Our Beliefs

What We Believe

  1. We believe that God acts out of love and grace and that ultimately it is love that changes people.
  2. We think that what truly matters in the life of faith is God’s choice of us and not our decision for God.
  3. We see God as both revealed and hidden. The crucified Jesus reveals to us the heart of God. Yet for us God remains a deep mystery. We think we need to be a bit humble when it comes to making statements about what God is up to in the world.
  4. We believe that the ordinary world is where God meets us. We think that God comes to us through means like water, bread and wine, and other people. We get a little nervous when people think they have a direct pipeline to God.
  5. For us, the Bible is “living word.” It is an address from God that invites us into a deeper relationship with God. We value it too much to think that it is infallible or without error.
  6. We think that Christians live in a both/and relationship with the world. We don’t despise the secular realm, but we also don’t think that it is ultimate. We welcome scientific study but don’t feel that life can be fully captured by scientific analysis. We like to live in the land of ambiguity.
  7. For us, the church is a creation of God, not the result of religious experiences or the actions of leaders.
  8. We believe that the church is a community of faith in which all have a role to play. For us, all of us are ministers.
  9. We think that Christians of today are connected to Christians of every time and place. We do certain things in worship and in church life because those things reflect our deep connection to those who have come before us. We are people of tradition, but believe that changing and being changed is what our tradition is all about.
  10. We Lutherans believe that before God and in the presence of the crucified Jesus all of us are beggars. We think that ultimately our worth and purpose in life come as a gift from God, not from anything we do.

First Lutheran is a member congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, the largest Lutheran body in our country. It is a vibrant and energetic body of believers that focuses its life on the graciousness of God that is rooted in the crucified and raised Jesus. Since our focus is discovered there, we believe that all are welcome here.