OUR BELIEFS
Harrison Church is a United Methodist community. The following expresses our beliefs concerning…
Mission Statement: Harrison United Methodist Church is dedicated to bible study and spiritual health for the next generations, building relationships with God and one another.
God
We believe God is the One revealed in the salvation history of the Jews and most fully in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We believe, in accordance with the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, that God is Trinitarian, eternally Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God, three persons, a Mystery that exceeds the limits and capacity of human reason.
Jesus
Jesus is the living embodiment (or incarnation) of God the eternal Son, the Messiah prophesied by Israel’s prophets, and the person in whom and through whom God disclosed and still discloses his true purposes for the world. He is God’s Word made flesh, the Kingdom of God in human form, the visible image of the invisible God, and the One who has communicated in his person and work the true nature and character of God. Raised bodily from the dead, Jesus Christ inaugurated a whole new creation, and the church, living between the passing of the old creation and the coming of the new earth, anticipates the time when Jesus shall return and reign as the world’s rightful Lord.
The Holy Spirit
The Holy Spirit is the love of God the Father and God the Son personalized, in, with, and through whom our communion with the Father and the Son consists. The Holy Spirit inspired Israel’s prophets, and anointed Jesus’s ministry, raising him from the dead. The Holy Spirit is the active agent of the church, guiding its mission into the world, and is worthy of our worship. The Holy Spirit enables our profession of faith and works within all disciples of Jesus Christ, shaping us into the persons God created us to be.
The Bible
The Bible is the church’s primary witness to the activity of God in Christ. Written by human beings under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, it reveals to us all that is necessary for our salvation. The Bible serves a thoroughly theological purpose: to reveal the identity of God. The Scriptures are therefore the church’s rule of faith and the standard by which we measure our Christian witness and living.
Human Beings
All persons exist as the image of God created for communion with God and with one another other. All persons therefore possess, as defined by the United Methodist Book of Discipline, sacred worth. Endowed with free will, we have the capacity to turn away from God and from one another—what the Bible calls sin—which in turn disorders our desires as individuals and as societies, creating communities of injustice, violence, fear, and death. God, however, refuses to leave creation to the brokenness to which humanity has subjected it, forming Israel to bear witness to God’s intentions for the world, a witness the church professes reached its climax in the resurrection of Jesus Christ and continues through the mission of the church. In Jesus Christ we see the true image of what humanity’s vocation should be: self-giving love for one another and for the world.
Salvation
Salvation is union with God and is therefore a gift from God. None of us has the capacity to apprehend a saving knowledge of God on our own. It is through God’s own self-condescension, through the Torah and the Prophets and, most fully, in Jesus of Nazareth, that all of creation can know God and experience its ultimate restoration. As United Methodists, and in accordance with the Scriptures, we believe salvation is a lifelong process of conversion during which time—through worship, prayer, discipline, study, and community—we learn what it means to love God and one another. Salvation was, is now, and is yet to be.
Church
Jesus Christ formed a new community of persons who would bear witness in their life together to the saving activity of God in the world. We call this new community the Church. The Church is the primary witness of God’s present and coming reign and, through its sacramental worship, preaching, service, and fellowship, exists as a preview or foretaste of the new earth still to come. The Church, at its most faithful, is therefore an alternative community called by God to be at once set apart from the world and yet engaged within it. The Church is the new nation and family of God whose members identify themselves neither through race nor class nor nationality but rather through their union with Jesus Christ as declared in baptism.