OUR FOUR CONVICTIONS
We thrive on trust received and shared
According to John’s Gospel, “God so loved the world that He gave His only Son”. This love was there before we were. It is a spontaneous and free gift. The trust is unconditional; its power to set us free calls us to trust in our turn.
Reading the Bible helps us to stand firm
The Bible is not a rule-book: it is a library of 66 books that speak to us both at an intellectual and at an emotional level. Together, and with the help of God’s Spirit, we accept it as the reference for our faith, we read it as a source of inspiration, we interpret it for our lives today. Reading the Bible makes us effective and responsible.
We need one another
God speaks to us in our hearts through the Bible and through our neighbour. We cannot have a relationship with Jesus Christ unless we have a relationship with others. Parishes are in solidarity with one another, and no specific church can exist without the universal Church. God calls us never to cut off others, for God joins us through them.
The good life is the simple life
Simplicity is a lifestyle that encourages sharing, responsibility and sobriety. This does not mean narrow-minded austerity (Jesus was called a “glutton and a drunkard”), but it does mean not allowing oneself to be fascinated by ostentatious expenditure, whether of energy, natural resources or money. It means cultivating a healthy detachment from our plans and our actions, our achievements and our failures, a detachment that enables a healthy sense of humour ! These are not new convictions. They are sometimes summarized in the slogan sola fide (faith alone), sola scriptura (scripture alone), or a formula: the priesthood of all believers (joint responsibility and equality between minister and congregation).
We believe that the love of God, revealed most fully in Jesus, is an all-welcoming, all-accepting, unconditional love, that we can experience, learn about and try to put in to practice as Jesus did.
