What We Believe

The following are the core beliefs of Calvary Baptist Church. For an expanded look at our beliefs, please review The 2000 Baptist Faith and Message.

The Bible was written by men divinely inspired and is God’s revelation of Himself to man. It has God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth, without any mixture of error, for its matter. It is our final authority of faith and practice.

There is one and only one living and true God. God eternally exists in three persons – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – each having distinct personal attributes without division of nature, essence, or being.

God as Father reigns with providential care over His universe, His creatures, and the progress of human history according to the purposes of His grace. He is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving, and all-wise. God is Father in truth to those who become children of God through faith in Jesus Christ.

Christ is the eternal Son of God. In His incarnation, He was conceived of the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary. He is the One Mediator, fully God, fully man, in whose Person is effected the reconciliation between God and man. He died on the cross in our place to bear the punishment for our sins, was buried, and was raised from the dead. He ascended into heaven and will return in power and glory to judge the world and to consummate His redemptive mission. He now dwells in all believers as the living and ever-present Lord.

The Holy Spirit is the third person of the Trinity, exalting Christ and convicting us of our sins and our need for a Savior. He fully lives in every believer from the moment of salvation. He comforts, teaches, corrects, and empowers us to live in righteousness. The Holy Spirit equips believers with spiritual gifts to build up and extend the Body of Christ.

God uniquely created man in His image and likeness. He created them male and female as the crowning work of His creation. In the beginning, man was innocent of sin. Endowed by God with free choice, man sinned against God and brought sin into the human race, falling from his original innocence. Only the grace of God can bring man into His holy fellowship and enable man to fulfill the creative purpose of God.

Salvation involves the redemption of the whole man and is offered freely to all who accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, who obtained eternal redemption for the believer by His own blood. In its broadest sense, salvation includes regeneration, justification, sanctification, and glorification. There is no salvation apart from personal faith in Jesus Christ as Lord.

The church is a local body of baptized believers brought together in a covenant relationship with God and one another. The church observes two ordinances of Christ (baptism and the Lord’s Supper), preaches the gospel, teaches the Bible to disciple believers, spreads the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and ministers to the needs of the body and the community.

Christian baptism is the immersion of a believer in water in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It is an act of obedience symbolizing the believer’s faith in a crucified, buried, and risen Savior, the believer’s death to sin, the burial of the old life, and the resurrection to walk in newness of life
in Christ Jesus.

The Lord’s Supper is a symbolic act of obedience whereby members of the church, through partaking of the bread and the fruit of the vine, memorialize the death of the Redeemer and anticipate His second coming.

It is the duty and privilege of every follower of Christ and every church of the Lord Jesus Christ to endeavor to make disciples of all nations. The Lord Jesus Christ has commanded the preaching of the gospel to all nations. It is the duty of every child of God to seek constantly to win the lost to Christ by verbal witness undergirded by a Christian lifestyle and by other methods in harmony with the gospel of Christ.

God is the source of all blessings, temporal and spiritual; all that we have and are we owe to Him. All believers are, therefore, under obligation to serve Him with their time, talents, and material possessions. According to the Scriptures, Christians should contribute their means cheerfully, regularly, systematically, proportionately, and liberally to advance the Gospel around the world.

God has ordained the family as the foundational institution of human society. It is composed of people related to one another by marriage, blood, or adoption. Marriage is the uniting of one man and one woman in covenant commitment for a lifetime. The husband and wife are of equal worth before God since both are created in God’s image. The marriage relationship models the way God relates to His people.

Children are a blessing and heritage from the Lord. Parents are to teach their children spiritual and moral values and to lead them, through consistent lifestyle example and loving discipline, to make choices based on biblical truth.