The Bible is our final authority in all things, as God’s inspired, infallible, and inerrant words.
- We believe that the Bible is without error.
- We believe that the infinite-personal God revealed in its pages made us all, that we rebelled against his authority and therefore each come into the world dead in sin and deserving of his just judgement.
- We believe that the only hope of rescue from that judgement is by Jesus Christ, specifically through his substitutionary life and death and resurrection received through faith plus nothing.
When we follow Jesus in repentance and faith, God gives us Jesus’ own perfectly righteous record of living, and at the same time wipes clean our miserable, sinful record. He sets us free, forgives us, and adopts us as his own children to live new lives by the power of his Holy Spirit. Read the Ultimate Questions booklet for a basic explanation of this good news about Jesus Christ. See “A Bird’s-Eye View of the Christian Religion” for a concise summary of our teaching, and A Beginner’s Guide to Christian Faith and Life for an even simpler introduction.
We fully believe that the great truths that were recovered in the Protestant Reformation summarize the teachings of the Bible and are well-explained in the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms.
We are a confessional church. This means that we spell out what we believe the Bible teaches in a confession/creed. Some Bible-loving Christians insist that we need “no creed but Christ”. But a creed (from the Latin root, credo, “I believe”) is nothing other than a statement of what one believes that the Bible teaches. Accordingly, whether or not they put it into writing, all Christians have a creed–a set of beliefs about what the Bible teaches. By writing ours down into a Confession and Catechisms, we can be upfront about our beliefs. We can be held accountable to teach and act consistently with them. And we can quickly and easily teach both adults and children the system of truth God reveals in the Bible.- Some Christians believe that creeds divide Christians. They urge Christians to unite into some sort of “lowest common denominator” version of Christianity. In contrast, we urge Christians to prayerfully discuss God’s Word and let “iron sharpen iron”. This will help Christians to unite based on a common faith in the “whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27), “until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine…” (Ephesians 4:13-14).