God is love
At St. Paul’s we are committed to the historic Christian faith and believe that faith is a living, practiced, performed reality—not just right thinking or ascribing to ideas. We believe that living faith transforms our life today and leads us to a life of inclusion, justice, hope, and love. The point of right belief (what’s called orthodoxy) is not to be right, but to be a people who live out and express the love of God that is gifted to us in Jesus Christ.
God’s story—presented in scripture, the life of the Church throughout the centuries (including the historic creeds of the Church, in particular the Nicene Creed and the Apostles’ Creed), and most centrally in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ—is the story of love. Christians do not have an abstract definition God. We believe in a God who shows up, a God who comes to us and says, “this is what I am like, this is who I am.” And that “revelation” of who God is—the revealing of what God’s love and grace and mercy are like—is found in Jesus Christ, who is Emmanuel: God with us.
What we see in Jesus reveals who God always is and has been—the eternal giving and receiving of love: a God who is love. God is the eternal gift of love between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
God is with us
In Jesus Christ, Emmanuel: God with us, we see the lived expression of God’s life and love in the world. This is what we call the “incarnation,” which means that God was enfleshed; that God entered our human life to transform and redeem it. This divine love that we find among us in Jesus is what we seek to follow. It’s the life we as a community seek to live—Christians are the people of the incarnation. At the heart of this is our sacramental worship. God showed up in Jesus Christ and continues to come to us in the real, material, stuff of our world. God continues to draw near and come among us in the reality of our everyday lives.
This story of love, the story of Jesus Christ, is our story too. In Christ we see the life and love of God touching every aspect of human life—from the humility of the manger to the agony of the cross. As a result, every aspect of our life and world is reconciled to God in love. As followers of Jesus, we seek to continue touching every aspect of our world with that love. We find our place within God’s story in living lives of forgiveness, reconciliation, justice, and peace; in feeding the hungry, seeking liberation and justice for the oppressed, welcoming the stranger, and embracing the marginalized.
You are welcome
The Holy Spirit is the love that invites us into the story and enables us to live within it, and that life is lived in community. This community of the Spirit is called the Church—the Church is the home of this love in the world. Because of this, the Church must be a place of welcome and embrace, a place that makes a home for others. The story of Christ’s love and liberation opens up into our lives and continues through the Church.
The liberation of the oppressed, care for the poor, and receiving and embracing the marginalized must be at the heart of our life together because it was at the heart of the life of Jesus. This means we are committed to both the proclamation of this story and living within it. The Church is both an invitation that welcomes all and an outpouring that reaches out beyond itself to others. The promises of our baptism beautifully confirm us in this way of life.
At the center of this is a commitment to living for the benefit of those in poverty and need, to pursuing racial justice and equality, to affirming the lives and gifts of LGBTQ+ people, and gender equality. We are currently working hard to ensure that all of our facilities are fully and equally accessible to people with disabilities. We also believe that the Church is an open space for questioning, doubting, and seeking—not for those who have it all figured out but those who know it is worth it to seek more, to grow and develop, and continue on the pilgrimage, even if they aren’t entirely sure where it will end up.
For more ways to learn about our faith and grow in this story of love, see our Teaching and Formation page.