2. 4. Inasmuch as Christ was given by the Father for us, and his obedience and punishment were accepted in place of our own, 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. The gospel changes our relationship with God from one of hostility or slavish compliance to one of intimacy and joy. contact us. Such sharing also promotes a radically generous commitment of time, money, relationships, and living space to social justice and the needs of the poor, the oppressed, the immigrant, and the economically and physically weak. What replaces the gospel will never promote a mission-hearted faith anchored in enduring truth working itself out in unashamed discipleship eager to stand the tests of kingdom-calling and sacrifice. We want to be a church that not only gives support to individual Christians in their personal walks with God, but one that also shapes them into the alternative human society God creates by his Word and Spirit. Christ Jesus is our peace: he has not only brought about peace with God, but also peace between alienated peoples. But the gospel of grace, centered on a man dying for us while we were his enemies, removes selfrighteousness and selfishness and turns its members to serve others both for the temporal flourishing of all people, especially the poor, and for their salvation. The Redemption of Christ 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 church should surround all persons suffering from the fallenness of our human sexuality with a compassionate community and family. 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. Christian churches must work for justice and peace in their neighborhoods through service even as they call individuals to conversion and the new birth. Instead of calling people to individual conversion through a message of grace, people are called to join the Christian community and kingdom program of what God is doing to liberate the world. 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. It is not enough that the church should counter the values of the dominant culture. Because the gospel calls us to holiness, the people of God live in loving bonds of mutual accountability and discipline. If a church seeks to be a counterculture for peoples temporal and eternal good, it will guard itself against both the legalism that can accompany undue cultural withdrawal and the compromise that comes with overadaptation. Our theoretical knowledge of Gods truth is only partial even when accurate, but we nevertheless can have certainty that what the Word tells us is true (Luke 1:4). If you would like to have it removed, please The Fall We believe that Adam, made in the image of God, distorted that image and forfeited his original blessednessfor himself and all his progenyby falling into sin through Satans temptation. There you will find a "Claim Listing" button. 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 living and service. We therefore do not see our corporate worship services as the primary connecting point with those outside. 3. As we confess in CS(7), Jesus Christ acted as our representative and substitute, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. We desire to advance along the Kings highway, always aiming to provide gospel advocacy, encouragement, and education so that current- and next-generation church leaders are better equipped to fuel their ministries with principles and practices that glorify the Savior and do good to those for whom he shed his lifes blood. The cross is seen mainly as an example of sacrificial service and a defeat of worldly powers rather than substitution and propitiation for our sins. But to deny the possibility of purely objective knowledge does not mean the loss of truth that corresponds to objective reality, even if we can never know such truth without an element of subjectivity. This betrays a lack of gospel humility and a lack of love for our neighbor. Irreligion and secularism tend to inflate selfencouraging, uncritical, selfesteem; religion and moralism crush people under guilt from ethical standards that are impossible to maintain. We affirm that truth is correspondence of life to God. Adam and Eve were made to complement each other in a one-flesh union that establishes the only normative pattern of sexual relations for men and women, such that marriage ultimately serves as a type of the union between Christ and his church. He did this 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. Christ wins our salvation through losing, achieves power through weakness and service, and comes to wealth through giving all away. We want to generate a unified effort among all peoplesan effort that is zealous to honor Christ and multiply his disciples, joining in a true coalition for Jesus. Adam and Eve belonged to the created order that God himself declared to be very good, serving as Gods agents to care for, manage, and govern creation, living in holy and devoted fellowship with their Maker. The church is the body of Christ, the apple of his eye, graven on his hands, and he has pledged himself to her forever. It is a community which so loves and cares practically for its members that biblical chastity makes sense. Therefore Christians glorify God not only through the ministry of the Word, but also through their vocations of agriculture, art, business, government, scholarshipall for Gods glory and the furtherance of the public good. If we do this we will be salt and light in the world (sustaining and improving living conditions, showing the world the glory of God by our patterns of living; Matt 5:1316). We desire to champion this gospel with clarity, compassion, courage, and joygladly linking hearts with fellow believers across denominational, ethnic, and class lines. Because the gospel (unlike religious moralism) produces people who do not disdain those who disagree with them, a truly gospelcentered church should be filled with members who winsomely address peoples hopes and aspirations with Christ and his saving work. In the ministry of the church, both men and women are encouraged to serve Christ and to be developed to their full potential in the manifold ministries of the people of God. We hope to draw highly secular and postmodern people, as well as reaching religious and traditional people. The biblical revelation is not just to be known, but to be lived (Deut 29:29). God put humanity in the garden to cultivate the material world for his own glory and for the flourishing of nature and the human community. Secularism tends to make people selfish and individualistic. If your area does not have a regional chapter and you are interested in starting one, please contact us at [emailprotected]. We believe that in many evangelical churches a deep and broad consensus exists regarding the truths of the gospel. By his sacrifice, he bore in our stead the punishment due us for our sins, making a proper, real, and full satisfaction to Gods justice on our behalf. We must work for the eternal and common good and show our neighbors we love them sacrificially whether they believe as we do or not. 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 all the glory and honor of the nations is to be offered up to the living God. (See below, point 5c.). You will find attached both our Confessional Statement and our Theological Vision for Ministrya vision rooted in the Scriptures and centered on the gospel. II. We have become deeply concerned about some movements within traditional evangelicalism that seem to be diminishing the churchs life and leading us away from our historic beliefs and practices. As Gods people hear, believe, and do the Word, they are equipped as disciples of Christ and witnesses to the gospel. We do all of this because the gospel of God leads us to it, even while we recognize that the ultimate restoration of all things awaits the personal and bodily return of our Lord Jesus Christ (CS[13]). We cannot look at the poor and the oppressed and callously call them to pull themselves out of their own difficulty. The Tri-une God 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. To eliminate the propositional nature of biblical truth seriously weakens our ability to hold, defend, and explain the gospel. We believe that every expression of Christianity is necessarily and rightly contextualized, to some degree, to particular human culture; there is no such thing as a universal ahistorical expression of Christianity. It will do little to make them comfortable but will do much to make its message understandable. The Gospel Coalition supports the church by providing resources that are trusted and timely, winsome and wise, and centered on the gospel of Jesus Christ. Countercultural community. It must welcome them in hundreds of ways. We affirm that truth is correspondence to reality. Together they are simultaneously Gods 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. Revelation 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. We believe that such commitments will drive us afresh toward Scripture, toward the Christ of Scripture, toward the gospel of Christ, and we will begin to grow in our ability, by Gods grace, as churches, to act in line with the truth of the gospel (Gal 2:14). We believe in the bodily resur- rection of both the just and the unjustthe unjust to judgment and eternal conscious punishment in hell, as our Lord himself taught, and the just to eternal blessedness in the presence of him who sits on the throne and of the Lamb, in the new heaven and the new earth, the home of righteousness. In this perspective, the gospel appears as creation, fall, redemption, restoration. The ultimate answer is that God must, for his own glory, send revival in response to the fervent, extraordinary, prevailing prayer of his people. The kingdom of God is an invasive power that plunders Satans dark kingdom and regenerates and renovates through repentance and faith the lives of individuals rescued from that kingdom. By being a counterculture. By his perfect obedience he satisfied the just demands of God on our behalf, since by faith alone that perfect obedience is credited to all who trust in Christ alone for their acceptance with God. There are many churches seeking to engage the culture through political activism. We believe that Scripture is pervasively propositional and that all statements of Scripture are completely true and authoritative. 4. This betrays a lack of confidence in the gospel. [and] was raised). Please make sure all fields are filled out. Regarding money, the churchs members should engage in radical economic sharing with one anotherso there are no needy among them (Acts 4:34). The Gospel We believe that the gospel is the good news of Jesus ChristGods very wisdom. How shall we respond to this cultural crisis of truth? Christian growth occurs only when the whole life is shaped by Christian practices in communityincluding prayer, baptism, the Lords Supper, fellowship, and the public ministry of the Word. This reality compels us to stand with others who are stirred by the conviction that the mercy of God in Jesus Christ is our only hope of eternal salvation. The Power of the Holy Spirit We believe that this salvation, attested in all Scripture and secured by Jesus Christ, is applied to his people by the Holy Spirit. It brings out the means of salvation, namely the substitutionary work of Christ and our responsibility to embrace it by faith. We want to encourage a passion for sound doctrine, but we know that Christian growth is not simply cognitive information transfer. So we maintain, with what we hope is appropriate humility, the principle of sola Scriptura. Copyright 2022 The Gospel Coalition, INC. All Rights Reserved. We not only hear of these influences, we see their effects. Helping people take their next step toward Christtogether. We believe the Holy Spirit who inspired the words of the apostles and prophets also indwells us so that we who have been made in the image of God can receive and understand the words of Scripture revealed by God, and grasp that Scriptures truths correspond to reality. The gospel is seen as a means of finding individual peace and not as the foundation of a worldviewa comprehensive interpretation of reality affecting all that we do. They will emphasize repentance, personal renewal, and holiness of life. (The hermeneutical issue). What could lead to a growing movement of gospelcentered churches? There are many churches with a radical commitment to the poor and marginalized. As we confess in CS(1), [God] providentially brings about his eternal good purposes to redeem a people for himself and restore his fallen creation, to the praise of his glorious grace. 