What does it mean to be a church?
We believe that church is a place where we are called to honor our past, to worship God in the present, and to follow God into the future.  We are proud of the history that has brought us to where we are today, but we also rejoice that God has a plan for us. God wants us to be a living church, one with a vibrant future ahead of it. We believe that we can do that best when we embrace our mission…to love God by loving all of God’s creation.

We believe that the church is the training ground for our ministry out in the world.
God has blessed us with a community where we can learn our story, ask questions and form relationships with fellow disciples, gain wisdom and insight and knowledge, receive grace and practice forgiveness, learn to pray and identify the gifts that God has given us for serving the world.  And then, encouraged by our fellowship together, we can go out and put those gifts to good use.

Our community helps us to do this by helping us to remember who and whose we are: we are beloved children of God, fearfully and wonderfully made in God’s image, reflecting the broad and expansive diversity of the Kingdom of God.  In church, we learn to make space for one another, to hear voices and perspectives that depart from our own, and to listen for the still, small voice of God’s Spirit at work within our neighbor. We believe church ought to challenge us even as we are comforted, and our hope is that we will leave our fellowship with a broader mind than we came with.

Finally, we affirm with thanksgiving the testimony of those who have come before us, on whose shoulders our faith rests, who affirmed that God was at work in the past and in the present to bring God’s Kingdom of peace and justice to fruition. We give thanks for our denomination, the Presbyterian Church (USA), which reminds us that we are a connectional church, and that we are stronger together than we are alone.

And we confess, in the words of the Second Helvetic Confession:

That I belong—body and soul, in life and in death—not to myself but to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ, who at the cost of his own blood has fully paid for all my sins and has completely freed me from the do- minion of the devil; that he protects me so well that without the will of my Father in heaven not a hair can fall from my head; indeed, that every- thing must fit his purpose for my salvation. Therefore, by his Holy Spirit, he also assures me of eternal life, and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.