United Under the Elder Affirmation of Faith

We believe that congregations, campuses, and churches that embrace Bethlehem's mission statement and the Elder Affirmation of Faith should be pursuing an experience of church life that is marked by the following ten dimensions.

1. Worship: Enjoying and displaying the worth of Christ in God-centered, Christ-exalting, Spirit-led, Bible-saturated corporate worship, including congregational singing and expository exultation.
2. Prayer: Commitment to depend on God's grace and mercy in personal, family and corporate prayer, so that in all our blessings the Giver will get the glory.
3. Education: Personal efforts to grow and help each other grow in Biblical truth and wisdom and faith and love, which show Christ as our supreme treasure.
4. Mutual Care: Corporate commitment to pursue a life together in sacrificial faith-sustaining care for each other in loving relationships at every level of youth and age, joy and sorrow, comfort and crisis, health and brokenness.
5. Witness: Personal and corporate strategies of wartime living, courageous witness, and social action to show the supreme value of Christ to fallen people and fallen culture.
6. Racial Harmony: Intentional efforts to display love across racial and cultural lines and be a church that models the fruit of that love.
7. Compassion: Personal and corporate expressions of compassion to relieve human suffering, near and far, by means of short-term intervention and long-term personal and structural change, in order to show the justice, mercy and soul-satisfying beauty of Christ - forever.
8. Missions: Corporate efforts in cross-cultural missions for the sake of the Name of Christ among unreached peoples.
9. Leadership: Humble submission to spiritual, biblically qualified elders who lead by example, not dominion, and with joy, not under compulsion, to equip the saints for the work of the ministry, including aggressive efforts to multiply congregational leaders.
10. Legacy: The commitment of church and parents to train up succeeding generations of children and youth who live the vision of this church.