ABOUT
Our Distinctives
What We Value.
Our mission is to exalt God, equip the saints for the work of service, edify one another, and evangelize the world. We exalt God by glorifying, loving, knowing, worshipping, thanking, serving, and obeying Him. We equip the saints through the teaching, training, shepherding, praying for, and leading of His people. We edify one another through involvement, commitment, prayer, service, mutual ministry, and discipleship among each other. We evangelize the world through compassion, prayer, conversion, and communicating the Gospel to our neighbors and the world.
Our distinctives are the unique way in which we apply our doctrine. They are the values, commitments, and priorities which are grounded in our theological convictions that guide us as we carry out our mission. Read on to see all our distinctives, or click a link to skip to individual items.
We believe in the verbal, plenary inspiration of the Bible, which simply means that the Bible is given by God right down to the very words and their meanings. Because the Bible is God’s Word, it is authoritative, true, trustworthy, sufficient, and without error in all it says (2 Peter 1:20–21). This is why we affirm the reformation truth of ‘sola scriptura’: in the Bible, God has not only given us an authoritative standard to which we must submit our lives as well as our minds, but He has given us everything we need for life and godliness, and the only sufficient rule for faith and practice (2 Timothy 3:15–17; Hebrews 4:12; 1 Peter 2:3).
When we talk about expositional or expository preaching, we are simply talking about reading, explaining, and applying the whole Bible, verse by verse, book by book, week after week (2 Timothy 3:16–4:5). Because the whole Bible is the inerrant, authoritative Word of God, we are committed to expositional preaching as the most biblical kind of Bible teaching. Not only does this enable us to mine the riches of God’s Word at a deep, meaningful level, but it also prevents us from taking verses out of context, skipping over the difficult passages, or coming up with our own unique interpretations that God never intended. By committing ourselves to the verse-by-verse preaching of the Bible, we follow after the apostolic pattern of faithfully teaching the whole counsel of God (Acts 20:26-27).
“All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work.”
2 TIMOTHY 3:16-17
We believe the biblical model of local church leadership is a plurality of qualified, gifted men who are pastors of God’s flock. Not only is this taught in Scripture, but it provides mutual accountability, collective wisdom, and a sharing of the joys and burdens of ministry among these elders while ensuring that the people of God are properly taught, protected, and shepherded (1 Peter 4:1–5).
We practice baptism by immersion for those who have professed faith in Christ not for salvation or as a work of merit, but as a symbol of the believer’s identification with Christ and His church (Matthew 28:19).
We believe that God reveals Himself in Scripture not only to be the Creator of all things, but absolutely sovereign over all things, providentially governing His universe toward His preordained ends (Psalm 119:19; Ephesians 1:11). His sovereignty not only rules over the broad scope of history, but over individuals, and especially over the salvation of sinners (Ephesians 1:3–12; Romans 8:28–30).
