WHAT WE BELIEVE
We take doctrine seriously, believing that accurate knowledge of God is essential to mature Christian living. Three key words describe our doctrinal convictions:
- Evangelical
- Reformed
- Presbyterian
Evangelical
We believe and preach those foundational truths that have always been essential to Christianity. That means we believe the Bible to be the inspired, inerrant, infallible Word of God. We believe that Jesus, the second person of the Holy Trinity, became incarnate, lived the perfect life we should have lived and paid the penalty we deserved when He died on the cross. We believe that His body was raised from the dead physically, and that as the only one through whom salvation comes, He freely gives eternal life to all who put their trust in Him. We believe that all human beings were made in God’s image, are accountable to Him and will be judged when Jesus returns in His Second Coming. Those who have put their trust in Jesus will be welcomed into an eternal glory in heaven, and those who have ignored or denied His claims will be cut off forever in the anguish of an eternal hell.
Reformed
We hold fast to those historic truths that were returned to the church during the 16th Sola Scripture (our infallible source of truth is Scripture alone), Sola Fide (we are justified by faith alone), Sola Gratia (God elects a people based on grace alone), Solus Christus (Christ alone is head of His church), and Soli Deo Gloria (all that we believe and do is for the glory of God alone). Put most succinctly, we seek to be God-centered in all that we think and do, from worship in the sanctuary to work in our career.
Presbyterian
We believe God has not only told us in His Word what He wants us to believe and how He wants us to live. He has also told us how we are to organize and function in our corporate life as a church. At the heart of that is church government by elders in the local church. The word elder comes from the Greek word presbyteros, thus we are “Presbyterian.” These elders (including the pastor) are elected by the congregation as men of godly wisdom and maturity, and have the responsibility of overseeing the spiritual life of the congregation. And representative elders from each congregation work cooperatively and in submission to one another in regional presbyteries. Thus we are a “connectional” denomination.
Presbyterian Church in America
We are connected to other churches in our denomination across the nation. The Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) was organized in 1973 as like-minded pastors and congregations withdrew from our former denomination because of its increasingly tragic abandonment of historic Biblical truths, and made a fresh start by returning to those truths cherished by previous generations of believers. We have grown nationally from 40,000 members to almost 400,000, and from 8 career missionaries to over 600, through evangelism, discipleship and church planting. Since our founding, we have remained committed to the Great Commission (local and foreign missions), in inerrancy of Scripture (believing that every word of the Bible is God-breathed), and historic Reformed theology (God-centered life and doctrine as articulated by Reformation leaders such as Martin Luther, John Calvin, and John Knox). For more information, we invite you to explore our denomination’s website at pcanet.org
Westminster Standards
We are a “confessional” church, in that we have a set of documents which articulate what we believe the Bible teaches. Our ordained officers (teaching and ruling elders, as well as deacons) take a solemn public oath, affirming that they “sincerely receive and adopt” the system of doctrine taught in those PCA constitutional standards. This is intended to maintain the purity of the church by having leaders who have sworn to maintain faithfulness to those doctrinal truths. These documents are three in number, and were composed by Puritan leaders meeting at Westminster Abbey in England during the mid-1600s. They are the Westminster Confession of Faith, Larger Catechism, and Shorter Catechism. You can read these documents here at our denomination’s web site: pcaac.org/resources/wcf/
