What We Believe: A Gospel-Centered Faith

At Trinity Community Church, we believe that God is one being that exists in Three Persons. Far more than just some philosophical riddle, this is the way that God has revealed Himself in history, as the Father and Creator, the Son who becomes one of us for our redemption, and the Spirit who draws us into the life of God and empowers his people. Because of this, we seek to celebrate and delight in all of God, as He has made Himself known: holy, loving, convicting His people of injustice, delivering us from our sins and tenderly binding up the broken. The God who is present in each of us by His Spirit also governs the far reaches of space and time.

We believe that worship is far more than an event; it’s a way of ordering our lives, a return to our very purpose as humans. We exist for the glory of God, which means worship wasn’t made for humans; humans were made for worship. The Gospel announces that Jesus is redeeming us back to this fundamental purpose and reordering our lives according to God’s way. As members of Trinity Community Church, we want every aspect of our lives to be lived as an offering of worship.

God’s purpose in creation and reconciliation was to bring together a community of people who would receive and reflect the eternal love of the Trinity. SAs a Gospel-centered church, we worship as members of a body. As we sing about the glories and mercies of our God, we sing both to God and to one another. As we listen to and proclaim God’s word, we are formed as God’s people. In communion and baptism we testify to one another what Christ has done in his life, death, burial, and resurrection and what He is doing through our lives. Because we are one body worshipping together, we joyfully submit our individual worship and liturgical preferences for the good of the body.

Here at Trinity, we believe in having a covenant commitment to one another, a commitment not based on common interests, ancestry, or opinions, but on the common identity we share in Christ. As members of Trinity Community Church, we seek to share our lives with each other, committed to each other through hard times and good, through times of tension and times when friendship comes easy, through times of grief and times of celebration, remaining unified together by the spiritual resources we have in Christ.

To love one another is to desire each other’s highest good. For us at Trinity Community Church, that means seeking to see our lives transformed by the Gospel and conformed to the way of Christ. Because God has brought us together to anticipate the way of life that he is bringing to our world, we as Christians take responsibility for each other and look out for each other’s growth. We do this without judgment because we recognize that all have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory; and we do this with loving grace, because we have each been offered immeasurable mercy in Christ.

At the end of the Bible’s story, we are given a glimpse of the sort of world that God is bringing about, and it is a world in which people from all different tribes, tongues, nations and peoples are joined together under the identity we share in Christ. As a Gospel-centered church, we believe that in Christ, our differences no longer divide us but instead reflect the endless creativity and grace of God. This means that at Trinity we equally value men and women and cherish the differences between them. We honor our older members for their wisdom and life experience and treasure the youngest in our midst as gifts from the Lord to our whole church. We want Trinity to be a community where the weak in the eyes of the world – whether physically, socially, economically – are honored more than the strong and where the spiritual gifts of each member contribute to the whole.

The Gospel is the message that Christ is reconciling people to God through the Cross and restoring Creation through the power of his coming Kingdom. For us at Trinity Community Church, being a Gospel-centered community means that we not only proclaim the Gospel but also demonstrate it by working to see our community increasingly resemble the future Kingdom. As a result, we take issues of justice, poverty, and beauty seriously, and strive to contribute meaningfully to our place in the world.

Jesus said that his disciples would be known by their love. Mission begins by building intentional community, right where we are, in our neighborhoods and workplaces and through our shared hobbies. As it was in the earliest days of the Church, bringing Jesus to those around us happens through humble acts of hospitality and love, as Christians share their lives with outsiders. We at Trinity strive to find and create spaces where seekers and skeptics can belong before they believe.

Humans are storied creatures; our lives take on meaning when we recognize them to be a part of a greater narrative. This is part of why the Gospel is so important, because through the Gospel we take part in the ultimate story that God is telling through human history. This means that as we at Trinity Community Church go out on mission, we do so as storytellers. We tell the story of what Jesus has done in the Cross, we tell the stories of what Jesus has done in our lives, and we explain the stories of the world around us through the lens of the Bible’s narrative, recognizing that belief begins as we gradually discover meaning in a transcendent story.

Here at Trinity we are not ultimately interested in converts to the faith, if all we mean by that is someone who has prayed a prayer or who marks “Christian” on a census form. Rather, we recognize that Jesus isn’t only saving us from the penalty of sin, but from its power also. He is calling us to become the kinds of people we were meant to be. Because of that, we believe that every member of Trinity Community Church is a disciple-maker, called to intentionally mentor new believers toward a lifetime of apprenticeship to Jesus, even as they themselves continue on that same pilgrimage of eternal life. In the end, the invitation we offer to those who want to know Jesus is an invitation to come and die.

As one of our elders says, just as we go where we’re sent, we also send where we’re not. While all of us at Trinity are called to be disciple-makers, we also recognize that there are others who will rise up to overcome barriers to the Gospel in a way that is entirely unique, and uniquely challenging. Without this work, the Gospel will not make it to all the nations, which is why we highly prize the work of domestic church planters and global missionaries and seek to leverage our resources to support them.