Our Beliefs
God
1. There is one God, the creator of all things, to whom all creatures owe the highest love, reverence and obedience. God is revealed to us as one God in three persons: God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.
What we believe about the Bible
2. The Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are the inspired Word of God and are an infallible guide and final authority on all questions of what man is to believe and how he is to live. Additions to Scripture, either by supposed revelations of the Holy Spirit, or the ideas of man, are inadmissible.
Human Beings
3. All men have sinned against God by breaking his commandments, and, guilty before God, are subject to his judgement and wrath. Sin has so affected man’s nature that he cannot, in his own strength, live as God requires or turn to God.
Salvation
4. God, in his great love and mercy, sent his Son into the world to be a mediator between sinners and himself. The Son, being truly God, took a real human nature & lived a sinless life in obedience to God the Father. God gave the Lord Jesus Christ to die on the cross as the Substitute for his people, bearing the full penalty for their sins. Christ rose from the dead and he ascended into heaven where he lives and reigns.
5. To make the death of Christ effective for individual sinners, it is necessary for the Holy Spirit to work in them. The Spirit renews their natures, makes their souls alive, giving them the desire and the ability to repent and believe in Christ as their Saviour and Lord.
The Christian Life
6. God justifies sinners by faith and adopts them to be his sons. The Holy Spirit indwells God’s people and further works in them and strengthens them so that they are enabled more and more to glorify God in their lives and to overcome sin and temptation within themselves. True believers are kept and preserved until they enter into the joys of heaven. The revelatory gifts of the Holy Spirit with which the early church was endowed have ceased.
The Church
7. The church of Christ is instituted by God for his worship and service, and for the encouragement and building up of his people. The local church is a fellowship of believers in Christ. Christ has instituted two special ordinances for the local church: baptism and the Lord’s Supper.
The Future
8. The Lord Jesus Christ will return personally, visibly and bodily, and in power and glory. The bodies of men after death return to dust but their spirits return immediately to God – the righteous to rest with him, the wicked to be reserved under darkness until the judgement. The bodies of all the dead, both just and unjust, will be raised.
God has appointed a day in which he will judge the world by Jesus Christ when everyone will receive according to his deeds. The wicked will go into everlasting punishment in hell with the devil and his angels. The righteous in Christ, with glorified bodies, will live and reign with Christ for ever.
Our Distinctives
• We are Bible-centred. We believe God speaks powerfully today through his Word, and we want everything to be shaped by that.
• We want to honour Jesus. We are unashamed in our commitment to Jesus as the only way to God. He is literally alive and governs this church directly. We want to know, love and serve him better and better.
• We have plain, straightforward meetings. We speak in modern English and keep worship simple to stay focused on God, not ourselves.
• We want to be outward-looking. Without Christ, people dishonour him and are terribly lost in their sins. So local and global mission has to be a priority.
• We believe in the sovereignty of God over all things, not least in the salvation of sinners. By grace he chose us before we ever chose him.
• We seek to make prayer central to church life. Jesus said, ‘Apart from me you can do nothing.’ We believe it!
• We do not speak in tongues or prophesy. We believe that the Biblical way to honour these wonderful spiritual gifts is to recognise that they had a unique and temporary role in the founding of the early church.
• We are Baptist by Biblical conviction. So we only baptise believers, by immersion; we believe in having a defined church membership; we are independent of any external authority other than that of Christ; and we welcome to the Lord's Table anyone who is a baptised member of this or another Biblical church.
• We have male leadership. We believe the Bible is clear about the responsibility of men to lead the local church, and we seek to obey it.
• We value the idea of the ‘church family’. Churches ought to be places where both our diversity and unity are celebrated and worked at.
• We are very imperfect. We are still learning what it means to love God, each other and our community. We still have many faults, blind spots and weaknesses. Anyone who joins us in membership needs to be prepared for that – and prepared to join us in praying for the Spirit’s power in all we do.