What We Believe

We believe in one God, eternally existing in three equally divine Persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, who know, love, and glorify one another. This one true and living God is infinitely perfect in both His love and His holiness. He is the Creator of all things, visible and invisible, and is therefore worthy of all glory and adoration.

Immortal and eternal, He perfectly and completely knows the end from the beginning. He sustains and sovereignly rules over all things and, through His providence, brings about His eternal and good purposes—to redeem a people for Himself and restore His fallen creation to the praise of His glorious grace.

We believe that God created human beings, male and female, in His own image. Adam and Eve belonged to the created order that God Himself declared to be very good, serving as God’s agents to care for, manage, and govern creation while living in holy and devoted fellowship with their Maker.

Men and women, equally made in the image of God, enjoy equal access to God through faith in Christ Jesus and are both called to move beyond passive self-indulgence toward meaningful private and public engagement in family, church, and civic life.

Adam and Eve were made to complement one another in a one-flesh union that establishes the only normative pattern of sexual relations for men and women. In this way, marriage ultimately serves as a picture of the union between Christ and His Church. In God’s wise purposes, men and women are not simply interchangeable but are created to complement one another in mutually enriching ways.

God ordains that they assume distinctive roles reflecting the loving relationship between Christ and the Church—the husband exercising headship in a way that displays the caring and sacrificial love of Christ, and the wife submitting to her husband in a way that models the love of the Church for her Lord.

In the ministry of the church, both men and women are encouraged to serve Christ and to be developed to their full potential in the many ministries of the people of God. The distinctive leadership role within the church given to qualified men is grounded in creation, fall, and redemption and must not be set aside by appeals to cultural developments.

We believe that from all eternity God, in His grace, determined to save a great multitude of guilty sinners from every tribe, language, people, and nation. To this end, He foreknew them and chose them.

We believe that God justifies and sanctifies those who, by grace, have faith in Jesus, and that one day He will glorify them—all to the praise of His glorious grace.

In love, God commands and implores all people to repent and believe, having set His saving love on those He has chosen and having ordained Christ to be their Redeemer.

We believe that, moved by love and in obedience to His Father, the eternal Son became human: the Word became flesh, fully God and fully man, one Person in two natures. The man Jesus, the promised Messiah of Israel, was conceived through the miraculous work of the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary.

He perfectly obeyed His heavenly Father, lived a sinless life, performed miraculous signs, was crucified under Pontius Pilate, rose bodily from the dead on the third day, and ascended into heaven. As the mediatorial King, He is seated at the right hand of God the Father, exercising God’s sovereignty in heaven and on earth, and serving as our High Priest and righteous Advocate.

We believe that through His incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and ascension, Jesus Christ acted as our representative and substitute. In Him we become the righteousness of God. On the cross He canceled sin, satisfied the righteous wrath of God, and by bearing the full penalty of our sins reconciled to God all who believe.

Through His resurrection, Christ Jesus was vindicated by His Father, broke the power of death, defeated Satan who once held power over it, and secured everlasting life for all His people. By His ascension He has been forever exalted as Lord and has prepared a place for us to be with Him.

We believe that salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved. Because God chose the lowly things of this world—the despised things and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, no human being may boast before Him. Christ Jesus has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness, and redemption.

We believe that those who have been saved by the grace of God through union with Christ by faith and through regeneration by the Holy Spirit enter the kingdom of God and delight in the blessings of the new covenant: the forgiveness of sins, the inward transformation that awakens a desire to glorify, trust, and obey God, and the promise of the glory yet to be revealed.

Good works constitute indispensable evidence of saving grace. Living as salt in a decaying world and light in a dark world, believers should neither withdraw into seclusion nor become indistinguishable from the world. Rather, we are to seek the good of the city, for all the glory and honor of the nations will ultimately be offered to the living God.

Recognizing that this is God’s created order, and because we are citizens of His kingdom, we are called to love our neighbors as ourselves, doing good to all, especially to those who belong to the household of God.

The kingdom of God, already present but not yet fully realized, is the exercise of God’s sovereign rule in the world toward the eventual redemption of all creation. It is an invasive power that plunders Satan’s dark kingdom and regenerates and renews—through repentance and faith—the lives of individuals rescued from that kingdom. In doing so, it inevitably establishes a new community of people living together under God’s rule.

We believe that baptism and the Lord’s Supper were ordained by the Lord Jesus Himself. Baptism is connected with entrance into the new covenant community, while the Lord’s Supper is connected with ongoing covenant renewal.

Together, they serve as God’s pledge to us, divinely ordained means of grace, our public vows of submission to the once-crucified and now-resurrected Christ, and a foretaste of His return and the consummation of all things.

The mode of baptism practiced at Foundation Church is post-conversion immersion.

God has graciously revealed His existence and power in the created order and has supremely revealed Himself to fallen humanity in the person of His Son, the incarnate Word.

This God is a speaking God who, by His Spirit, has graciously made Himself known in human words. We believe that God inspired the words preserved in the Scriptures—the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments—which serve as both the record and the means of His saving work in the world.

