What We Believe
Old truth,
without apology
We did not invent our religion, and we are not at liberty to edit it. We confess the faith handed down by the church for two thousand years and recovered in the Reformation, written down plainly so no one has to guess what we teach.
Why this church exists
Walk into most churches today and you will find the sharp edges filed off. Sin goes unnamed. The sermon has been traded for a talk about your best life. The lights dim, the band swells, and somewhere in it all the holiness of God has gone missing. Many faithful Christians have felt it: a hunger the room around them was never built to fill.
We planted this church for them, and for anyone the Lord is calling out of that fog. We are not here to entertain you or to flatter you. We are here to worship the living God as He has commanded, to preach the whole counsel of His Word, to name sin as sin and hold out Christ crucified as the only hope of sinners. That is the whole of it. There is no second agenda.
This is old religion. The religion of the apostles and John the Baptizer. Of Daniel and David, Abraham and Adam. We do not apologize for God's Word, make excuses for what the spirit of the age finds offensive, or reimagine the gospel for a modern audience. If that is what you have been looking for, you have found the right people.
What we confess
Six convictions that set us apart
Pick one to read it in full.
The Historic Faith
God is not a tool for your self-improvement. He is the infinite, thrice-holy Maker of heaven and earth, who governs all things by the counsel of His will. Worship begins with the fear of Him, and that fear is the beginning of wisdom. The Bible is the very Word of God, without error and sufficient for all of life. We do not stand over it to correct it. We sit under it; it is read, preached, sung, and prayed in everything we do. We did not invent this religion and we are not free to revise it. We confess the faith handed down by the church and recovered in the Reformation, written down plainly in the creeds and confessions so no one has to guess what we teach.
Law and Gospel
The moral law of God still stands, and is useful for righteous living. It is a mirror through which we see our sin, and our need of a Savior. Salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, according to the Scriptures, to the glory of God alone. We preach Christ and Him crucified, risen, and reigning, a real Savior for real sinners, held out freely to all who will come. We read the whole Bible through the lens of God's covenant. We name sin plainly, and we will not flatter you. Every one of us is born in sin, dead in our trespasses, unable to save ourselves or even to want to. A church that cannot say this honestly has already lost the gospel.
Corporate Worship on the Lord's Day
We worship the way God has commanded. We hold to the Regulative Principle of Worship: in worship we do only what God commands, no more. That keeps our services reverent and ordered, without spectacle. We sing the Psalms and follow a historic liturgy. Our ministers wear vestments. We come to the Lord's Table every week, with wine. Families worship together, children included. The little ones are not sent down the hall to a program; the promises of God are to believers and to their children, and they belong in the assembly of the saints.
Biblical Sexual Norms
God made men and women different on purpose. We hold to patriarchy: not egalitarianism, and not complementarianism. In the Reformed tradition men lead, at home, in the church, and in the world. God's design for masculinity and femininity is taught, encouraged, and developed here. We practice household voting: the husband leads not by overruling his family but by bringing it to consensus through conversation, and then speaking for it. Feminism and LGBTQ ideology are, at root, a resentment of God's created order.
Hospitality with Accountability
We keep the Lord's Day, the whole day, not a tidy two-hour Sunday morning. After corporate worship there is Sunday lunch together, the ministry of smoke (cigars and conversation among the men), ladies' tea, and through the week a shared meal and teaching. This is not a crowd you can disappear into. Membership means vows and being known. Our elders pastor people on purpose, by name.
Cultural Engagement
All of Christ, for all of life. The Christian faith has something to say about education, family, money, work, political theory and practice, and much more. It has become ordinary for the church to take its cues from the culture and follow where it leads. We don't. The church is meant to impose itself upon the culture, not the other way around.
The Standards we confess
Hold us to it
We don't hide behind a vague statement of faith you have to take on trust. We subscribe in full to the historic confessions of the Reformed church, written down plainly so no one has to guess what we teach. Follow any one of them to read its story, then the original text itself.
We teach through them, not around them. Sunday School meets at 9:30 before worship, and you are welcome to pull up a chair.
The Ecumenical Creeds
The oldest summaries of the faith, shared by Christians everywhere.
- The Apostles' Creed
- The Nicene Creed
- The Athanasian Creed
The Three Forms of Unity
The confessions of the Reformed churches of the Continent.
- The Heidelberg Catechism
- The Belgic Confession
- The Canons of Dort
The Westminster Standards
The confession and catechisms we preach and teach line by line.
- The Westminster Confession of Faith
- The Westminster Larger Catechism
- The Westminster Shorter Catechism
Who we answer to
Connected and accountable
We are a congregation of the Vanguard Presbyterian Church, in Knox Presbytery. The VPC is a confessional, continuing Presbyterian denomination committed to the full subscription of the Westminster Standards and to Presbyterian government without hierarchy. It is a young denomination, formed by churches and ministers who left the Presbyterian Church in America as that body drifted from its confessional commitments. They did not want a new religion; they wanted to keep the one the PCA was founded to defend. We are not a law unto ourselves. We are joined to a wider body of churches that believe and practice the same things, and we are accountable to it.
Come and hear it preached
A confession on paper is one thing. Hearing the Word opened and Christ held out is another. Plan a visit, or listen to a sermon before you come.