What do we believe? It's pretty simple...

The important stuff:

We believe that there's one God, that He's written about in the Bible (which He inspired), and that He loves every one of us. We believe that Jesus was a real man who walked and talked like we do, but that He was also God, being sent here to change the world by by dying for us, and then coming back to life three days later. We believe the Bible says that the way to know God truly and intimately is through Jesus, and only through him. We believe that God is gracious, and offers every last one of us the opportunity to choose to follow Him, regardless of what we've done, and that choosing Him and following Him means we'll outlive our human state and be with Him forever. We believe that the Spirit of God (the Holy Spirit) has been given to us to give us guidance and strength in our everyday lives, and we take God seriously when He says that life can be completely different when we choose Him.

The other stuff:

There's an awful lot of other stuff that we can get hung up on in the Christian community, and we're often asked what our stance is as a church on different topics. We love having those conversations, and think it's important to talk through those things, but we don't want any one minor thing to define this community. What does define us is what's written above. We believe in Jesus and in following Him. If there's something that's important to you, though, please ask, and we'd love to have the conversation with you! We try to stay away from doing too much of the "publishing our stance" on things, though, simply because it's our dream to have Element be a church community wherein people from all different denominational backgrounds can worship and learn together, and we know that sincere followers of Jesus sometimes disagree with each other on the secondary things - We don't think that means we can't be a part of the same community! We will never compromise on the authority of the Bible, and that Jesus is the only way. We will also never compromise on the belief that we feel the Bible paints a picture for us to be people who love each other deeply, to the point of sacrificing our own comfort for someone else, and that it's more important to show others God's love than to show how "right" we are on a particular topic.