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. We believe in the bodily resurrection of both the just and the unjust – the unjust to judgment and eternal conscious punishment in hell and the just to eternal blessedness in the presence of him who sits on the throne in the new heaven and the new earth, the home of righteousness. On that day the church will be presented faultless before God by the merits and triumph of Christ, all sin purged and its wretched effects forever banished. 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 that baptism and the Lord’s Supper are ordained by the Lord Jesus himself. The former is a outward symbol of the inner reality of entrance into the new covenant community, the latter a symbol of ongoing covenant renewal and a means spiritual nurture and growth. Together they are simultaneously God’s 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.

We believe that God’s new covenant people have already come to the heavenly Jerusalem; they are already seated with Christ in the heavenlies. This universal church is manifested 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 church is the body of Christ, the apple of his eye, graven on his hands, since he has pledged himself to her forever. The church is distinguished by her gospel message, her sacred ordinances, her discipline, her great mission, and, above all, her love of God, and her members’ love of one another and of the world. Crucially, this gospel we cherish has both personal and corporate dimensions, neither of which may properly be overlooked. Christ Jesus is our peace: he has not only brought about peace with God, but also peace between alienated peoples. 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. The church serves as a sign of God’s future new world where its members live for the service of one another and their neighbors, rather than for self. The church is the corporate dwelling place of God’s Spirit, and the continuing witness to God in the world.

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 anticipation of their glory yet to be revealed. Good works constitute indispensable evidence of saving grace. 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 the glory and honor of the nations is to be offered up to the living God. Recognizing whose created order this is, and because we are citizens of God’s kingdom, we are to love our neighbors as though they were ourselves, doing good to all, especially to those who belong to the household of God. The kingdom of God is an invasive power that plunders Satan’s dark kingdom and regenerates and renovates through repentance and faith the lives of people rescued from that kingdom. It therefore inevitably establishes a new community of human life together under God.

We believe that salvation, attested in all Scripture and secured by Jesus Christ, is applied to his people by the Holy Spirit. Sent by the Father and the Son, the Holy Spirit glorifies the Lord Jesus Christ and is present with and in believers. He convicts the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment, and by his powerful and mysterious work regenerates spiritually dead sinners, awakening them to repentance and faith, baptizing them into union with the Lord Jesus, such that they are justified before God by grace alone through faith alone in Jesus Christ alone. By the agency of the Holy Spirit, believers are renewed, sanctified, and adopted into God’s family; they participate in the divine nature and receive his sovereignly distributed gifts. The Holy Spirit is himself the down payment of the promised inheritance, and in this age indwells, guides, instructs, equips, revives, and empowers believers for Christ-like service.

We believe that Christ, by his obedience and death, fully discharged the debt of all those who are justified. By his sacrifice, he bore in our stead the penalty due us for our sins, making a proper, real, and full satisfaction to God’s justice on our behalf. Inasmuch as he was given by the Father for us, and his obedience and satisfaction accepted in our stead, and both freely and not for anything in us, this justification is solely of free grace, in order that both the exact justice and the rich grace of God might be glorified in the justification of sinners.

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. 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. 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. As the mediatorial King, he is seated at the right hand of God the Father, exercising in heaven and on earth all of God’s sovereignty, and is our High Priest and righteous Advocate. We believe that by his incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and ascension, Jesus Christ acted as our representative and substitute, 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. 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 believe that salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven by which we must be saved. Because God chose the lowly things of this world, the despised things, the things that are not, to nullify the things that are, no human can ever boast before him. Christ Jesus has become our righteousness, holiness, and redemption.

We believe that the gospel is the good news of Jesus Christ. Utter folly to the world, even though it is the power of God to those who are being saved, this good news is centered on the cross and resurrection of Christ: 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. This good news is biblical (his death and resurrection are according to the Scriptures), theological and salvific (in order to reconcile us to God Christ died for our sins), historical (if the saving events did not actually 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).

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, that he justifies and sanctifies those who by grace have faith in Jesus, and that he will one day glorify them – all to the praise of his glorious grace. In love God commands and implores all people to repent and believe, having set his saving love on those he has chosen and having ordained Christ to be their Redeemer.

We believe that Adam, made in the image of God, perverted that image by falling into sin through Satan’s temptation and in so doing forfeited his original blessedness. As a result, all humans are alienated from God, corrupted in every aspect of their beings (i.e., physically, mentally, volitionally, emotionally, spiritually) and condemned finally and irrevocably to death – apart from God’s own gracious intervention. The supreme need of all human beings is to be reconciled to God under whose just and holy wrath we stand; and the only way forward is to receive the undeserved love of this same God, who alone can rescue and restore us to himself.

We believe that God created human beings, male and female, and in his own image. Adam and Eve belonged to the created order that God declared to be very good, serving as God’s caretakers in the cultivation of creation, living in holy and devoted fellowship with their Maker. Men and women enjoy equal access to God by faith in Christ Jesus and both are called to move beyond self-indulgence to an active self-giving engagement with family, church and civic life. In marriage, husbands and wives enter into a one-flesh union which serves ultimately as a type of the relationship between Christ and his church, and establishes the only normative pattern of sexual relations. In God’s wise purposes, husbands and wives are not simply interchangeable: they complement each other in mutually enriching ways, such that when each fulfills his or her own God-given role the glory of God’s own image is reflected in their marriage.

God has graciously disclosed his existence and power in the created order, and has supremely revealed himself to fallen human beings in the person of his Son, the incarnate Word. 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. 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. We confess that both our finitude and our sinfulness preclude the possibility of knowing God’s truth exhaustively, but we affirm that, enlightened by the Spirit of God, we can know it truly. The Bible is to be believed, as God’s instruction, in all that it teaches; obeyed, as God’s command, in all that it requires; and trusted, as God’s pledge, in all that it promises. As God’s people hear, believe, and do the Word, they are equipped as disciples of Christ and witnesses to the gospel.

We believe in one God, eternally existing in three equally divine Persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, who know, love and glorify one another. This one true and living God is infinitely perfect in his love and in his holiness. He is the Creator of all things, visible and invisible, and is therefore worthy to receive all glory and adoration. Immortal and eternal, he perfectly and exhaustively knows the end from the beginning, sustains and sovereignly rules over all things, and providentially brings about his eternal and good purposes to redeem a people for himself and restore his fallen creation, to the praise of his glorious grace.

adapted from The Gospel Coalition Statement of Faith