These movements have led to the easy abandonment of both biblical truth and the transformed living mandated by our historic faith. How should we read the Bible? 4. This is not an outline of our doctrinal beliefs (see the Confessional Statement), but a statement of how we intend to discharge Christian ministry and interact with our culture in biblical and theological faithfulness. By being a counterculture. The Enlightenment belief in thoroughly objective knowledge made an idol out of unaided human reason. There is a fastgrowing charismatic movement with emphasis on glorious, passionate, corporate worship. The emphasis is on Christianity as a way of life to the loss of a bloodbought status in Christ received through personal faith. Reading along the whole Bible. There is great hope if we can unite on the nature of truth, how best to read the Bible, on our relationship to culture, on the content of the gospel, and on the nature of gospelcentered ministry. It must welcome them in hundreds of ways. By the Spirits agency, believers are renewed, sanctified, and adopted into Gods family; they participate in the divine nature and receive his sovereignly distributed gifts. The former is con- nected with entrance into the new covenant community, the latter with ongoing covenant renewal. The Redemption of Christ We believe that, moved by love and in obedience to his Father, the eternal Son became human: the Word became flesh, fully God and fully human being, one Person in two natures. But it also affirms the goodness of serving Christ as singles, whether for a time or for a life. Religion and morality in general tend to make people tribal and selfrighteous toward other groups (since their salvation has, they think, been earned by their achievement). But if we seek direct power and social control, we will, ironically, be assimilated into the very idolatries of wealth, status, and power we seek to change. These writings alone constitute the verbally inspired Word of God, which is utterly authoritative and without error in the original writings, complete in its revelation of his will for salvation, sufficient for all that God requires us to believe and do, and final in its authority over every domain of knowledge to which it speaks. Living as salt in a world that is decaying and light in a world that is dark, believers should neither withdraw into seclusion from the world, nor become indistinguishable from it: rather, we are to do good to the city, for all the glory and honor of the nations is to be offered up to the living God. By his sacrifice, he bore in our stead the punishment due us for our sins, making a proper, real, and full satisfaction to Gods justice on our behalf. The Bible is to be believed, as Gods instruction, in all that it teaches; obeyed, as Gods command, in all that it requires; and trusted, as Gods pledge, in all that it promises. The gospel replaces superiority toward the poor with mercy and compassion. Adam and Eve were made to complement each other in a one-flesh union that establishes the only normative pattern of sexual relations for men and women, such that marriage ultimately serves as a type of the union between Christ and his church. But the truth of Scripture cannot be exhausted in a series of propositions. In addition to all this, gospelcentered churches will have a bias toward church planting as one of the most effective means of evangelism there is. How then do we keep our balance? 3.
It is through the power of the Holy Spirit that we receive the words of the gospel in full assurance and conviction (1 Thess 1:5). The Power of the Holy Spirit We believe that this salvation, attested in all Scripture and secured by Jesus Christ, is applied to his people by the Holy Spirit. Such a church will not only support Christians engagement with culture, but will also help them work with distinctiveness, excellence, and accountability in their trades and professions. By his resurrection Christ Jesus was vindicated by his Father, broke the power of death and defeated Satan who once had power over it, and brought everlasting life to all his people; by his ascension he has been forever exalted as Lord and has prepared a place for us to be with him. We are ashamed of our sins and failures, grateful beyond measure for forgiveness, and eager to see afresh the glory of God and embody conformity to his Son. Thus the gospel creates a human community radically different from any society around it. Regarding power, it is visibly committed to powersharing and relationshipbuilding among races, classes, and generations that are alienated outside of the Body of Christ. It will do little to make them comfortable but will do much to make its message understandable. Because the gospel calls us to holiness, the people of God live in loving bonds of mutual accountability and discipline. But to speak of truth only as propositions weakens our appreciation of the incarnate Son as the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and the communicative power of narrative and story, and the importance of truth as living truly in correspondence to God. Regarding sex, the church should avoid both the secular societys idolization of sex and traditional societys fear of it. The ultimate answer is that God must, for his own glory, send revival in response to the