God is the creator of everything, maker of all things visible and invisible, who was before all things. God is personal and knowable and has a name, “Yahweh,” revealed in Exodus and throughout Scripture. God is Trinity, three-in-one—God the Father, Jesus the Son, the Holy Spirit—which means that God has always and will always exist in an ongoing relationship of love. As the theologian Micheal Reeves notes, “Loving others is not a strange or novel thing for God; it is at the root of who he is. God is love because God is a Trinity.”

In the beginning, a good God made a good world, and “imaged” himself in human beings, creating both man and woman in his likeness, to steward his good world and partner with him in bringing its good potential to bear. Because of this, every human is imbued with intrinsic worth, value, and dignity, a Christian theology of Imago Dei. Sin (rebellion against God) marred that good plan and introduced death into the human story. The Gospel is the good news that God our Father, the Creator, out of His great love for us, has come to rescue us from sin, satan, death, and hell, and to renew all things in and through the work of Jesus Christ on our behalf, and to establish His Kingdom through His people, in the power of the Holy Spirit. This is for God’s great glory and our profound joy.

Salvation is the rescuing power, transformative work, and redemptive hope offered through Jesus. We are rescued from sin and death through the power of Jesus’ death and resurrection (what Christians sometimes call “justification”), we are saved into the family of God, as we join brothers and sisters in the ongoing journey of being daily formed by the Holy Spirit into Christlikeness (what Christians sometimes call “sanctification”), and we are saved for the coming day of redemption, when Christ returns to right all wrongs, inaugurate God’s good new world, and invite us into that good new world (what Christians sometimes call “glorification”).

The Bible is the living, active word of God, true and without error or falsehood in its original literary intent and design. God divinely inspired its writing through the original human authors. He does not contradict what he has already spoken for us through his word, in belief and practice. Therefore, the Bible serves not only as an inspiration and a guide into ongoing life with God, but also as a guardrail for us to better discover, understand, and live into the providential, moral, and personal will of God for our world and our lives.

The New Testament authors use various metaphors and images to describe the church—the body and the bride of Christ, the temple, a royal priesthood, the family of God. Though varied, these metaphors and images affirm several key truths—Christ is the leader of the church, Christ dwells in the church, the church belongs to God, the church is set apart from the world, the church is called out missionally into the world, the church is family. Living Hope Church is a localized, contextualized expression of the global, historic, universal Christian church.