Why We're Here

The very core of this church is the belief that God is love.

- Chris C.

Statement of Faith

People ask, "What does the Presbyterian Church believe?" The answer is, "It depends on who you ask."

The Presbyterian Church (USA) is composed of pastors and people who represent a broad spectrum of beliefs. Historically, however there are at least eight themes that have been the core of orthodox Presbyterian belief since the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century. And, this is what we believe at Carmel Presbyterian Church.

1. The Incarnation of the Word of God in Jesus Christ
Presbyterians are "Trinitarians." That is, we believe with all other Christian traditions that God is one and that He expresses Himself in three ways; God the Father. God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.
The attributes of God the Father such as His righteousness, eternal nature, love, mercy, omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, and justice are also the attributes of God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.
Although we believe that this is the clear teaching of the Bible, we cannot really understand the Trinity. We believe along with the Apostle John that "in the beginning was the Word and the Word was God and the Word became a human being and we beheld His glory as that of the one and only Son of God." (John 1:1ff)
We believe that God has come to our planet in human form in order to go to the cross and die on our behalf. In so doing He took our sins upon Himself so that we would not have to die for our sins.
The only belief that is necessary to join a Presbyterian (USA) church is to believe that Jesus Christ died in your place for your sins and that He is your Lord and Savior.

2. The Priority of Worship
We believe that of all the things that we do, worship is the most important. One of the great accomplishments of the Protestant Reformation was to return worship to the people.
The Westminster Confession of Faith says "the chief end of man (humankind) is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever." We believe that among the various ways we glorify and enjoy God, corporate worship is the most basic and productive.
The central message of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation is that the proper response of humankind to God is one of praise, adoration and obedient submission.

3. The Absolute Authority of the Bible as the Word of God
We take the Bible seriously.
We do not believe that the Bible is magic or a lucky charm.
We do believe that the Bible reveals God and all that we need to know about being God's people.
We believe that it is important to understand the whole message of the Bible.
The danger is always that we will single out one or two verses and build a belief system out of them and ignore other verses on the same subject that may shed a different light on a particular issue.
Primarily we believe that the Bible is God's Word to us and that the Word of God can be summed up in Jesus Christ. He is the living Word, in the written Word, and He came to reveal God the Father to us.
We believe that if philosophy, psychology, science or any other teaching contradicts Jesus Christ as he is revealed in the Bible, we will always be obedient to Jesus Christ. He is our rock, our compass. He is the center of our being.

4. Justification by Faith
The biblical concept of "justification" means that we are made right with God by accepting, by faith, Christ's death on the cross as being the solution to the problem of our sins.
It means also that the righteousness of Christ is credited to each individual believer.

God loves humankind. And He loves infinitely. He is also infinitely just. He cannot ignore our sin nature. One of the great recoveries of the Reformation was the biblical teaching on the unconditional love of God.
The Bible describes the coming to Christ in faith as so radically life-changing as to be like being "born again". Some in our community have experienced an instantaneous, often emotionally overpowering experience of being "born again."
Others in our fellowship know that they have been born again but cannot point to an exact time or place. Even so, they can point to the reality of their faith in Christ.

The point is, we don't encourage uniformity of experience - only a common commitment to Jesus Christ. We believe that personal faith in Christ occurs in different ways: sometimes like the rush of a strong wind and sometimes like a soft breeze.
Sometimes it is a highly emotional experience and sometimes it is a growing, yet quiet confidence. There are perhaps as many individual experiences as there are individual Christians. The common denominator is that we are made right with God by receiving, by faith, the Lord Jesus Christ. We are not made right with God by good actions or the acceptance of a particular lifestyle or a long list of affirmations but Jesus Christ, alone, received by faith.

We believe that the person who has been made right with God by faith will subsequently show the reality of that experience in a desire to worship, obey, serve, pray to and study God. Many people who come to Christ by faith have been bruised and scarred by human relationships and other church experiences.
We believe that our greatest task is to help hurting people discover and experience being made right with God as a good gift from an incredibly loving God for all eternity.

5. The Sovereignty of God
The term "sovereignty" has not been particularly popular in the United States since the American Revolution and our rejection of King George of England.
Indeed, one of the slogans of the American Revolution was "No King But Jesus!" Sovereignty means God is in control of the universe.
Nothing ever happens that takes God by surprise. As the popular song says, "He's got the whole world in His hands."

God's sovereignty is one of the most basic, foundational ideas in the Bible and the kingdom of God was the main theme of Jesus' teaching. However, questions arise: "If God is in control why does He allow bad things to happen? If God is in control, why does He not do something about the evil in our world?”

