family of God. The Holy Spirit indwells, seals, and sanctifies every believer, conforming them to the image of Christ.

On election and free will. We believe that both the sovereign election of God and the free will of man are taught in Scripture, and that both are equally true. We do not flatten one to protect the other. On the one hand, God has chosen His own: “according as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world” (Ephesians 1:4); “as many as were ordained to eternal life believed” (Acts 13:48). On the other hand, the call goes out to all, and all who come are received: “whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely” (Revelation 22:17); “him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out” (John 6:37). We hold these together as Scripture does, without forcing a system on them. Election is God’s business; the free choice to accept or reject Christ is ours. Where the Bible holds two truths in each hand, we will hold them too, and we will not let go of either to make the puzzle simpler than God made it.

On the security of the believer. We believe that those who are truly saved are saved forever, kept not by their own strength but by the power of God, once saved, always saved. The same grace that saves also keeps. “And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand” (John 10:28). He “which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6), and the believer is “sealed with that holy Spirit of promise” unto the day of redemption (Ephesians 1:13–14; 4:30). Salvation is the gift of God, and “the gifts and calling of God are without repentance” (Romans 11:29).

We believe the Church is the body of Christ, made up of all true believers, and that it gathers in local congregations for worship, the preaching of the Word, the ordinances, fellowship, and the work of the gospel.

We believe that the office of overseeing the local body, the pastor (elder) who governs and shepherds the congregation, is, by God’s design, reserved for qualified men. Paul writes plainly: “Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection... I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man” (1 Timothy 2:11–12), and he grounds this not in the customs of his day but in creation itself: “For Adam was first formed, then Eve” (1 Timothy 2:13). The qualifications for the overseer are likewise written for a man, “the husband of one wife” (1 Timothy 3:2).

We do not hold this as a relic of a patriarchal culture that the modern world has outgrown. We hold it because it is rooted in the unchanging order of creation, and because God does not change, He never has, and He never will (Malachi 3:6; Hebrews 13:8). What His Word established remains established today.

At the same time, we affirm with equal conviction that this concerns two offices only. In everything else, women are fully and gladly welcomed into the work and leadership of the body: to teach (men and women alike in countless settings), to disciple, to evangelize and preach the gospel, to serve as deacons, to lead ministries, and to exercise every gift God has given them. The Scriptures honor women laboring in the gospel, Priscilla who helped instruct Apollos (Acts 18:26), Phoebe the servant (διάκονος, diakonos) of the church (Romans 16:1), the daughters who prophesied (Acts 21:9). We believe women should be encouraged and placed into the very callings of leadership and service to which God has gifted and appointed them.

We believe the Holy Spirit gives gifts to the church for its building up, and that He still equips believers today with gifts such as teaching, serving, giving, leading, mercy, and evangelism (Romans 12:6–8; 1 Peter 4:10–11). These abiding gifts are very much for the church in every age.

But we draw a careful distinction. We believe the miraculous sign-gifts, the speaking in unlearned tongues, the gift of healing, the raising of the dead, and the receiving of new revelation through prophecy, were given for a particular purpose and a particular time. They were the credentials of the apostles and the foundation-era church. Paul calls them “the signs of an apostle” (2 Corinthians 12:12), and the writer of Hebrews says the great salvation was “confirmed unto us by them that heard him; God also bearing them witness, both with signs and wonders, and with divers miracles, and gifts of the Holy Ghost” (Hebrews 2:3–4). The Greek word for these is σημεῖα (sēmeia), “signs”, they pointed beyond themselves to authenticate the messenger and the message.

We hold that these sign-gifts have ceased, having served their purpose. Once the message was confirmed and the canon of Scripture completed, the scaffolding came down, for scaffolding is for the raising of a building, not for the finished house. “Whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away... but when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away” (1 Corinthians 13:8–10).

We do not need a fresh word, a private tongue, or a new sign, because we have the complete, living, breathing Word of God, able to make us wise unto salvation and to furnish us thoroughly unto every good work (2 Timothy 3:15–17). What God once confirmed by signs, He has now preserved for us in Scripture. We do not deny that God still heals and still works wonders as He wills, He is sovereign, and may do as He pleases; but we do not believe He has given the church today the apostolic sign-gifts as ongoing abilities, nor should any believer be made to feel a lesser Christian for not possessing them.

We believe in the personal, visible, and bodily return of the Lord Jesus Christ, and we hold to what is often called the pre-tribulational, pre-millennial view of the events to come.

We believe in the rapture of the church. Before the time of judgment falls upon the earth, the Lord will descend and call His own up to meet Him in the air. “The Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout... and the dead in Christ shall rise first: then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air” (1 Thessalonians 4:16–17). The word for “caught up” is rendered in Latin rapturo, from which we have the word rapture. This will happen “in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye” (1 Corinthians 15:52).

We believe the church will not pass through the tribulation, for God has “not appointed us to wrath” (1 Thessalonians 5:9) and has promised to keep His own “from the hour of temptation, which shall come upon all the world” (Revelation 3:10). After the church is taken, there will follow a seven-year tribulation, a time of unequalled trouble upon the earth (Daniel 9:27; Matthew 24:21), during which the events foretold in the book of Revelation unfold.

We believe that at the close of the tribulation, Christ will return to the earth in power and glory, defeating the gathered armies of the world at the battle of Armageddon (Revelation 19:11–21), and will then establish His thousand-year reign, the millennial kingdom, ruling in righteousness from Jerusalem (Revelation 20:1–6).

We believe that after the thousand years comes the final judgment before the great white throne (Revelation 20:11–15), the resurrection of all the dead, the eternal blessedness of the redeemed, and the eternal punishment of the unredeemed. “And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal” (Matthew 25:46). Then God will make all things new, and the redeemed will dwell with Him forever, where “there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying” (Revelation 21:4). “Even so, come, Lord Jesus” (Revelation 22:20).