What We Believe

St. Paul's is a congregation affiliated with the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod.

As Confessional Lutherans:

We believe in one God who has revealed Himself to us in three Divine Persons—God the Father and God the Son and God the Holy Spirit;

We believe that this Triune God has caused His Word to be perfectly recorded in the Old and New Testament Scriptures by inspiration of the Holy Spirit; therefore, the Bible has no mistakes and errors of any kind and can be trusted absolutely;

We believe that by His almighty Word God created a perfect world in six days but that this perfect world was ruined by Adam and Eve's rebellion against their Creator. Their sin has corrupted all humanity so that all people are now conceived and born dead in sin and under God's wrath;

We believe that out of pure, undeserved love God sent His eternal Son into our sinful world to assume our flesh and to satisfy God's anger against our sins by His perfect life and His innocent suffering and death on the cross;

We believe that this same Son of God, Jesus Christ, not only died for the sins of humanity but that He rose bodily from the dead after three days;

We believe that for Jesus' sake God has graciously pardoned the entire world and it is this good news or Gospel which Jesus wants His Church to proclaim to all people;

We believe that God distributes His forgiveness and is present today among His people through the "means of grace" (the Word and Sacraments) and that God's Church is found wherever these means of grace are used;

We believe that Baptism is one of these "means of grace" through which God, by water in His mighty Word, calls people (including infants and little children) into His Church or family, giving them the new birth of faith, and forgiving them all their sins;

We believe that the Lord's Supper is another "means of grace" in which our risen Savior gives all communicants His true body to eat and His true blood to drink hidden in, with, and under the outward forms of bread and wine for the forgiveness of all their sins and the strengthening of their faith;

We believe that the Holy Spirit, who spoke to the Prophets and Apostles in the Bible, speaks to us through God's Word and Sacrament;

We believe that, through congregations such as ours, God calls qualified men into the public Ministry of Word and Sacrament to faithfully preach His Word and administer the Sacraments;

We believe that our risen Savior Jesus will return visibly to this world on the last day as He has promised to assign all unbelievers to eternal punishment in hell but to take all true believers to live with Himself in heaven forever;

We believe that all the teachings of the Lutheran Church, as we have learned to know them from Luther's Small Catechism and as they are more thoroughly explained in the other Lutheran Confessions, are true and correct statements of the teachings of the Bible and reflect our own personal faith today.

We believe that harmony and uniformity among God's people should be encouraged as St. Paul teaches (Romans 15:5) so that we might all "with one heart and one mouth glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ" (Romans 15:6); hence we use historic and traditional liturgies and hymnody in all Divine Services.

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