I believe in the Holy Triune God, revealed to us in nature, Scripture and history, but most of all through Jesus Christ. I believe in the Holy Triune God who still reveals himself to us through our own experience and remains active in the life of the church and creation today. God is the majestic Creator of heaven and earth; the servant Redeemer of our world gone astray; the transforming Spirit who empowers new beginnings in human life.
God is sovereign; the Creator of the world and humankind, each one in his own image. God loves us as his own children. Without Him nothing would have existed or continue to exist. Through the fall, we now live in a broken world as broken people. God chose the nation of Israel to show his love to all people, to draw them to him, and to reveal himself to the world. Beginning in the Old Testament the Father planned the incarnation of the Son out of Israel as salvation for all humanity.
God is mainly known to us through Jesus Christ. The Father sent Jesus as a human, to suffer and die for us, to save us and to restore the relationship between the Father, us and creation. Jesus became fully human, suffered as a human, felt joy like a human, celebrated, mourned, hungered and thirsted, cried, was betrayed and was hurt. Only through the death of Jesus Christ incarnate can we be reconciled to God, and our sins redeemed before God. The resurrection of Jesus Christ reconciles humanity to God through defeating death and the forces of evil once and for all. Only through the resurrection can we, too, defeat death to be resurrected upon the return of Christ to a life everlasting. Jesus left us with the Word, the Gospel, which is our guide to live by. It is the authoritative Word of God, inspired by the Spirit and written by humans called to do so.
The Father and the Son send the Spirit to be with us as reminders of the love of the Father in giving up the Son to death, and the love of Christ for humanity and its brokenness. The Holy Spirit is God with us now, in our midst, in our hearts and in our lives, and continues to reveal God to us today. The Spirit opens our hearts to the Scriptures and our experiences, and so reveals God to us. The Spirit guides us, comforts us, corrects us, prays with us, shows us God and keeps us in a relationship with God through her continuous presence.
I believe that the Church is the body of Christ – all believers in all times and places. As God is interrelated with self in the Trinity in a loving, communal relationship we are to interact with God and each other. The proclamation of the Word and the Sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper as marks of the Church, feeds us and keeps us in communion with the Triune God. Through the Sacraments we receive the grace that helps us to live as Disciples of Christ. The Church is called to be a community of reconciliation and to participate in Jesus’ ministry of the Kingdom of God on earth. It renounces oppression and works for the liberation of all.