fervent, extraordinary, prevailing prayer of his people. The core dynamic of gospelcentered ministry is therefore worship and fervent prayer. On the other hand, the older evangelicalism (though not all of it) tended to read across the Bible. He did this so that in him we might become the righteousness of God: on the cross he canceled sin, propitiated God, and, by bearing the full penalty of our sins, reconciled to God all those who believe. (The contextualization issue), 1. Countercultural community. The statements of Scripture are true, precisely because they are Gods statements, and they correspond to reality even though our knowledge of those truths (and even our ability to verify them to others) is always necessarily incomplete. There are many seekerdriven churches that help many people find Christ. We see a family of true disciples growing deeper in their knowledge of Him, growing richer in their satisfaction in Him, and living life together in His design. This one true and living God is infinitely perfect both in his love and in his holiness. It is a community which so loves and cares practically for its members that biblical chastity makes sense. It is a wonderful non-denominational church that welcomes all whole heartedly. Together they are simultaneously Gods pledge to us, divinely ordained means of grace, our public vows of submission to the once crucified and now resurrected Christ, and anticipations of his return and of the consummation of all things. The ministry we have outlined is relatively rare. This gospel fills Christians with humility and hope, meekness and boldness, in a unique way. The Plan of God We believe that from all eternity God determined in grace to save a great multitude of guilty sinners from every tribe and language and people and nation, and to this end foreknew them and chose them. We must be a counterculture for the common good. Our desire is to serve the church we love by inviting all our brothers and sisters to join us in an effort to renew the contemporary church in the ancient gospel of Christ so that we truly speak and live for him in a way that clearly communicates to our age. Though truth is propositional, it is not only something to be believed, but also to be received in worship and practiced in wisdom. But we also reject a view of truth that sees truth as nothing more than the internally coherent language of a particular faithcommunity. We have become deeply concerned about some movements within traditional evangelicalism that seem to be diminishing the churchs life and leading us away from our historic beliefs and practices.
How this reading of the Bible shapes us. Preaching should be expository (explaining the text of Scripture) and Christcentered (expounding all biblical themes as climaxing in Christ and his work of salvation). We have a God who is mighty in all His ways; who does the amazing work of growing us in obedience and faith. Instead of calling people to individual conversion through a message of grace, people are called to join the Christian community and kingdom program of what God is doing to liberate the world. Christian churches must work for justice and peace in their neighborhoods through service even as they call individuals to conversion and the new birth. 2. Ironically, this approach can be very legalistic. 1. [and] was raised). Sent by the Father and the Son, the Holy Spirit glorifies the Lord Jesus Christ, and, as the other Paraclete, is present with and in believers. Because the gospel (unlike religious moralism) produces people who do not disdain those who disagree with them, a truly gospelcentered church should be filled with members who winsomely address peoples hopes and aspirations with Christ and his saving work.
Therefore the person who does not generously give away his or her wealth to others is not merely lacking in compassion, but is unjust. God will be all in all and his people will be enthralled by the immediacy of his ineffable holiness, and everything will be to the praise of his glorious grace. We believe in the bodily resur- rection of both the just and the unjustthe unjust to judgment and eternal conscious punishment in hell, as our Lord himself taught, and the just to eternal blessedness in the presence of him who sits on the throne and of the Lamb, in the new heaven and the new earth, the home of righteousness. It moves us to serve others irrespective of their merits, just as Christ served us (Mark 10:45). Secularism tends to make people selfish and individualistic. If we do this we will be salt and light in the world (sustaining and improving living conditions, showing the world the glory of God by our patterns of living; Matt 5:1316). Such sharing also promotes a radically generous commitment of time, money, relationships, and living space to social justice and the needs of the poor, the oppressed, the immigrant, and the economically and physically weak. We hope to draw highly secular and postmodern people, as well as reaching religious and traditional people. The Restoration of All Things We believe in the personal, glorious, and bodily return of our Lord Jesus Christ with his holy angels, when he will exercise his role as final Judge, and his kingdom will be consummated. Christ Jesus is our peace: he has not only brought about peace with God, but also peace between alienated peoples.
