VISION, MISSION AND BELIEFS
WHAT IS ST. PAUL’S MISSION?
God calls us to be a community of faith celebrating God’s love in Christ and moved by the Spirit to witness to God through listening, learning and serving.
WHAT IS ST. PAUL’S VISION?
GATHERING ♦ GROWING ♦ GIVING
We understand that gathering is at the center of our life together as God’s people. We take seriously our time together in worship on Sunday mornings, our primary gathering time. God also gathers us in our families, our neighborhoods, and in small groups to do the work of the Kingdom.
We seek to be a place that is growing in our discipleship and relationship with God and one another, as well as our commitment to our neighborhood and the city of Arlington. And we are! We have many new families and visitors, along with a core faithful community, that is living in this sort of life of faith.
We want to be generous in our giving as a witness to the God that we confess and worship. In our tradition, this means that we are generous in our support of the wider church we are a part of, in our partners, in our presence and work in Arlington itself, and in our giving as families and individuals to support the work of the congregation.
WHAT ARE ST. PAUL’S BELIEFS?
We believe in a gracious God who loves us unconditionally. We believe that the Bible is the story of God and God’s people – the story of God’s great love for us. We also believe we are part of the story. For us, the core of the story is the good news that God was revealed through Jesus as a human being, died and rose again to bring us into a relationship with God. That relationship gives hope, comfort, and purpose to our lives. As Lutheran Christians, we believe that we are saved by God’s grace, which we receive through faith, not by anything we do. We share in the mystery of faith expressed in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds and in the Lutheran confessional writings (collected as the Book of Concord). Finally, we believe that God is still active in the world around us.