OUR CORE BELIEFS: WHAT WE HOLD TO BE NON-NEGOTIABLE

• The Bible is God's unique revelation to people. It is the inspired, infallible Word of God, and the supreme and final authority on all matters upon which it teaches. No other writings are vested with such divine authority.
  
  
• There is only one God, creator of heaven and earth, who exists eternally as three persons - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, each fully God yet each personally distinct from the other.
  
  
• All people are created in God's image and matter deeply to Him. Central to the message of the Bible is that God loves people, and invites them to live in communion with Himself and in community with each other.
  
  
• Apart from Jesus Christ, all people are spiritually lost and, because of sin, deserve the judgment of God. However, God gives salvation and eternal life to anyone who trusts in Jesus Christ and in His sacrifice on his or her behalf. Salvation cannot be earned through personal goodness or human effort. It is a gift that must be received by humble repentance and faith in Christ and His finished work on the cross.
  
  
• Jesus Christ, second Person of the Trinity, was born of the Virgin Mary, lived a sinless human life, willingly took upon Himself all of our sins, died and rose again bodily, and is at the right hand of the Father as our advocate and mediator. Some day, He will return to consummate history and to fulfill the eternal plan of God.
  
  
• The Holy Spirit, third Person of the Trinity, convicts the world of sin and draws people to Christ. He also indwells all believers. He is available to empower them to lead Christ-like lives, and gives them spiritual gifts with which to serve the church and reach out to a lost and needy world.
  
  
• Death seals the eternal destiny of each person. At the final judgment, unbelievers will be separated from God into condemnation. Believers will be received into God's loving presence and rewarded for their faithfulness to Him in this life.
  
  
• All believers are members of the body of Christ, the one true church universal. Spiritual unity is to be expressed among Christians by acceptance and love of one another across ethnic, cultural, socio-economic, national, generational, gender, and denominational lines.
  
  
• The local church is a congregation of believers who gather for worship, prayer, instruction, encouragement, mutual accountability, and community with each other. Through it, believers invest time, energy, and resources to fulfill the Great Commission - reaching lost people and growing them into fully devoted followers of Christ.

BAPTISM

While recognizing for other churches the right to practice infant baptism if it conforms to their theologies, the congregation of Uptown Church understands the Scripture to teach that only professing believers qualify for baptism.

Scriptural teaching on baptism may be summarized as follows:

1. Baptism is an act of obedience to the command of Christ, fulfilled by individuals who have subjected themselves to His sovereignty.
2. Baptism symbolizes the spiritual cleansing through divine forgiveness and newness of life experienced by believers by virtue of their identification with Christ in his death and resurrection.
3. Baptism provides an opportunity for believers to make a formal profession of their faith before the church.
4. As a biblical rite if initiation for believers to make a formal profession of their faith before the church.

Although the old covenant practice of infant circumcision is sometimes adduced as a rationale for infant baptism, the biblical definition of the functions of circumcision and of Baptism shows that those two institutions fulfilled different purposes in their respective covenants. The equation is never made in the Bible between the circumcision of male infants in the old covenant and the baptism of born-again believers, much less of infants, in the new covenant. However, Uptown Church provides the opportunity for Christian parents to present their children for the ceremony of Dedication, whereby God's blessing is formally invoked upon the children, and the parent's public ally commit themselves to raise the children in accordance with the Scripture.

Uptown Church prefers a mode of baptism by immersion on the basis of a sacramentarian view of the ordinances whereby their value lies in the symbolism they convey and in the faith of the participants rather than the nature or amount of the elements used, as bread and wine for communion, and water for baptism.