What We Believe
God has saved us by grace through faith in Christ.
“Faith is a living, daring confidence in God’s grace.”
When Lutherans talk about faith, we are talking about the relationship God’s Holy Spirit creates with us. It’s a relationship where God’s promise of steadfast love and mercy in Jesus opens us to a life of bold trust in God and joyful, generous service to everyone we know and meet in daily life.
Martin Luther was exuberant when he described the freedom of “a living, daring confidence in God’s grace, so sure and certain that believers would stake their lives on it a thousand times.” He once wrote, “Oh, it is a living, busy, active, mighty thing, this faith. It is impossible for it not to be doing good things unceasingly.”
Faith convictions expressed as statements of belief flow from this confident trust in God. ELCA Lutherans share in the faith expressed in the Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds, in the Lutheran confessional writings (collected as the Book of Concord), and in the ELCA Confession of Faith.
God is present with us in Word and Sacrament and forms us to experience God’s presence in every aspect of daily life.
God has created us by grace to live in union with Jesus Christ and to live faithful, fruitful lives by the power of the Holy Spirit (Ephesians 2:8-10). In Jesus Christ, God has reconciled us to God and to each other. As we gather around Scripture and the sacraments of baptism and Holy Communion, this life in Christ defines, shapes, and guides us.
By God’s grace, we can and do live confidently and generously in this community of faith and in service of others, amid the mysteries and paradoxes of this life in Christ – including our human limitations and failings, and the ambiguities, uncertainties, and suffering that we experience.
The loving presence of God in Christ is also with us through one another and in our daily lives in the world. In the words of Galatians 2:20, “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
Christ frees us to love and serve all people unconditionally.
Christ has and continues to free us from sin and death, even from ourselves, so that we can live out the loving, healing, liberating, and reconciling agents of Christ. (2 Corinthians 5:17-18). In Jesus Christ, all of life – every act of service, in every daily calling, in every corner of life – flows freely from a living, daring confidence in God’s grace.
God frees us to join in God’s work of building God’s kingdom of justice and mercy on earth as in heaven. Through the wide range of vocations to which God calls us, we nurture faith, build alliances, and gather resources for a healed, reconciled, and just world. As a church together, we strive to participate in God’s reconciling work, especially with disenfranchised, vulnerable, and displaced people in our communities and the world. We bear witness to the love of God in Jesus Christ through dialogue and collaboration with ecumenical partners and with other faiths. In all these ministries, God’s generosity flows through us into the life of the world.
Christ calls us to share this good news so others might also live in a dynamic, life-giving relationship with the Triune God.
The life of grace is lived in community. None of us lives only for ourselves. Our well-being, our forgiven-ness, our freedom is experienced in our inter-relatedness with others. We are called to share this joy, this hope, this promise with others so they, too, can experience the life-giving love of God.
We welcome people of all sorts to an ever-widening circle of grace, accepting one another because God accepts us, loves us, forgives us. We appreciate the words of the Iona Community:
The table of bread and wine is now to be made ready. It is the table of company with Jesus and all who love him. It is the table of sharing with the poor of the world, with whom Jesus identified himself. It is the table of communion with the earth, in which Christ became incarnate. So come to this table, you who have much faith and you who would like to have more; you who have been here often and you who have not been for a while you who have tried to follow Jesus, and you who have failed; Come. It is Christ who invites us to meet him here. (Iona Communion Liturgy 2020)