Indifference to the poor and disadvantaged means there has not been a true grasp of our salvation by sheer grace. Such a biblically grounded and united mission is the only endur- ing future for the church. We want to generate a unified effort among all peoplesan effort that is zealous to honor Christ and multiply his disciples, joining in a true coalition for Jesus. The integration of faith and work. Irreligion and secularism tend to inflate selfencouraging, uncritical, selfesteem; religion and moralism crush people under guilt from ethical standards that are impossible to maintain. God ordains that they assume distinctive roles which reflect the loving relationship between Christ and the church, the husband exercising headship in a way that displays the caring, sacrificial love of Christ, and the wife submitting to her husband in a way that models the love of the church for her Lord. We have a vision for a church that sees conversions of rich and poor, highly educated and less educated, men and women, old and young, married and single, and all races. Regarding the family, the church should affirm the goodness of marriage between a man and a woman, calling them to serve God by reflecting his covenant love in lifelong loyalty, and by teaching his ways to their children. Yet postmodernisms response is dangerous in another way: its most strident voices insist that claims to objective truth be replaced by a more humbly tolerant and inclusively diverse subjective pluralisma pluralism often mired in a swamp that cannot allow any firm ground for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints. Such a stance has no place for truth that corresponds to reality, but merely an array of subjectively shaped truths. We want to be a church that not only gives support to individual Christians in their personal walks with God, but one that also shapes them into the alternative human society God creates by his Word and Spirit. For several hundred years, since the dawning of the Enlightenment, it was widely agreed that truthexpressed in words that substantially correspond to realitydoes indeed exist and can be known. And while, in Gods grace, there is an encouraging number of bright spots in the church, we see no broad movement yet of this gospelcentered ministry. We believe that such commitments will drive us afresh toward Scripture, toward the Christ of Scripture, toward the gospel of Christ, and we will begin to grow in our ability, by Gods grace, as churches, to act in line with the truth of the gospel (Gal 2:14). The Kingdom of God We believe that those who have been saved by the grace of God through union with Christ by faith and through regeneration by the Holy Spirit enter the kingdom of God and delight in the blessings of the new covenant: the forgiveness of sins, the inward transformation that awakens a desire to glorify, trust, and obey God, and the prospect of the glory yet to be revealed. CONFESSIONAL STATEMENT He perfectly obeyed his heavenly Father, lived a sinless life, performed miraculous signs, was crucified under Pontius Pilate, arose bodily from the dead on the third day, and ascended into heaven. How should we relate to the culture around us? How this vision of truth shapes us. The gospel opens our eyes to the fact that all our wealth (even wealth for which we worked hard) is ultimately an unmerited gift from God. .
The gospel moves people to holiness and service out of grateful joy for grace, and out of love of the glory of God for who he is in himself. We do not believe that in best practice these two ways of reading the Bible are at all contradictory, even though today, many pit them against each other. At the same time, we are more flawed and sinful than we ever dared believe, yet we are more loved and accepted than we ever dared hope. You will find attached both our Confessional Statement and our Theological Vision for Ministrya vision rooted in the Scriptures and centered on the gospel. Truth is not only a theoretical correspondence but also a covenantal relationship. We therefore do not see our corporate worship services as the primary connecting point with those outside. (The epistemological issue). . 1. The Justification of Sinners We believe that Christ, by his obedience and death, fully discharged the debt of all those who are justified. While TGC does its best to validate each entry, TGC cannot guarantee the actual health of these churches as they are self-regulated. In corporate worship Gods people receive a special lifetransforming sight of the worth and beauty of God, and then give back to God suitable expressions of his worth. This universal church is manifest in local churches of which Christ is the only Head; thus each local church is, in fact, the church, the household of God, the assembly of the living God, and the pillar and foundation of the truth. The Gospel Coalition supports the church by providing resources that are trusted and timely, winsome and wise, and centered on the gospel of Jesus Christ. The gospel, however, humbles and affirms us at the same time, since, in Christ, each of us is simultaneously just, and a sinner still. In this imbalance there is little or no emphasis on the importance of the work of justice and mercy for the poor and the oppressed, and on cultural production that glorifies God in the arts, business, etc. contact us. At the same time, and in the same congregations, there will be engagement with the social structures of ordinary people, and cultural engagement with art, business, scholarship, and government. As the mediatorial King, he is seated at the right hand of God the Father, exercising in heaven and on earth all of Gods sovereignty, and is our High Priest and righteous Advocate.
As the Jewish exiles were called to love and work for the shalom of Babylon (Jer 29:7), Christians too are Gods people in exile (1 Peter 1:1; James 1:1).
