Statement of Faith

I believe in God who is Trinity, three in one, one in three. God is the one who rescued Israel out of slavery in Egypt, who raised Jesus Christ from the dead. God is the one who hears people when they cry out and saves them. “God is the one who loves in freedom.”(Karl Barth) The Father sends the Son through the power of the Holy Spirit to redeem the world through the Cross of Christ, which reconciles sinful humanity back to God. God defines sin as all that God is not. In raising Jesus from the dead, God gifts humanity with eternal life. Eternal life is the promise of the resurrection, the promise that nothing, not even death, can separate us from the love of God. God is what God has done, is doing, and will do. And what God does is love.

I believe in God the Father who creates, covenants, and calls. The Father is the one who sends the Son.

I believe in God the Son, the eternal Word of God, who is the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the light of the world. Born a Jew, baptized by John the Baptist, filled with the Holy Spirit to proclaim God’s kingdom to the poor, Jesus healed the sick, received the rejected, and awakened Israel for the salvation of the nations. In his eternal act of obedience to the sending of the Father, Jesus defines what it means to be God; he also defines what it means to be human. Jesus Christ is the true human.  His history is our history, because we are what we are in him. In him, we died; in him, we rise again. We are already in Christ, by virtue of having been chosen in him when he performs his saving work. We are already in him, by virtue of the Father’s choosing of us to be God’s people. This covenant of the Father is sealed by the power of the Holy Spirit in the crucifixion of Jesus the Son. In this act of God, we are graciously granted our true identity by God, whose gifts and calling are irrevocable. This is what grace means to me. We belong to Jesus. We are God’s children—loved, forgiven, saved.

I believe in God the Holy Spirit, who sustains, comforts, convicts, and sanctifies. Imagine the Father and the Son as a spiraling circle. The Holy Spirit is the love that emanates and processes from the one to the other. The Holy Spirit is the love of the triune God personified. The Spirit is like a wild goose, moving in mysterious ways, transforming all that the Spirit encounters. Christ sits at the right hand of God the Father—the Spirit places Christ within our hearts.

I believe that the Bible is holy scripture, which witnesses in its entirety to the truth of who God is as revealed in the birth, ministry, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus of Nazareth. All scripture tells of God’s judgment and points towards God’s grace in Jesus.  By and through this witness, it becomes the Word of God. I have come to realize that, as 2 Timothy 3:16 testifies, “All scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.”

I believe that the sacraments of Baptism and Communion are outward signs of an inward-working grace, where Christ is spiritually present in a special way. In Baptism, we corporately and communally acknowledge, accept, proclaim, and, through the power of the Holy Spirit, seal God’s gracious and unconditional claim upon us as children of the Father, sisters and brothers of the Lord. In Communion, we accept the gifts of bread and wine, which are signs of the broken body and shed blood of Jesus. In receiving these, through the power of the Holy Spirit, we are welcomed, again and again, into the arms of Jesus. We depend on these gifts for our very life, for in them, we testify to the truth that Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again, in the fullness of time.

I believe the Church is the body of Christ. The body of Christ, called and constituted by the Lord, congregates as the saved sinners that we are, and among this congregation, we hear the Word preached, we receive the sacraments, and we exercise congregational discipline for the purpose of restoration. The Church lives into the promise that the death of Jesus is neither the end of his story, nor our story. The Church witnesses to the truth that, in the power of the resurrection, we are made a new creation, given the task to go, tell, and make disciples in a spirit of thanksgiving for all that God has done for us. The purpose of a Christian’s life is to become more and more like Jesus, to bear witness to his grace. The purpose of the Church is to bear witness to the Good News of Jesus Christ through our worship, which manifests itself in our gatherings on Sundays, and in our moment-to-moment encounters with neighbors, whom Christ has commanded we love and serve. As the Father sends the Son, through the power of the Holy Spirit, the Son sends the Church out into the world to love and to serve, bearing witness to the truth of God in the Risen Lord Jesus.

Me and a young person from White Memorial Presbyterian Willow Springs,
 on my last sunday of my internship