“Baptist” has come to mean many different things to many different people over the years—not all of it good.
We think the Baptist tradition is defined by its commitment to personal choice and direct connection to God.
Traditionally, Baptists do not have a specific creed or set of dogmas which we are required to believe.
Nor do we have a central administrative authority that dictates what each Baptist church should teach.
(The Southern Baptist Convention is a different story, but—long story short—we aren’t a part of the Southern Baptist Convention.)
We are generally united in believing that Christ’s life, death, and resurrection have made forgiveness and everlasting life freely available to all people through faith in him.
This is what the Apostle Paul called, “The Gospel of Christ.”
We also tend to agree on some other doctrines as well, but there are no absolute, uniform, or specific requirements placed on how each individual interprets the Bible or the work of God in our world.
Faith is a journey that we all take together, but it must also be one of personal discovery.
We also believe that all human beings have equal and direct access to God through Christ’s work of redemption.
All people have been called to love God and their neighbor perfectly but have fallen short of that call to love. This breaks our relationship with God.
That’s why God came to earth as Jesus: To reconcile us. He lived a life of perfect love, suffered and died under the weight of our sorrows and mistakes, and rose to life again to proclaim the hope of renewal for all of his creation.
Because of Jesus, all of us can come to God just as we are.
When we believe in the love which God greets us with through Jesus Christ, our relationship with God is restored.
Through this restoration, we receive eternal life and are adopted as a part of God’s family.
This is accomplished solely by grace through faith.
(Grace is another word for God’s unchanging love for everyone. Faith is what connects us to that love.)
Having a relationship with God doesn’t require special rituals or special people or special words.
Because of what the Lord Jesus has done for us, we are all empowered to call out to God for the renewed life and forgiveness which we all need.
God has promised to answer that call from anyone at any time in any place.
Once we are freed from guilt, shame, and the fear of our own mortality through Jesus, we are empowered to love God and our neighbor by the Holy Spirit.
And we do the best job of loving God and our neighbor when we work together.
