What We Believe

About Us / What We Believe At WUMC

We believe in God.

The nature of God is much more complex and mysterious than any of our descriptors or categories can adequately define, so all of our affirmations about God necessarily begin with faith. ultimately, we believe God is so great as to be the eternal source of life and of love, and yet God is so personal as to know and love each of us as if there were only one of us,

We receive the Bible as inspired and inspiring, instructive for life and faith.

In faith, we receive the Bible’s stories, testimony, songs and traditions from people’s experience and worship of God as instructive for our understanding of God’s nature and God’s work. Thus we come to believe in God as Creator, Savior and Sustainer of life, among many other “names.”

 

We believe Jesus reveals God.

Our best understanding of how God is, what God is like, how to know God’s will and how to live God’s vision of the heavenly life comes from studying and following Jesus of Nazareth. We believe that Jesus is “God with us” in the flesh. We believe that God was in Christ Jesus, in his faithful life, his self-giving love, his death and his resurrection, reconciling a stray, war-torn, wounded world to our original relationship in shalom (peace, wholeness) with God.

We believe that Jesus invites us to follow him.

We don’t have to be perfect before we follow. Following Jesus’ way of life has a way of cleaning up our acts. We follow by loving those Jesus would love. We follow by forgiving others and ourselves. We follow by searching our own hearts for God’s still, small voice. We follow by putting our trust in God and placing our lives in God’s hands. We believe that following Jesus bring us Life that this Earth can’t contain.

We believe that God is still present and working through the Holy Spirit.

We believe that prayer connects us with God and others in healing, transforming, peace-restoring ways

Our Church is made up of many members with many different beliefs.

But the guiding principle which binds us, even in our very different beliefs, is that which Jesus identified as “The Greatest Commandment: Love God and your neighbors with all your heart, soul, mind and strength.”