Our Beliefs

Our hope is for Local Church St. Pete to be a community where you can grow in your faith, ask hard questions and take time to explore the truths of who Jesus is and what it means for your life today.

Here are some truths we treasure and resources we love to share. Enjoy exploring them.

CORE DESIRES

Expectation and Dependency
We believe God will do great things for our good and His glory. We want to trust him and lean on him through prayer in every way.

Humility and Compassion
We know we are not the “saviors” of St Pete, there’s only one. We are not the only thing going on in St Pete. God is at work through many people and in various ways but we get to be a part of His mission. We will always have something to learn from others. We have been shown compassion, and want to show it to others.

Love and Mercy
Jesus said, “The world will know you are my disciples by your love for one another.” We want to walk in love. This will require sacrifice and patience, sincerity and time. We have been forgiven and shown mercy through Jesus and want to show forgiveness and mercy to others.

Intentionality and Hospitality
The time is now and the mission is before us. We want to move about our day-to-day lives with intentionality. We want to listen to, learn from, eat with and welcome people into our lives.

Tolerance and Community 
We do not have to agree on everything with someone else to show them love and respect. We do not need to accept their belief system as true to be their friend. We want to bring honest questions and honest answers where we have them. We know this happens best in the context of genuine community.

GOSPEL STORY

God himself has come to rescue and restore us in and through Jesus Christ. When we change our mind about who is God in our lives and by faith believe that Jesus’ life, death and resurrection has secured our rescue and restored us to a right relationship with God the Father, we’re then made new in Jesus. Through Jesus, God has graciously provided a way for our broken relationship with Him to be restored and made right again. It’s this very message of reconciliation and hope that defines who we are as a church. We get to come alongside others and say, “Look at what God has done in Jesus!…Jesus is God’s answer to the hurt, pain, brokenness and longing in our own hearts. God has not left us alone, He has provided a way for us to be at peace with him – this story of Jesus grows out of a bigger story – one that’s been shouting promises of forgiveness for ages and now in Jesus we see how those promises have been answered!” Nothing shapes the identity of Local Church St. Pete more than this Gospel Story.

GOSPEL IDENTITY

Tim Keller: “When we experience Christ’s radical grace through repentance and faith, it becomes the most intense, foundational event of our lives…In Christ we have both spiritually died and been raised to new life.” Our identity is not in how we dress, what we look like, how much money we make or where we live. It isn’t something we have to earn either. Our identity is found in Jesus and this means we’ve entered a new family, a Gospel community, where we are loved and accepted, not because of our work and effort but because of the work and effort of Jesus. As adopted sons and daughters we want to share the same kind of compassion and grace we’ve received from God our Father. Completely captivated by this new identity we have in Jesus, we know it’s best lived out in the context of Gospel community.

GOSPEL COMMUNITY

We were never meant to live our life in Christ on our own. Jesus said John 13:35, “all men will know you are my disciples, if you love one another.”  The New Testament exhorts us to be joined to, devoted to, counsel, honor, confess your sins to, forgive, bear with, carry the burdens of, be kind to, teach and admonish, build up, pray for, love one another. In other words, we’re called to be and do something together that we could never be and do on our own. Through this new “Gospel community” God continues to gather a people from every tribe, tongue and nation – including the people of St. Pete. Life is messy, no one is perfect and community can be tough at times, but we understand the church is God’s idea for our good and His glory.

GOSPEL INTENTIONALITY

In Thessalonians 1:5 we read that the Thessalonians heard the Gospel of Jesus in a way that came not simply with words, but also with power, with the Holy Spirit and with deep conviction. The result? They became imitators of those who preached the gospel, imitators of the Lord Jesus himself. In other words they connected what they heard to their very lives. The message they received rang out not because they planned an event that would demonstrate their faith but because their very lives gave them away! Their faith in God had become known everywhere because their passion was to serve the living and true God. We want this to be said of Local Church St. Pete. We understand that intentionality in serving God’s mission happens when there’s an overflow of love and joy for God and a true brokenness for the lost. We’re humbled by God’s grace and that translates into active, ongoing service. We aren’t striving to prove our own significance or aiming to build a name for ourselves, instead we want the people of St. Pete to see Jesus for who He is and bring honor to His name.

John Stott: “He (Jesus) did not stay in the safe immunity of His heaven. Instead He emptied himself of His glory and humbled himself to serve. He actually entered our world. He took our nature, lived our life and died our death. He could not have identified with us more closely than he did…And now he calls us to enter other people’s worlds, as he entered ours…We are called to enter other people’s social and cultural reality: into their thought-world, struggling to understand their misunderstandings of the gospel, and into the pain of their alienation, weeping with those who weep. And this without compromising our Christians beliefs, values and standards.