These writings alone constitute the verbally inspired Word of God. They are utterly authoritative and without error in the original writings, complete in revealing His will for salvation, sufficient for all that God requires us to believe and do, and final in their authority over every domain of knowledge to which they speak.

We confess that our finitude and sinfulness prevent us from knowing God’s truth exhaustively, yet we affirm that, enlightened by the Spirit of God, we can truly know God’s revealed truth.

The Bible is to be believed as God’s instruction in all that it teaches, obeyed as God’s command in all that it requires, and trusted as God’s promise in all that it declares. As God’s people hear, believe, and live out the Word, they are equipped as disciples of Christ and witnesses to the Gospel.

We believe that Adam, made in the image of God, distorted that image and forfeited his original blessedness—for himself and for all his descendants—by falling into sin through Satan’s temptation.

As a result, all human beings are alienated from God, corrupted in every aspect of their being—physically, mentally, volitionally, emotionally, and spiritually—and are ultimately condemned to death apart from God’s gracious intervention.

The greatest need of all humanity is reconciliation with God, under whose just and holy wrath we stand. Our only hope is the undeserved love of this same God, who alone can rescue us and restore us to Himself.

We believe that the Gospel is the good news of Jesus Christ—God’s wisdom.  Utter folly to the world, it is the power of God to those who are being saved.

This good news is Christ-centered, focusing on the cross and resurrection. The Gospel is not proclaimed if Christ is not proclaimed, and the true Christ is not proclaimed if His death and resurrection are not central. The message is simple: Christ died for our sins and was raised from the dead.

This good news is biblical—His death and resurrection occurred according to the Scriptures. It is theological and salvific—Christ died for our sins to reconcile us to God. It is historical—if these events did not truly occur, our faith is futile and we remain in our sins.

It is apostolic—the message was entrusted to and transmitted by the apostles, who were eyewitnesses of these saving events. And it is deeply personal—where it is received, believed, and held firmly, individuals are saved.

We believe that Christ, through His obedience and death, fully satisfied the debt of all who are justified.

By His sacrifice He bore, in our place, the punishment due for our sins, making a true, proper, and complete satisfaction to God’s justice on our behalf. Through His perfect obedience He fulfilled the righteous requirements of God for us, and by faith alone that perfect obedience is credited to all who trust in Christ alone for their acceptance with God.

Because Christ was given by the Father for us, and His obedience and punishment were accepted in place of our own—not because of anything within us but entirely by grace—this justification is solely an act of God’s free grace.

In this way both the perfect justice and the rich grace of God are glorified in the justification of sinners. From this free justification flows a zeal for personal and public obedience.

We believe that the salvation revealed in Scripture and accomplished by Jesus Christ is applied to His people by the Holy Spirit.

Sent by the Father and the Son, the Holy Spirit glorifies the Lord Jesus Christ and, as the other Paraclete, dwells with and within believers. He convicts the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment, and through His powerful and mysterious work regenerates spiritually dead sinners, awakening them to repentance and faith.

By Him believers are united with the Lord Jesus, justified before God by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone.

Through the Spirit’s work believers are renewed, sanctified, and adopted into God’s family. They participate in the divine nature and receive the spiritual gifts He sovereignly distributes.

The Holy Spirit Himself is the guarantee of the promised inheritance, and in this present age He indwells, guides, instructs, equips, revives, and empowers believers for Christlike living and faithful service.

We believe that God’s new covenant people have already come to the heavenly Jerusalem and are already seated with Christ in the heavenly places.

The universal Church is expressed in local churches, of which Christ alone is the Head. Each local church is therefore the household of God, the assembly of the living God, and the pillar and foundation of the truth.

The Church is the body of Christ, the apple of His eye, engraved upon His hands, and He has pledged Himself to her forever.

The Church is marked by her Gospel message, her sacred ordinances, her discipline, and her mission, and above all by her love for God and her love for one another and for the world.

The Gospel we cherish has both personal and corporate dimensions, and neither may be neglected. Christ Jesus is our peace. He has not only reconciled us to God but has also reconciled divided peoples to one another. His purpose was to create one new humanity in Himself, bringing peace and reconciling both Jew and Gentile to God through the cross.

The Church therefore serves as a sign of God’s coming new world when its members live not for themselves but in service to one another and to their neighbors. The Church is the corporate dwelling place of God’s Spirit and His continuing witness in the world.

We believe in the personal, glorious, and bodily return of our Lord Jesus Christ with His holy angels. At that time He will exercise His role as final Judge and His kingdom will be fully established.

We believe in the bodily resurrection of both the just and the unjust—the unjust to judgment and eternal conscious punishment in hell, as our Lord Himself taught, and the just to eternal blessedness in the presence of Him who sits on the throne and of the Lamb, in the new heaven and the new earth, the home of righteousness.

On that day the Church will be presented faultless before God through the obedience, suffering, and triumph of Christ. All sin will be removed and its wretched effects forever banished.

God will be all in all, and His people will be captivated by the immediacy of His glorious holiness. Everything will resound to the praise of His glorious grace.