These Principles guide and inform how we act together as a church and live our lives together in fellowship with Father God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit and through that relationship, with each other.
We welcome anyone and everyone whether you are (already) a Christian or exploring the Christian faith.
We use scripture as the means to understand God’s heart and mind.
We explore aspects of our faith in order to come to better know what it means for us.
We recognise that we were all sinners and were separated from God and it is only by His grace that we were reconciled to Him, and we know that we still sin; so, we try not to be judgemental about each other.
We recognise each other’s gifting and apply it through Body Ministry (Eph 4: 12, 15 – 16) 12 to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up…… 15….speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ. 16 From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.
We hold ourselves individually accountable to God and accountable to guide and care for each other
We hold scripture with the greatest respect and intend to learn and be guided by it.
John 16: 13 tells us:
13 But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come.
Ps 119: 18 reminds us:
Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in your law.
Therefore, we want, as much as possible, to interpret Scripture in an intelligent manner using our minds, guided by the Holy Spirit. We recognise that the Bible was not written to a 21st century western audience so we use a series of hermeneutic principles to instruct our understanding when reading and when we are studying it:
We hold that:
- Some scripture is Prescriptive (it is the way God intended)
- (A lot of) scripture is Descriptive (and we can acknowledge that without affecting the inerrancy of God’s word)
- All of scripture has a Contextual nature which affects how we understand it (which gives a way to make sense of what is being said)
- There can be a Cultural framework in which it was originally written (which dictates how we can understand it and therefore make sense of it today)
- God have in mind the Redemptive nature of scripture, especially through the Old Testament into the New Covenant (God’s heart is always to be seen in the unfolding of scripture)
- There would be a difference in how we interpreted scripture if we were to take an Episcopal view
- Or as Continual in that it continues through till today and beyond (i.e., Jesus death is a once and for all redemptive act and is a complete and final sacrifice for our sins)
- Finally, the Dispensational nature of our understanding of scripture; we can see the different aspect of God’s intentions right through to the End Time.