What We Believe

We believe . . . in Jesus

Jesus Christ is the person at the centre of what we believe. He’s so important to our faith that we take our very name after Him. We call ourselves Christians because of Jesus Christ and we believe that Jesus is God Incarnate, God’s Son, our Saviour, Rescuer, Redeemer and friend. Some of those are big words that can be hard to understand and we would love to talk to you about them, but at their core is we believe Jesus is God’s Son, the second person of the Trinity, who came into the world, lived a perfect life, died an atoning, sacrificial death on the cross for the sins of God’s people, physically rose again from the dead, and will one day come back again.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made
John 1:1-3 ESV

In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
1st John 4:10 ESV

We believe . . . the Gospel

“Gospel” simply means “good news” and it is great news! It’s the good news that God hasn’t abandoned His people but made a way for them to be part of His family despite the distance they created by turning away from Him in the beginning. God did this by sending His Son, Jesus Christ, into the world to die on a cross. Through Jesus’ obedient life and sacrificial death, the distance between God and His people has been closed and we can come close.
Why is that such good news though? Don’t other religions teach that we can get close to their ‘god’ too? It’s good news because through Jesus, God has provided everything that His people needed to be part of His family. Jesus came down for us so that we could come to Him and he made the way, rather than us working our way up to Him, He came down for us! That’s such good news because far too often we treat the gospel in ‘be’ terms, ‘be better,’ ‘be good’ and then you will ‘be loved,’ but the ‘be’s’ that God wants us to embrace is to believe that because of His Son and what He has done we are His beloved and then to turn away from a life lived without Him to a life lived with Him. That ‘turning to’ and ‘turning away’ is what we call repentance, and that is a vital part of the gospel as well. Repentance is turning away from the things that we used to do that displeased and were disobedient to God, and turning to God and living a whole new life under God’s command. Put simply, since God has changed our hearts, our lives should change as well, we shouldn’t be the same as before!

Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain.
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures
1st Corinthians 15:1-3

The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.
1st Timothy 1:15 ESV

We believe . . . the Bible

The Bible is God’s Word and by His Spirit, God inspired His people to write down the wonderful story of His grace and love. The Bible is more than a rule book, it is the foundation on which Christians build their lives. We turn to God’s Word to help guide and direct us in everything that we do and we always want it to be at the centre of our church family life. The central character of the Bible is Jesus, it is all about Him, and the central message of the Bible is grace. Every time we open its Spirit breathed pages we want are getting to see and hear God and find out what He wants for this world and our lives.
Some of the words that we use to describe the Bible are inerrant, infallible, and sufficient. That means that we believe that the Bible is God’s Word, completely true, without any mistakes, and that what it tells us is enough for what God wants from us and how we should live in this world.

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.
2nd Timothy 3:16-17

We believe . . . in Reformed Theology

As a Presbyterian Church, we are part of a group of people who embrace what is known as Reformed Theology. This means that though we trace our roots back in time to the church as it came to be in Acts and God’s people as Israel and beyond, we are a product of the Reformation of the 16th Century. During that time the church underwent changes, or reforms, with the hope of bringing it back to the standards of the early church. We continue as people with that endeavour always hoping to maintain a steadfast unshakeable dependence on the Bible as God’s Word and that we are justified, ‘made right’, with God’ by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.
You can find a summary of what Presbyterians believe in the subordinate standards of our church: the Westminster Confession of Faith, and the Shorter and Larger Catechisms.

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.
Ephesians 2:8

We believe . . . that how we live matters

We want people to know all the right things about Jesus, the Bible and theology, but we also want people to live the right way and do the right things. We believe that living the right way and doing the right things is a vital part of being a disciple of Jesus and is lived out by doing what God wants.
Our lives are meant to be lived as a response to Jesus’ love and grace and though we often fail to live up to our Christian calling we constantly look to Jesus in the hope that we become more and more like Him in how we live and what we say and do. We want our faith to be seen, not only through what comes from our lips, but in what we do as well.
This matters because what we do speaks of who we are; what we do tells the world whether we really do belong to and believe in Jesus. We have all heard someone talk about hypocrisy in the church and we know it is there in all our lives but we want every day as we walk in the footsteps of Jesus to be another day when we have closed some of the distance between what we say, how we live and who we really are.
We don’t only want this in our lives as individuals, we want this for our whole church family. This is where we want to be people not only known for Gospel Doctrine, believing the Biblical truths, but also for Gospel Culture, living out those truths as well.

Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ
Philippians 1:27a

“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.”
John 15:12-23

I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.
Ephesians 4:1-3

We believe . . . in preaching

Every Sunday the single longest part of our service will be when someone, usually Philip our minister, opens the Bible and explains what God has said, how this points to Jesus, and how we are to live in response to His grace. This is part of us holding up the Bible as the foundation of our faith and we never want to shy away from God’s Word being at the centre of everything we do, without His saving words being spoken we are doomed to a life lived at distance to God the destination of which is death and hell.

Listening to preaching in our day and age is not an easy thing, our attention spans are shorter and it’s so tempting to think it’s boring and doesn’t really matter when thoughts like that cross our minds we are fighting the same battle as our first parents did back in the garden (Genesis 3). In response, we need to remember that this is how God has chosen for His people to come home and if it’s important to God it should be important to us.

How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can anyone preach unless they are sent? As it is written: “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!”
Romans 10:14-15