This betrays a lack of gospel humility and a lack of love for our neighbor. Evangelistic effectiveness. There are many churches with a radical commitment to the poor and marginalized. We adopt a chastened correspondencetheory of truth that is less triumphalistic than that of some in the older evangelicalism. On the one hand, we are troubled by the idolatry of personal consumerism and the politicization of faith; on the other hand, we are distressed by the unchallenged acceptance of theological and moral relativism. The kingdom of God, already present but not fully realized, is the exercise of Gods sovereignty in the world toward the eventual redemption of all creation. 2. The gospel is the declaration that through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has come to reconcile individuals by his grace and renew the whole world by and for his glory. God put humanity in the garden to cultivate the material world for his own glory and for the flourishing of nature and the human community. We believe that Scripture is pervasively propositional and that all statements of Scripture are completely true and authoritative. Also, its preaching, though expository, was sometimes moralistic and did not emphasize how all biblical themes climax in Christ and his work. Copyright 2022 The Gospel Coalition, INC. All Rights Reserved. 2. We affirm that truth is correspondence to reality. We are a fellowship of evangelical churches in the Reformed tradition deeply committed to renewing our faith in the gospel of Christ and to reforming our ministry practices to conform fully to the Scriptures. We not only hear of these influences, we see their effects. Utter folly to the world, even though it is the power of God to those who are being saved, this good news is christological, centering on the cross and resurrection: the gospel is not proclaimed if Christ is not proclaimed, and the authentic Christ has not been proclaimed if his death and resurrection are not central (the message is: Christ died for our sins . Unaided human reason, it was thought, is able to know truth objectively. Developing humane yet creative and excellent business environments out of our understanding of the gospel is part of the work of bringing a measure of healing to Gods creation in the power of the Spirit. The practical evidence of this is that our local churches increasingly welcome and embrace people of all races and cultures. 3. 2. It therefore inevitably establishes a new community of human life together under God. This good news is biblical (his death and resurrection are according to the Scriptures), theological and salvific (Christ died for our sins, to reconcile us to God), historical (if the saving events did not happen, our faith is worthless, we are still in our sins, and we are to be pitied more than all others), apostolic (the message was entrusted to and transmitted by the apostles, who were witnesses of these saving events), and intensely personal (where it is received, believed, and held firmly, individual persons are saved). Such arrogance, they say explains, in part, many of the injustices and wars of the modern era. 1. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity, thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both Jew and Gentile to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. We cannot look at the poor and the oppressed and callously call them to pull themselves out of their own difficulty. 3. By his perfect obedience he satisfied the just demands of God on our behalf, since by faith alone that perfect obedience is credited to all who trust in Christ alone for their acceptance with God. The kingdom of God is an invasive power that plunders Satans dark kingdom and regenerates and renovates through repentance and faith the lives of individuals rescued from that kingdom. We believe that in many evangelical churches a deep and broad consensus exists regarding the truths of the gospel. Jesus did not treat us that way. The gospel is seen as a means of finding individual peace and not as the foundation of a worldviewa comprehensive interpretation of reality affecting all that we do. (The hermeneutical issue). The man Jesus, the promised Messiah of Israel, was conceived through the miraculous agency of the Holy Spirit, and was born of the virgin Mary. We desire to champion this gospel with clarity, compassion, courage, and joygladly linking hearts with fellow believers across denominational, ethnic, and class lines. Moreover, this God is a speaking God who by his Spirit has graciously disclosed himself in human words: we believe that God has inspired the words preserved in the Scriptures, the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments, which are both record and means of his saving work in the world. To read across the whole Bible is to collect its declarations, summons, promises, and truthclaims into categories of thought (e.g., theology, Christology, eschatology) and arrive at a coherent understanding of what it teaches summarily (e.g., Luke 24:4647). Christian growth occurs only when the whole life is shaped by Christian practices in communityincluding prayer, baptism, the Lords Supper, fellowship, and the public ministry of the Word. They will emphasize repentance, personal renewal, and holiness of life. In the ministry of the church, both men and women are encouraged to serve Christ and to be developed to their full potential in the manifold ministries of the people of God. He is the Creator of all things, visible and invisible, and is therefore worthy to receive all glory and adoration. If you have made an account on the new church directory but have forgotten your password you can recover it, If you have made an account on the new church directory but have forgotten your username or need any other assistance, please contact us at. The good news of the Bible is not only individual forgiveness but the renewal of the whole creation. What replaces the gospel will never promote a mission-hearted faith anchored in enduring truth working itself out in unashamed discipleship eager to stand the tests of kingdom-calling and sacrifice.
Our vision is to see lives transformed for the glory of God. If we seek service rather than power, we may have significant cultural impact. You can think of attending the Sunday Mass of the church also. We want to be radically distinct from the culture around us and yet, out of that distinct identity, we should sacrificially serve neighbors and even enemies, working for the flourishing of people, both here and now, and in eternity. This betrays a lack of confidence in the gospel. Because it points us to a man who died for his enemies, the gospel creates relationships of service rather than of selfishness.