Worship WE ARE CREATED TO WORSHIP the one and only true God in Spirit and in Truth. Many believe that singing praises to God is worship. While worship includes the singing of our praises to God, it is much, much more than that.
Worship is the giving of our very lives in service to God: we worship Him when we have it as our ambition to please Him, when we learn His commandments and keep them, when we strive to give up the sins that so easily overcome us, and when we love our brothers.
In praising God - one aspect of worship, we do our best to approach Him with reverence and the sense of being apart from the world by singing hymns, choruses, and other music that we believe honors our Lord.
For these reasons, we focus in worshiping God through the expositional, line-by-line preaching and teaching of His Word, by encouraging obedience to Him, by striving to live in the world without being part of the world, by encouraging one another in love and good works, and by singing His praises.
( Psalm 150; Matthew 5:16; Mark 12:30-31; John 14:15; Romans 12:1-2, Romans 14; 2 Corinthians 5:9, 6:14-18; Hebrews 12:1-2; 1 John 3:10, 17, 4:20-21 )
The Authority of Scripture WE BELIEVE THAT GOD'S WORD is His complete and authoritative revelation to man. Without the Bible, our beliefs about God and how we are to pursue our relationship with Him are nothing more than opinion. Opinions change and as they do so, the concept of right and wrong changes and ultimately our behavior changes leading us to worship a god of our own making.
Like God, Himself, the Truth of God's Word, does not change. We are confident that the Bible teaches us truthfully and completely how we are to follow Him, how we are to order our relationships with fellow believers, and how we are to reach those not in fellowship with God through His Son, Jesus Christ.
God is Truth and He cannot lie and He does not change.
Everything He has revealed to us is absolutely reliable and is profitable for us for our instruction and correction and training in righteousness.
Therefore, we hold to a high view of the authority of Scripture and we diligently study and learn what it says, and work to conform our beliefs to God’s revealed truth, and we do our best to live accordingly.
Note: With regard to Bible translations, we find that there are several excellent modern, literal English translations of the Bible and we use the New American Standard Bible in our services. We love the King James Version also and acknowledge its lasting, valuable, and useful place in the life of the modern Christian.
Fellowship in the Local Church WE WORK TO BUILD STRONG RELATIONSHIPS with one another as members of the Family of God. While our families are at the center of our personal relationships, as God's Family, our strong and vibrant fellowship is crucial to the health, vitality, protection and work of the Body of Christ in the world.
A very brief study of the early Christian church found the early believers studying Scripture together, breaking bread together, partnering together in ministry, praying together, and meeting the needs of one another with gladness and sincerity of heart – and all with a single-mindedness that is to be the model for our modern day fellowship.
The early church invested in one another with their time and their possessions. And when they met regularly in true, Christian fellowship an amazing reward was the result: the Lord added to their fellowship daily those who would be saved.
We encourage everyone to share in the ministry of the church: through time, service, prayer, and finances. Therefore, we focus on our meeting together in fellowship as the body of Christ.
Discipleship IT IS OUR GOAL TO ADEQUATELY DISCIPLE followers of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ said to His people, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age (NASB).”
We believe that there are at least three essential elements in making disciples: 1. loving and obeying God ourselves and teaching others to love and obey Him; 2. loving our Christian brothers and sisters ourselves and encouraging others to love one another; and, 3. loving to reach the world with the Gospel of Jesus Christ ourselves and teaching and encouraging others in the same way.
We therefore focus on discipleship, that is, preaching, teaching, and exhorting one another to live out and share the Truth in love, in word, in character, in behavior, in good works, and in suffering.
( Matthew 28:18-20; Mark 12:30-31; 1 Peter 2:12-3:22 )
