We love the Bible and take it seriously. We believe the Bible is God’s written revelation to us and the ultimate authority for faith and practice. The Bible is quite complex, even though it unfolds into one overarching narrative. The Bible was written by many different authors over a great deal of time, all inspired by the Holy Spirit. It was written mainly in Greek and Hebrew and covers the spectrum in terms of types and genres of literature. When we study or teach the Bible, we consider the genre, original context, author’s intent, and historical background to get a full picture of meaning. Because we love the Bible, we want to treat it with the utmost respect and give it room to say what it says: not what we want it to say. God cannot be neatly confined to a political party’s platform or ideology, and neither can His Word. Simply put, we believe the Bible is true. Ironically, we live in a world full of falsehoods. We desire to be conformed to the image of Jesus and grow in the faith as delivered in the Bible; we don’t conform Jesus or the scriptures into our image.
We preach through the Lectionary found in the Book of Common Prayer, as many churches have done for hundreds of years. Instead of relying on our own ingenuity to come up with sermon series and decide “what we should talk about,” we rely on the assigned scripture texts for every day of the year as we walk through the church calendar together.
