إيمــاننـا

• Regardless of the name: God, Yahweh or Allah, we believe in One God, Creator of more stars in heaven than grains of sand on earth: the Great I am.

• We believe God is Spirit; He is beyond matter, space and time; non-subject to tangible human experimentation and computation.

• We believe God is Omnipresent, Omnipotent, All Good and All Wise.

• We believe God is all about Love.

• We believe that it is out of absolute Love that God created Man in His own image with uncompromising insistence on granting him free will.

C.S Lewis put it this way: “God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong, but I can't. If a thing is free to be good, it's also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata -of creatures that worked like machines- would hardly be worth creating."

• We believe God gave us the choice to walk with Him or away from Him.

• We believe we all sinned by choosing to disobey God subjecting ourselves to the consequence of being separated from God, our only source for joy and peace. "God cannot give us happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing." writes C.S Lewis.

• We believe that out of an eternal and unconditional love, God had a plan. He willingly chose to inflict the punishment on Himself to reconcile us back to Him into the original relationship that we were created for. It is nothing out of our goodness or merit, but out of God’s grace: a free gift that we all agree we do not deserve.

• We believe not in a religion that dictates how to reach out to satisfy a god, but in a God who reached down to us. Nothing we need to do; all is already done!

• We believe that whoever acknowledges to be in need for God’s help for his own salvation by accepting to receive God’s free gift, Jesus Christ, will spend eternity with God.

• We believe that our salvation is found in Jesus Christ alone.

• We believe the Nazarene teacher who lived 2020 years ago in our Middle East and originally named Yeshua, later modified into Jesus or Issa, is God Himself in human flesh.

• We believe Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit to be born from Virgin Mary. Jesus’ teaching was all about radical love, unrestricted forgiveness and humble servanthood.

• We believe He, who also was full human, existed from the Beginning, had authority to forgive sins, had the power over nature, awoke people from the dead and declared to be the Way, Truth and Life, all of which to be attributed to a Creator God alone yet if not, then to an insane person; no third possibility left.

C.S. Lewis explains: "You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us."

• We believe Jesus Christ is God's Word and ultimate God's self revelation to Mankind.

• In his teaching, Jesus uncompromisingly hammered hypocrisy, the particular sin practiced at the time by the Jewish leaders and, surely enough, nowadays by us. Disturbed and annoyed, the leaders set Jesus to death. We believe that, out of an unfathomable, unconditional love, the innocent Jesus willfully succumbed all the way to death on the cross.

Historically, the cross is one of the cruelest execution tools invented. After hours of beating and whipping, the criminals' or rebels' arms were nailed on a horizontal bar and they were left to die slowly by the exhaustion of their respiratory muscles. Overridden by the golden ornaments placed in our churches, hanging in our homes or dangling on our chests, the true message of the cross got sadly overlooked.

C.S Lewis puts it elegantly: “The crucifixion did not become common in art until all who had seen a real one died off.”

• We believe it is on this same cruel tool that the crucified Jesus not only declared and put into practice His unconditional love and forgiveness toward His prosecutors, but also set an example to His followers, later referred to as Christians, to behave similarly toward their neighbors and enemies.

• Opposite to the sword that symbolizes the sacrifice of the other out of hate, the cross of Jesus symbolizes the sacrifice of the self out of love.

• We Believe Jesus died and was raised from the dead on the third day; declaring triumph over sin and Evil.

• We believe Jesus ascended to heaven and is waiting for us there, our ultimate home.

• We believe Jesus shall return to judge the living and the dead.

• We believe that our Master, Lord & Savior is alive, is present with us and interacts with us today through the Holy Spirit.

• We believe in the unseen Spirit of God present with us today. He is our advocate, comforter, counselor, guidance and Joy; a joy that no one or circumstance can take away from us. A joy based on God’s love alone.

• We believe that when we sin the Holy Spirit grieves. It is for this very reason that, after acknowledging and accepting God’s gift of salvation, we shall not return to our old sinful ways. We shall not sin, not out of fear from a punishment, rather our of love for the Lord.

• We believe the Holy Spirit facilitates our relationship, communication and conversation with God the Father through guiding our prayers.

• We believe a prayer from a sincere heart is the way to relate with our passionate Father in heaven.

• We believe our prayer has the power to change circumstances; but more importantly has the power to change us, the pray-ers, to conform to the will of God.

• We believe God listens to us, knows and feels what we are going through and that He- regardless of our understanding - responds to our prayers in His way and Time.

• We believe we relate to a living God who communicates with His beloved Children through prayer, through daily circumstances and through his given word in the Bible.

• We believe the Bible alone is the word of God written by many prophets and apostles by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

• We believe the Bible is the only infallible source for the knowledge of God’s truth concerning salvation from Sin; and the source for God's commandments according to which we need to live and examine our conduct.

• We believe the Bible is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.

• We believe the core message of the Bible is about God’s love by which we were created, saved and called His children.

• We believe the Church is the Family of God's children and not a hierarchical organization or an architecturally impressive building.

• We believe this Family consists of sinners and imperfect people who acknowledged their helplessness by accepting God's grace in Jesus Christ, the Head of the church.

• Even with clashes over theology, doctrine or worship methodologies, we believe this Family from all over the world is unified in Jesus. Regardless of our citizenship, culture, language, race, social status or type of favored music, we are One in Christ.