Our Beliefs

This is a broken world: lives are broken, people are broken.  Church is a place for people to discover how God is helping.

We believe there is one God, who tells us about Himself and His plans for us through the Bible.  We believe the Bible tells us the full truth about God and about ourselves.  The Bible says God comes to people in Jesus Christ to set us free from the prison of sin and lead us into salvation.

We believe sin isn’t just bad things people do or say.  Sin is any and all failure to live up to what God expects of people.

Jesus is able to free us from the prison of sin because he is God and man, divine and human.  Sin must be judged, and righteousness will be rewarded.  When, after suffering many things, Jesus voluntarily went to the cross and died there for us, he took upon himself the just punishment for our sin; he paid the penalty for us.  His death cancels the debt of our sin against God.

When Jesus was raised from the dead (this is what Easter is about), God made it possible for us to have eternal life through Jesus.  Eternal life is part of God’s promise of joy and justice for those who put their faith in Him.

We believe that faith in Jesus happens through the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit causes belief and feeds and grows faith.

We look forward to enjoying life with God in eternity, and we believe that salvation and the Resurrection mean something big for us here in this life, too: those who believe in Jesus Christ are empowered by the Holy Spirit (1) to become better at resisting temptation to sin and (2) to live more and more as God expects of us.  We fully and freely admit, though, that none of us are going to get our lives completely right, here.  There are no perfect people in church!  We come together to become together.

We believe in the Ten Commandments, though we don’t always keep all of them perfectly.

We believe that Jesus sends us great help for this life and our growth in faith through the gifts of Baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and prayer.

We also believe that reading the Bible and hearing God’s Word preached are especially necessary and helpful for comfort, for growing faith, and for salvation.