Our Core Beliefs

Our statement of Faith…

We take our statement of faith from the Evangelical Alliance

  1. The one true God who lives eternally in three persons — the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
  1. The love, grace and sovereignty of God in creating, sustaining, ruling, redeeming and judging the world.
  2. The divine inspiration and supreme authority of the Old and New Testament Scriptures, which are the written Word of God—fully trustworthy for faith and conduct.
  1. The dignity of all people, made male and female in God’s image to love, be holy and care for creation, yet corrupted by sin, which incurs divine wrath and judgement.
  1. The incarnation of God’s eternal Son, the Lord Jesus Christ — born of the virgin Mary; truly divine and truly human, yet without sin.
  1. The atoning sacrifice of Christ on the cross: dying in our place, paying the price of sin and defeating evil, so reconciling us with God.
  2. The bodily resurrection of Christ, the first fruits of our resurrection; his ascension to the Father, and his reign and mediation as the only Saviour of the world.
  3. The justification of sinners solely by the grace of God through faith in Christ.
  4. The ministry of God the Holy Spirit, who leads us to repentance, unites us with Christ through new birth, empowers our discipleship and enables our witness.
  5. The Church, the body of Christ both local and universal, the priesthood of all believers — given life by the Spirit and endowed with the Spirit’s gifts to worship God and proclaim the gospel, promoting justice and love.
  6. The personal and visible return of Jesus Christ to fulfil the purposes of God, who will raise all people to judgement, bring eternal life to the redeemed and eternal condemnation to the lost, and establish a new heaven and new earth.

At The Free is that we see it as a Biblical imperative that marriage is for a man and woman, so we don’t affirm same sex marriage. We see that marriage may not be for everyone, but for those that choose marriage, we hold it in high regard. This means that we don’t affirm any sexual relationships that take place outside marriage. We believe this misses the mark, as far as God is concerned. Whether this is people of opposite genders, the same gender, adultery, promiscuity or even simply lusting after someone in our hearts. All of this misses the mark and goes against God’s ideal plan for marriage.

But this doesn’t mean that we give people a hard time who may miss the mark in this way. When it comes to God’s plan for our lives, every single one of us misses the mark. As the Bible says, we are all sinners (Romans 3:23). We all fall short of the mark that God has set for us. None of us can rank one sin worse than another. To rank sexual sin worse than any other is wrong. If we’re going to point our finger at someone, or a group of people, we first need to take the plank out of our own eye. Each one of us will experience temptation in all areas of our lives. Indeed, Jesus himself experienced temptation. The experience of being tempted isn’t of itself a sin and same sex attraction isn’t sinful. We don’t get to choose the form of temptation; however, we do get to choose how we respond to all temptation. We are desperately sorry for how The Church as a whole has often scapegoated, attacked and at times persecuted gay people, seeing this as “a sin above and beyond all others”. This is not the view of The Free and we repent of any language, attitudes and behaviour that has given this impression.

We believe that The Free must be a community that welcomes everyone regardless of the temptations they face in life and together we seek to be a community that works for and strives after holiness and is characterised by love. This is the same love that we see in Jesus; unconditional, transformational, sacrificial, selfless and for all.

In the Gospels, we see Jesus drawing near to people and people drawing near to him. All kinds of people. Broken people, sinful people, marginalised people, people who were considered clean and unclean, pure and impure. Some of them are befriended by Jesus. Some of them are confronted by Jesus. But all of them are loved by Jesus. None walk away feeling condemned.

This is all our stories. That Jesus befriends us in our brokenness.

As a church we want to love Jesus’ way. Handling all people with Christ-like love, offering his unwavering truth and his outrageous grace.