As an Assembly of God church, we affirm the Sixteen Fundamental Truths of the Assemblies of God. We recognize that we stand in a stream of tradition that stretches back 2,000 years, and we are mindful of our place in it. The first five of our Fundamental Truths are classic cardinal doctrines of Christianity: we believe that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant and infallible Word of God. We believe that there is one God, eternally existent in three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. We affirm that Jesus Christ, God’s Son, is fully God and fully man. He was born of a Virgin and lived a sinless life, was handed over as the sacrifice for mankind’s sin and died on the cross at Golgotha. He was bodily resurrected from the grave and appeared to His disciples physically, then was bodily taken up to heaven, where he physically resides with God the Father. Mankind is born into original sin, and is unable to redeem himself. Because he cannot be “good,” he desperately needs good from an outside source: the grace of God through Jesus Christ. His only source of salvation is through faith in Jesus, and God has provided that as He does all of man’s other needs.

Like other Assembly of God churches, we also believe that the gifts and manifestations of the Holy Spirit are alive and well today. We believe that the Baptism in the Holy Spirit is a second definite work of grace in the life of the believer—normative in the 1st-century Church, actually—and is evidenced by speaking in tongues. Its sole purpose, according to Scripture, is to empower the believer for evangelistic witness. Here is a doctrinal apology of this view, written by our pastor.

We believe that the Church is the Body of Christ on earth, and has been established to be the family that nurtures believers into maturity in the faith. As Cyprian said, no man can call God his Father who does not also call the Church his mother. Church is not a club where we go to hear a message; it is a bodily, physical gathering of a committed family of evangelists who wish to meet with the living God. In it, we celebrate two ordinances: water baptism and the Lord’s Supper. The former is the initiatory rite into the Church, and symbolizes the cleansing of sin inherent in justification. The latter is the communion of the body of saints with God in testifying to Jesus’ Second Coming, and is also symbolic.

We believe that Jesus will return to earth a second time. Because we are premillennialist, we believe that this Second Coming will occur in two parts: the Rapture of the Church and the physical Second Coming of Christ to the earth. We believe that the Church will be taken up to heaven at the beginning of the Great Tribulation, and will therefore miss those seven years of woe and judgment in which the wrath of God is poured out on the rebellious inhabitants of the earth who refused to trust His Son for their righteousness. This period of time will culminate in the rise of a messianic figure called the Antichrist, who will position himself to oppose God on behalf of man—but he will be ultimately defeated by the returning Christ and the armies of heaven. Afterward, He will set up a kingdom on the earth and will reign from Jerusalem for 1,000 years. Following this, there will be a Great White Judgment Throne in which all who trusted in their own righteousness will be judged according to their deeds; those who did not trust Christ will find their eternal home in the place of their ultimate choosing: the lake of fire. Those whose names are in the book of life will, immediately after the redemption of all creation, inherit the earth that God created for man before the Fall.