My facilitating meetings has been with the following convictions which are my own.
Jesus is the incarnate, eternal Son of God, one with God the Father: there is One God. Father, Son and Holy Spirit are fully God. The community is orthodox in its proclamation of God as Trinity but everything else is open as we share in love. The Trinity is our shared faith.
God is beyond person and gender, beyond nation and culture, beyond all forms. God the Trinity is Spirit.
We can only say what God is like and what God isn’t. God’s essential nature for Christians is love: God is love and God is One. The Trinity teaches us that God is essentially relational and creation is other than God. Trinity helps us see love in action and to contemplate its fullness. We are all called into this divine dance.
As Christians we know God to be incarnate in Jesus revealed through the tradition recorded in the Christian Bible and the teachings of people of peace who obey the command of Jesus. Jesus tells us to love God, love our neighbour and love our enemies.
We all know a lack, a seperation from God, a need to be saved from emptiness and danger. The narrow way that leads to salvation is the way that leads to life. We are saved through the gift of peace into God. Jesus lived and died and rose again and is the way, the truth and the life. Christ is eternal, ever-living, God who shows us the Father. This is the Christian understanding of the human condition and the presence of evil. Evil is more than the absence of good it’s a choice that brings death. We are called to choose life.
Our lives in Christ are radically inclusive and radically caring of one another and the creation. We seek to hold all divisions in love, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, seeking truth through self sacrifice, a way by right living and a life marked by love.
Christ is found with the marginalised. Christ is universal, the revelation of God to all peoples and all are saved from death through Christ. Christ is the eternal redeemer who in Jesus’ life and death paid the price for sin by suffering its consequences as an innocent man forsaken by God yet ever God. It is the faith of Christ’s people that death is defeated through the life, death and resurrection of Christ. Christ is the Word of God, the light that shines in all. Christians believe God is all and in all. We know this through tradition and the gift of the Christian Bible formed by the grace of God, breathed through ordinary people, to serve the Church. In the community the Christian Bible is called the Word of God by tradition.
The slaughter of Jesus on the cross reveals to us our shared sin, the nature of evil and meaning of death.
The resurection of Jesus shows us the meaning and purpose of life. Out of the ashes of death comes new life. This is our faith, our hope. Through this event in time, received through the Christian Bible and the teachings of his followers, through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, we know forgiveness of sin, we know God. In Jesus we are saved. Jesus is the only hope. Jesus is the Word of God of the Christian Bible.
Takeley Chapel 