They are good questions and not easily answered. The beginning of an answer, however, is that God has done and is doing something. God created Adam and Eve and placed them in paradise. When they rebelled against God, a catastrophe occurred with the result that Adam and Eve died spiritually.
Every person born since Adam and Eve has inherited that same spiritual deadness. The physical world became flawed as a result of their rebellion as well.
Consequently, all humanity since Adam and Eve has lived in a flawed world system that includes death, disease, accidents and even damaging weather systems. Wars, murder, and rampant immorality are living proof that something is profoundly wrong with the human community.

But God is doing something. He is going to bring the world order as we know it to an end. But before He does, He has sent a Savior who we believe to be Christ the Lord, God the Son, the second person of the Trinity. God is creating a new race of people who will live forever. And before He brings human history to an end and before He renovates the heavens and the earth (1 Peter 3:10-13; Revelation 21:1),

He is allowing a period of time for as many who wish to receive Christ as their personal Savior to be a part of God's forever family.
The fact that God is in control means that we no longer have to be in control. Indeed, there are many areas in our life over which we have no control.
God's sovereignty should be a source of comfort and confidence to know that He is concerned about the details of our lives and that we can commit our lives to His tender care. After all, we are assured that "in all things God works for the good of those who love Him." (Romans 8:28)

6. The Church is a Covenant Community
The idea of God's covenant with humankind sums up much of what it means to be in the historical "stream" of the Reformation.
God has made a covenant with humankind out of His grace to save those who love and obey Him. He is the faithful lover who loves His people.
In similar fashion He calls His people to live in a loving caring relationship with one another in the growing community of Christ.

For Presbyterian Christians there are four C's that result from our relational community:

i. Confession: We confess our faith. That is, we believe that theology matters and that it is important to say what it is that we believe. Consequently we have compiled a Book of Confessions. It comprises one half of our Constitution. It contains eleven documents from the Apostles Creed (the oldest statement of faith in the Book) to A Brief Statement of Faith of 1991.

ii. Constitution: As Presbyterians, we have a commitment to a particular way of doing things. We accomplish our work according to a constitution. The second half of our Constitution is The Book of Order. We like to say that we do things "decently and in order." We sometimes laugh about the idea, but we value it in practice. In a day when some Christian leaders and church boards fly by the seat of their pants and when false shepherds lead people astray we can see the wisdom in a Constitution.

iii. Connection: We believe that Carmel Presbyterian Church is not the only church. We believe in ministry not just on a local scale but on a worldwide scale. We have a governmental connection with other Presbyterian Churches, certainly, but we are also connected with all of God's people everywhere. iv. Community: God has made a covenant to accept us unconditionally when we place our faith in Christ and to care for us as His children. We, in turn, are called to covenant to care for our brothers and sisters in Christ.

7. The Priesthood of All Believers
We tend to talk about clergy and laity. However, in reality we believe that there is no difference between clergy and laity, just different functions. We believe in the biblical concept of the priesthood of all believers.

The Reformers realized that a special class of priests who were closer to God than ordinary people was not the teaching of the New Testament. According to 1 Peter 2 all believers are priests, which means every believer can go directly to God without an intermediary and every priest has a ministry to perform. Our individual ministries are related to our individual gifts that God has given us. (See Ephesians 4, Romans 12, and 1 Corinthians 12-14.)

The role of the so-called clergy then is to teach the Word of God and to equip every believer for their individual ministries. We believe that Carmel Presbyterian Church should be an "equipping center": a place where people are helped to discover their individual gifts and then trained to use them in service either within the life of the church or beyond the church walls in the world.

8. Blessed to be a Blessing
God's people under the Old Covenant were in a unique relationship to God. If they would be obedient to God, God would bless them with health, abundant crops, and peace.
The nations would then come to them to discover the God whom they served. Israel failed in this role because they failed to obey God.

In the New Covenant period in which we now live, God's called-out-from-the-world-people are commanded by none other than Jesus himself to take the good news of the Gospel to all ethnic groups. We do this ultimately because our love of Christ constrains us to do so.

Conclusion: This is what we believe at Carmel Presbyterian Church. We confess that we live it out imperfectly. We do not hide the fact that we are people in process . . . people on the way . . . people wanting to become all that God wants us to be. We are well aware of our humanity and confess that we hurt one another from time to time. We confess that we often talk a better line about what we believe than how we live it out. We readily admit that the common comment that "nobody's perfect" is true also for God's people.

Still, in our hearts, we want to be more than we are. And, we believe that by the presence and enabling power of God the Holy Spirit we can be all that God wants us to be. As someone once said, "I'm not what I should be and I'm not what I'm going to be, but thank God I'm not what I used to be!"