Our Mission is to...

"Love God, Love People, and Make Disciples."


We find our mission and purpose as a family of faith in the red letters of Scripture. Two passages that make clear the focus of Christ’s desire for those who follow Him are the Great Commandment in Matthew 22:37-40 and the Great Commission in Matthew 28:18-20. 

 

And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” 

Matthew 22:37-40 (ESV)

 

And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” 

Matthew 28:18-20 (ESV)


With these key passages of Scripture in mind, we are committed to “Love God, Love People, and Make Disciples” by being an avenue of transformation. This means that we are learning to live every day by the Word of Christ, empowered by the Holy Spirit, to build communities of whole people devoted to honoring God our Father, both here in the Toutle River Valley, and around the world. 

STATEMENT OF FAITH

Toutle Christian Fellowship was formed as a fellowship of believers in the Lordship of Jesus Christ on October 1, 1950. Still today, we continue to be a body of believers that submit ourselves to His Lordship, with a deep desire to know Him and to be conformed to His image by the power of the Holy Spirit. 


OUR BELIEFS

We believe that the only true basis of Christian fellowship is Christ's (agápē) love, which is greater than any differences we possess and, without which, we have no right to claim ourselves Christians. 


We embrace that true worship of God is done in Spirit and in Truth. This means that we remain flexible and yielded to the leading of the Holy Spirit to direct our worship, while being firmly rooted and established in the Truth—that is, the inspired Word of God.


We are established upon traditional, orthodox, historic, biblical Christianity as outlined in 1 Corinthians 15 and The Apostle’s Creed, among other historic statements of faith. Our beliefs are not based on what feels true to us or on what agrees with our human reason, but on what God has revealed to be true. Consequently, we base our beliefs on God’s words in the Bible and seek to understand more and more deeply what God has there spoken. 


We believe that God is eternally existent in three united, yet separate persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God the Father is the personal, transcendent, and sovereign Creator God, who created all things through the Son. Jesus, His Son, is fully God and fully human. He was born of a virgin, lived a sinless life, provided the atonement for our sins by His death on the cross, was bodily resurrected, and ascended to the right hand of God the Father; He ever lives to make intercession for us and will again return to restore all things. The Holy Spirit is the eternal Comforter that Christ poured out on believers after His ascension. The Holy Spirit empowers all people by His gifts to fulfill Christ’s command to preach the Gospel to the entire world, an obligation shared by all believers today. 


We hold that all people are by nature separated from God and responsible for their own sin. In faith, we embrace that the salvation, redemption, and forgiveness Christ offers are freely given to all by grace, through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. This means that when a person repents of sin and accepts Jesus as their personal Savior and Lord, that person is born again and sealed with the Holy Spirit. Their sins are forgiven, and that person becomes a child of God, destined to spend eternity with the Lord.


Finally, we acknowledge that no single statement of faith can fully account for what we believe when we consider all that the Lord has revealed to us in Scripture. Given this, we seek to teach the Word of God in such a way that His message can be applied practically for the life of any individual, leading that person to greater maturity in Christ Jesus.