The Trinity

• God the Father is an infinite, personal Spirit, perfect in holiness, wisdom, power, and love. The Father concerns Himself mercifully in the affairs of humanity, that He hears and answers prayer, and that He saves from sin and death all that come to Him through Jesus Christ. We believe God’s knowledge is exhaustive; that He fully knows the past, present, and future independent of human decisions and actions. The Father does everything in accordance with His perfect will, though His sovereignty neither eliminates nor minimizes our personal responsibility.
• Jesus Christ is the Son of God, fully God in every way. He has the exact same nature, attributes, and perfections as God the Father and God the Holy Spirit. He is not only true God, but true man, conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary. He lived a sinless life, was crucified, laid in the grave for three days before rising from death to life. In Christ’s death and resurrection, the Father has provided a substitutionary atonement for everyone who believes. Jesus has taken His seat in heaven at the right hand of power to await His second coming.
• The Holy Spirit is the third person of the Trinity. His role in the Father’s directive is that of regeneration, sanctification, and preservation. His ministry is to glorify the Lord Jesus Christ, to implement Christ’s work of redeeming the lost, and to empower the believer for godly living and service. The Holy Spirit distributes spiritual gifts to believers as He wills for the common good, and does not include gifts that signify His baptism or filling, nor does any gift provide authoritative revelation beyond what has already been provided in the Word of God. Life in the Spirit includes trials and does not guarantee physical health, material wealth, nor confirming outward signs.

Mankind And Salvation

God created persons, male and female, in the image of God and free from sin. Against God’s direction, man chose to sin in the Garden and by his own choice all peoples have become sinners by nature at the instant of conception and are spiritually dead. Those that will repent of their own sins and trust Jesus Christ as Savior are regenerated by the Holy Spirit. In creation, God established marriage to be a lifelong covenant relationship between one man and one woman. Marriage so defined is the only permissible context for intimate sexual expression and is the foundation for human family. In the creation, God established human life as precious and must be protected from the moment of conception.

Salvation is the action of God in which He atones for the guilt of a sinner through Christ’s substitutionary death and resurrection. Salvation is provided to a sinner by God’s free and sovereign gift of grace through the sinner’s act of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, apart from any human merit, works, or even religious ritual. The consequence of salvation to a man, woman, or child are the acts of righteous living, good works, and proper social concern.

The Church

The Church is the spiritual body of which Christ is the head. Universally, it is located throughout the world, and locally, it is made up of individual churches. The true Church is composed of all persons who have been regenerated by the Holy Spirit. This body expresses itself in local assemblies whose members have been immersed by a credible confession of faith and have associated themselves for worship, for instruction, for evangelism, and for service. The local church administers the ordinances of believer’s baptism by immersion and the Lord’s Supper. The local church is interdependent and participates in the mutual submission of believers to each other in Christ’s love. The local church is a self-governing body by function and must be free from interference by all ecclesiastical or political authority.

Christian Conduct

The task of the believer is to glorify God in their personal and public life with conduct that requires each to be blameless before the world. The Bible requires that each believer should be faithful stewards of their possessions and should seek to realize for themselves the full stature of maturity in Christ.

The Last Things

The Bible speaks of the second coming of Christ, of the bodily resurrection from the dead of every believer and unbeliever, of the eternal existence of all peoples, of the coming judgment God, and the consequence of those that are saved into Heaven and those that are lost into the eternal punishments of Hell.