There is no building yet. No sign along the highway, no service time to give you, no address to write down. What there is, at present, is a small number of people in Washington County who want the same thing and are asking the Lord to give it.
I have been a pastor for forty years. I am not looking to start something novel. I am looking to see an ordinary church in this valley, doing the ordinary things Christ gave His church to do, and doing them for a long time.
What we are after
The preaching of the Word. Not a talk about the Word, not twenty minutes of encouragement with a verse attached to the front of it. The text opened, worked through book by book, the difficult parts along with the comfortable ones, at whatever length the text requires.
Worship ordered by Scripture rather than by taste. We read the Bible aloud. We pray. We sing to God, and the singing belongs to the congregation. We keep the two ordinances the Lord gave us, baptism and the Supper, and we keep them the way He gave them.
And membership that means something. Knowing one another. Bearing one another's burdens. Being missed when you are absent. A church you can be held accountable by, which is a mercy and not a burden, whatever the age says about it.
Why the name
We put it in the name to save everyone time.
God saves sinners. He does it because He determined to, before the foundation of the world, and not because He looked ahead and found something in us worth choosing. Salvation is His work from beginning to end. Christ died for His people and actually saved them by it. The Spirit gives life to the dead, and the dead do not cooperate in their own raising.
So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy. Romans 9:16
That is not a doctrine we keep in a back room and bring out once you have proven yourself. It is the gospel. It is the only reason anyone has anything to be glad about. And it is the difference between a hope that rests on what God has done and a hope that rests on how you happen to feel this morning.
We hold to the Second London Baptist Confession of 1689. Not as a substitute for Scripture but as a plain statement of what we believe Scripture teaches, written down where you can read it before you come rather than discover it after.
Who this is for
Perhaps you have been driving a long way on Sundays to sit under preaching like this, and you are tired of the drive. Perhaps you grew up on it, lost it somewhere, and have not been able to find it again nearby. Perhaps you have never heard any of this and something in it has caught you.
Perhaps you are not a Christian at all and would not say you were looking for a church. You are welcome. You will not be singled out, cornered, or asked to raise a hand. You will hear the Bible read and preached, which is the thing most worth your time in any case.
I will tell you plainly what this will not be. It will not be large, at least not soon. There will be no band and no lights. Nothing here is designed to be impressive. If that is a disappointment, better to know it now than in six months.