Digging
Deeper
What We Believe
We are Christians.
In 1 Corinthians, the apostle Paul writes to Christians who are dividing over minor issues (read 1 Corinthians 1:10-12), and in his letter, he declares that he had “resolved to know nothing but Christ Jesus and Him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2). There can be many different shades of belief about all sorts of aspects of the Christian faith, but the most important belief is this one… Jesus Christ died to save sinners (John 3:16, Romans 5:8, 1 Peter 3:18, 1 John 3:16, 1 John 4:10). For us this is our bottom line, we are not willing to reject anyone who has a different “take” on some other more minor point of faith.
In the first few centuries after Jesus’ death, Christians agreed and wrote down statements of faith that they could all agree on. These are called the creeds. We hold to all the great creeds of the Christian Faith.
We Agree with the statement of faith of the Evangelical Alliance which can be found here.
If you absolutely must categorise us in some way, we would describe ourselves as
- Biblical — That is, we believe the Bible is the Word of God and is the source of everything that is needed to understand our faith and to follow Jesus effectively. and
- Charismatic (or pentecostal) – That is, we believe that God gives His Holy Spirit to all who believe and that the spiritual gifts listed in places such as Romans 12, 1 Corinthians 12 and Ephesians 4 are available for Christians TODAY. However, we do NOT insist on the manifestation of any of the Spiritual Gifts as evidence someone is a ‘real’ Christian.
What We Do
We recognise that when we read the Bible, there are descriptions of groups of believers, letters to churches all over the then known world, and all sorts of other information from which we can learn about how to live out our lives as Christians together.
We also understand that we are people of a particular generation – whether they like it or not, many of the things people think believers should do come not from their Bibles, but from their culture.
This section deals with some of the things we do, and why we do them. The trick is this – to recognise which of the things that we do come from culture, and which come from the Bible. When we do that, we can be gracious towards those who do things differently.