Our Beliefs
Champion Forest Baptist Church is an autonomous body of believers who have been saved and eternally secured by grace through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, baptized as believers by immersion, and joined together by the Holy Spirit, with Jesus Himself as the Head of the church. Its ordinances are:
- Baptism, symbolizing the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the death of the believer’s old way of life and rising to a new life, and the believer’s public identification with Christ and with His church; and
- The Lord’s Supper, a symbolic reminder of Christ’s sacrificial, atoning death and the anticipation of His promised second coming.
The Church is guided by the Holy Bible, God’s only divinely inspired, infallible and inerrant revelation of Himself. The Holy Bible speaks as the final authority concerning truth, morality, and the proper conduct of mankind and is the final source of all that we believe.
In the Holy Bible, God reveals himself as the one true and sovereign God, existing eternally in three persons as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, yet one in substance. Mankind was created by and in the image of God, but all of humanity has fallen willfully into sin and is in need of God’s forgiveness and salvation. Salvation is available only through faith in Jesus Christ, God’s unique and only Son. Both fully divine and fully human, Jesus was born of a virgin, lived a sinless life, and suffered for the sins of the world through His atoning work on the cross, made sufficient to all who believe. He was buried, bodily raised again on the third day, and ascended to the right hand of the Father, where He makes intercession for the saints and awaits the time of His return to earth. Upon His return, He will rapture the church and resurrect the bodies of departed saints unto eternal life in Heaven and establish His Kingdom reign forever.
God wonderfully and immutably creates each person as male and female and the two distinct, but complementary genders, uniquely in all of creation, reflect the image and nature of God. God commanded the male and female to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, so He ordained marriage to be exclusively the union of one man and one woman, and that sexual activity occur exclusively within that sacred union. Human life is sacred, being created by God in His own image, and of inestimable dignity and worth in all of its dimensions including pre-born babies, the aged, the physically or mentally challenged and every other stage or condition of life, from conception through natural death. As such mankind is called to defend, protect and greatly value human life.
As an expanded statement of generally held beliefs among Southern Baptist Churches, Champion Forest Baptist Church affirms the Baptist Faith and Message (2000).
