What We Believe
Our
Beliefs
The Bible is the basis of all our beliefs. It’s the inspired Word of God, and it’s the grid through which we view everything else. Through the Bible we can know the truth about God and how we should live and worship him.
God and Us: The Bible teaches that every human being is responsible to God, because he has made us. It also teaches that we have been born with a nature in rebellion against God. We want to be our own masters, but our desire for autonomy has put us on a collision course with God's might and justice. Naturally we are headed for judgment. But God the Father, in love, sent Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son of God, to reconcile us to himself. True life - right now and forever - is only found in knowing Jesus through living faith. This living faith and personal knowledge of Christ is the gift of God by his Holy Spirit. We want everyone to know the love of the Father, in Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit so that we they might love him in return and enter into his joy forever.
Our theology (what we believe about God, human beings, this world etc.) is summarised by the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Westminster Larger and Shorter Catechisms. Unlike the Bible, these documents were written by men, but we believe they provide an accurate summary of biblical teaching. They were written over 400 years ago in London and have been the doctrinal statements of many churches in the UK and abroad since then.
Our
Mission & Foundational Commitments
Our mission is to gather and disciple the saints
for the building of Christ’s kingdom in Newcastle.
This is worked out in several foundational commitments:
1. The centrality of regulated, reverent and Spirit-filled worship.
God’s word directs our worship. We do not follow the culture or even our own good ideas, but what God commands us to do. God is holy, so we approach Him with reverence. Without His Spirit, our worship is empty, but by the Spirit we meet with the living God and are shaped to serve Him in the rest of life.
2. The application of God’s Word to all of life.
Christ is Lord. Christ has revealed His will for the whole of our lives in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. He gave Himself for His people that we might be zealous for good works (Titus 2:14). We therefore do not shy away from applying Christ’s will to all of life and culture. We disciple to send our people out to serve Christ in all of life.
3. The importance of being rooted in Historic Christianity
The Bible is our only infallible rule of faith and life, but we do not interpret it apart from a right understanding of tradition i.e., the history of God’s Spirit at work in His church. We are therefore rooted in the last 2000 years of church history from the Church Father’s through The Reformation to the presented.
4. The conviction that God builds His church through the ordinary means of grace.
We believe that God builds His church through the Word, the Sacraments (baptism and the Lord’s Supper) and prayer. By these means, He applies Christ, calls His elect and builds them up in grace and faith unto salvation. Our focus therefore is not on special programs but on these ordinary means for the gathering and discipling of Christ’s people and for the sending them out to build His kingdom.
5. The promotion of Reformed piety.
God calls all of his people to be holy and to be discipled into greater holiness. We are situated in the spiritual tradition of Calvin and The Puritans with their lively and rigorous pursuit of godliness in all of life – rooted in Word and Spirit. This piety is also ‘gendered’ in the sense that God has made us male and female. Our duties and fruits will therefore have a masculine and feminine flavour. Androgyny (the idea that men and women are interchangeable) is a pagan idea, not a Christian idea.
6. The practice of Christian fellowship
We strive to be a warm and practical family of God by His grace. This is the context of much of the discipleship that goes on amongst us.