Our Beliefs

St. Paul’s is an Episcopal Church parish representing the three streams of Anglican Christianity: evangelical, catholic and charismatic.  Anglicanism at its core is generously orthodox, biblical, and liturgically beautiful.  Our worship, which is steeped in The Book of Common Prayer, is intended first and foremost to glorify God in Jesus Christ.  It is the beauty of God’s character that focuses Anglican worship.  St. Paul’s is an increasingly unique mission post in its comprehensiveness and incorporation of these three streams: our theology is biblically orthodox, our liturgy elevates our reformed catholic heritage, and our worship is alive and empowered by the ongoing ministry of the Holy Spirit.  It is this celebration of the beauty of God’s holiness that sends us out into the world with Christ’s compassion.

Our worship each Sunday does not begin, “Bless me, Lord,” but rather, “Blessed be God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”  Of course we want to be “fed,” but our real objective is to honor God in His glorious majesty as He is revealed in Trinity of persons.  It means that we worship God for who He is, not for what we can get from Him.  In this sense, we stand in the theological tradition of the English Reformation of the 16^th century, the Tractarians of the 19^th century and the Charismatic renewal of the last century; these three unique influences in Anglican Christian history meld into our ongoing glorification of God in thought, word and deed.  With them, we ascribe to the following:

1.  A belief in the Triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; three distinct Persons co-equal in Glory and co-eternal in majesty and of one substantial Godhead, such that there are not three gods but one God.

2.  A belief in the Holy Scriptures as divine revelation, God-breathed (2 Tim. 3:16), carrying the full measure of His authority, containing all things necessary to salvation, and the measuring rod (canon) of our theology, polity and praxis.  We believe that God inspired them and blessed them in their writing to accurately and fully communicate God’s “revealed” Word.  It more than just “contains” or “speaks of” the Word of God; it is the Word of God written.  Scripture is our primary authority by which all other authorities are judged.  No other church in the world hears more Bible than Anglicans do every Sunday.  Our prayers are in large part verbatim portions of Scripture.

3.  A belief in the One Savior of humanity, Jesus Christ, who in His person is both fully God and fully man; of one substance with the Father as regards His Godhead, and at the same time of one substance with us as regards His manhood.

4.  A belief in the perfect obedience of Christ, His true and actual suffering, His substitutionary and atoning death on the cross, and His bodily resurrection and ascension as the only means given for our salvation and reconciliation with God.

5.  A belief in faith alone as the only grounds for the merits of Christ being imputed to us for our justification before God (justification by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone).

6.  A belief in the consummate return of Jesus Christ in glory to judge the living and the dead, and a belief in the bodily resurrection from the dead of all people and their entrance into either eternal damnation or everlasting blessedness.

7.  A belief in the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church as those souls that have been redeemed entirely by the work of Christ and called out of bondage into freedom, out of darkness into light, out of error into truth, out of death into eternal life.

8.  A belief that the visible church is best organized under the historic and biblical offices of Bishop, Presbyter, and Deacon; and that the church exists to worship the Triune God and to lift up the Savior Jesus Christ before all people through the faithful preaching and teaching of the Gospel, through prayer, and through the faithful administration of the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper (Holy Communion or the Eucharist).

9.  A belief in the Historic creeds of the Church as accurate representations of the essence of the Christian faith, and in the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican Church as a coherent and concise expression of Anglican doctrine.  Anglican theology is limited and guided by biblical essentials and Anglican teaching.  The English reformers didn’t see themselves as starting something new. They wanted to return the church to the authority of the Bible and to ancient consensual Christianity from which the Medieval Catholic Church had departed.  The theology of the English reformers, captured in the first Prayer Books, the Ordinal, the Homilies, and the Articles of Religion, defines our theological core.  These formularies have consistently been upheld as authorative throughout Anglican history.