Beliefs

We are Biblical.

We believe that whenever God speaks, His word is authoritative and that God has revealed Himself to mankind in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. We believe the Bible to be infallible, inerrant, sufficient, and the only rule of faith and practice. God’s Word is life-giving and so it is central to everything we believe and do here at New Hope. As God’s Word, it’s just as relevant for people in the 21^st century as it was for people in the 1^st. We love to read the Word, study the Word, and preach the Word. It guides our faith, our worship, and how we live, both inside and outside the church.

We are catholic.

Catholic is a term that means universal. By this we mean that we affirm the historic beliefs of the universal church. We believe in the Holy Trinity. There is but one God only, who exists eternally in three persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. We believe that all people are sinners by nature, justly deserving God’s righteous wrath, and that the only way of salvation is through faith in Jesus Christ and repentance of sins. We believe that Jesus Christ is the eternal Son of God who, through His perfect life and sacrificial death, atoned for the sins of all those who will trust in Him alone for salvation and that God calls all people to accept his free offer of the gospel. We believe that Christians are called to come together to worship God, live in fellowship with one another, and live holy lives in response to God’s grace freely given. We believe Jesus Christ rose bodily from the dead and will one day bodily and visibly return to judge all mankind.

We are Confessional.

The church today stands on the shoulders of the faithful men and women who have gone on before us. Though only the Bible is authoritative, we believe that it is wise to look to the collective wisdom of those who have already fought the good fight, having spent their lives pouring over Scripture and recording their learning for us, rather than each generation seeking to start the faith anew. Church confessions were written by Godly men so that future generations of the church would be better equipped with the knowledge of those who have gone on before us, so we are a confessional church. While there have been many sound confessions and catechisms produced over the centuries, we believe that the best and most thorough one produced by men is the Westminster Confession of Faith with its Larger and Shorter Catechisms. We subscribe to these as our standards because we believe that these are the most accurate summaries of the system of doctrine taught in Scripture. The Westminster Confession is no small document, but we like this because the Bible teaches on not just a few areas, but many topics. You can read the Westminster standards here.

We are Reformed.

This means that we adhere to a particular understanding of Scripture that came out of the Reformation, following the teachings of men like John Calvin and John Knox. The Reformed Faith is an approach to understanding God and Scripture that seeks to stress what Scripture stresses: the sovereignty of God in all things, the centrality and sufficiency of Scripture as the only authoritative rule for faith and practice, the inability of man to save himself, God’s covenantal relationship with man, the sufficiency of the work of Christ to save, the effective work of the Holy Spirit to bring dead souls to life, and that God calls us to worship him according to his revealed will.

We are Presbyterian.

The name Presbyterian comes from the Greek word for elder, presbuteros. In the New Testament, we find that every church was governed by a plurality of elders and that these churches were connected to one another, so we in the Presbyterian church seek to follow the apostolic practice by ordaining men to the office of elder who meet the requirements laid out in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 and by being a part of a denomination where we mutually submit to one another. Presbyterianism simply means churches ruled by elders. This means that there isn’t just one man at the top calling all the shots, but instead the church is governed by many elders who are elected by the congregation. This gives the church greater accountability and stability. Our church then seeks to be accountable to other churches in the body of Christ by being a party of the Presbyterian Church in America, the largest Bible-believing Reformed denomination in the English-speaking world. You can visit our denomination’s website here.