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. We believe such a balance will produce churches with winsome and theologically substantial preaching, dynamic evangelism and apologetics, and church growth and church planting. More recently, postmodernism has critiqued this set of assumptions, contending that we are not in fact objective in our pursuit of knowledge, but rather interpret information through our personal experiences, selfinterests, emotions, cultural prejudices, language limitations, and relational communities. Reading across the whole Bible.

Bringing Christian joy, hope, and truth to embodiment in the arts is also part of this work. VISION The practical evidence of this is that our local churches increasingly welcome and embrace people of all races and cultures. Thus the gospel creates a human community radically different from any society around it. If we seek service rather than power, we may have significant cultural impact. Because of the attractiveness of its community and the humility of its people, a gospelcentered church should find people in its midst who are exploring and trying to understand Christianity. The emphasis is on Christianity as a way of life to the loss of a bloodbought status in Christ received through personal faith. The core dynamic of gospelcentered ministry is therefore worship and fervent prayer. We do not believe that in best practice these two ways of reading the Bible are at all contradictory, even though today, many pit them against each other. Indifference to the poor and disadvantaged means there has not been a true grasp of our salvation by sheer grace. If we overcontextualize, it suggests that we want too much the approval of the receiving culture. 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. Unaided human reason, it was thought, is able to know truth objectively. How this vision of truth shapes us. There is a fastgrowing charismatic movement with emphasis on glorious, passionate, corporate worship. Regarding power, it is visibly committed to powersharing and relationshipbuilding among races, classes, and generations that are alienated outside of the Body of Christ. The doing of justice and mercy. He is the Creator of all things, visible and invisible, and is therefore worthy to receive all glory and adoration. Religions operate on the principle: I obey, therefore I am accepted, but the gospel principle is: I am accepted through Christ, therefore I obey. So the gospel differs from both irreligion and religion. Good works constitute indispensable evidence of saving grace. This gospel fills Christians with humility and hope, meekness and boldness, in a unique way. How this relationship to culture shapes us. The gospel opens our eyes to the fact that all our wealth (even wealth for which we worked hard) is ultimately an unmerited gift from God. If we undercontextualize, it suggests that we want the trappings of our own subculture too much. Yet we often see the celebration of our union with Christ replaced by the age-old attractions of power and affluence, or by monastic retreats into ritual, liturgy, and sacrament. There are many seekerdriven churches that help many people find Christ. Creation of Humanity We believe that God created human beings, male and female, in his own image. Evangelistic effectiveness. But we never want to be so affected by our culture that we compromise gospel truths. It is through the power of the Holy Spirit that we receive the words of the gospel in full assurance and conviction (1 Thess 1:5). We confess that both our finitude and our sinfulness preclude the possibility of knowing Gods truth exhaustively, but we affirm that, enlightened by the Spirit of God, we can know Gods revealed truth truly. As pastors, we intend to do this in our churches through the ordinary means of his grace: prayer, the ministry of the Word, baptism and the Lords Supper and the fellowship of the saints. 1. Also, its preaching, though expository, was sometimes moralistic and did not emphasize how all biblical themes climax in Christ and his work. We believe that by his incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and ascension, Jesus Christ acted as our representative and substitute. If you have made an account on the new church directory but have forgotten your password you can recover it, If you have made an account on the new church directory but have forgotten your username or need any other assistance, please contact us at. We adopt a chastened correspondencetheory of truth that is less triumphalistic than that of some in the older evangelicalism. 2. 1. The gospel is the declaration that through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has come to reconcile individuals by his grace and renew the whole world by and for his glory. Many today (but not all) who major in the first of these two ways of reading the Biblethat is, reading along the whole Bibledwell on the more corporate aspects of sin and salvation. At the same time, we are more flawed and sinful than we ever dared believe, yet we are more loved and accepted than we ever dared hope. Such a biblically grounded and united mission is the only endur- ing future for the church. But if we seek direct power and social control, we will, ironically, be assimilated into the very idolatries of wealth, status, and power we seek to change. The purpose of the Bible is to produce wisdom in usa life wholly submitted to Gods reality. Gods New People We believe that Gods new covenant people have already come to the heavenly Jerusalem; they are already seated with Christ in the heavenlies. We affirm that truth is conveyed by Scripture. 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, and in him they are baptized into union with the Lord Jesus, such that they are justified before God by grace alone through faith alone in Jesus Christ alone. We believe that salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name given under heaven by which we must be saved. It brings out the purpose of salvation, namely, a renewed creation. As a result, all human beings are alienated from God, corrupted in every aspect of their being (e.g., physically, mentally, volitionally, emotionally, spiritually) and condemned finally and irrevocably to deathapart from Gods own gracious intervention. It moves us to serve others irrespective of their merits, just as Christ served us (Mark 10:45). In this perspective, the gospel appears as God, sin, Christ, faith. Utter folly to the world, even though it is the power of God to those who are being saved, this good news is christological, centering on the cross and resurrection: 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 (the message is: Christ died for our sins . At the same time, and in the same congregations, there will be engagement with the social structures of ordinary people, and cultural engagement with art, business, scholarship, and government. We want to be radically distinct from the culture around us and yet, out of that distinct identity, we should sacrificially serve neighbors and even enemies, working for the flourishing of people, both here and now, and in eternity. Rather, we expect to meet our neighbors as we work for their peace, security, and wellbeing, loving them in word and deed. The ministry we have outlined is relatively rare. God created both soul and body, and the resurrection of Jesus shows that he is going to redeem both the spiritual and the material. 5. To read across the whole Bible is to collect its declarations, summons, promises, and truthclaims into categories of thought (e.g., theology, Christology, eschatology) and arrive at a coherent understanding of what it teaches summarily (e.g., Luke 24:4647). But it also affirms the goodness of serving Christ as singles, whether for a time or for a life. The answer is that we cannot contextualize the gospel in the abstract, as a thought experiment. . Because the gospel removes both fear and pride, people should get along inside the church who could never get along outside. In Gods wise purposes, men and women are not simply interchangeable, but rather they complement each other in mutually enriching ways. On the one hand, we are troubled by the idolatry of personal consumerism and the politicization of faith; on the other hand, we are distressed by the unchallenged acceptance of theological and moral relativism. The Kingdom of God 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 prospect of the glory yet to be revealed. You can seek to be your own lord and savior by breaking the law of God, but you can also do so by keeping the law in order to earn your salvation. It exists in the genres of narrative, metaphor, and poetry which are not exhaustively distillable into doctrinal propositions, yet they convey Gods will and mind to us so as to change us into his likeness. Therefore the person who does not generously give away his or her wealth to others is not merely lacking in compassion, but is unjust. This universal church is manifest 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. We have a vision for a church that sees conversions of rich and poor, highly educated and less educated, men and women, old and young, married and single, and all races. If you had an account on the old church directory at churches.thegospelcoalition.org you will need to make a new account. We do not, however, see enough individual churches that embody the full, integrative gospel balance we have outlined here. For the common good. We believe that God justifies and sanctifies those who by grace have faith in Jesus, and that he will one day glorify themall to the praise of his glorious grace. If you need to claim a listing you can do so by searching for the church and clicking on its name. 2. As a result it was more individualistic, centering almost completely on personal conversion and safe passage to heaven. Truth is not only a theoretical correspondence but also a covenantal relationship. It teaches its members to conform their bodily being to the shape of the gospelabstinence outside of heterosexual marriage and fidelity and joy within. Such arrogance, they say explains, in part, many of the injustices and wars of the modern era. The distinctive leadership role within the church given to qualified men is grounded in creation, fall, and redemption and must not be sidelined by appeals to cultural developments. Secularism and religion conform people to behavioral norms through fear (of consequences) and pride (a desire for selfaggrandizement). And while, in Gods grace, there is an encouraging number of bright spots in the church, we see no broad movement yet of this gospelcentered ministry. To read along the whole Bible is to discern the single basic plotline of the Bible as Gods story of redemption (e.g., Luke 24:44) as well as the themes of the Bible (e.g., covenant, kingship, temple) that run through every stage of history and every part of the canon, climaxing in Jesus Christ. This good news is biblical (his death and resurrection are according to the Scriptures), theological and salvific (Christ died for our sins, to reconcile us to God), historical (if the saving events did not 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).