Donelson CP Church began in 1957 with 13 people. Over the years the church has gone through building projects and ups and downs. But DCPC has always been a family church, and God-willing, will always be a place where people can come and be part of the family of God.
ABOUT GOD
We believe in the only true and living God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; who is holy love, eternal, unchangeable in being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.
The one living God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the Holy Trinity, speaks through the Holy Scriptures, the events of nature and history, apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers, but uniquely in Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh.
By word and action God invites persons into a covenant relationship. God promises to be faithful to the covenant and to make all who believe his people. All who respond with trust and commitment to God’s invitation find the promise sure and rejoice in being members of God’s people, the covenant community.
God is the creator of all that is known and unknown. All creation discloses God’s glory, power, wisdom, beauty, goodness, and love.
Among all forms of life, only human beings are created in God’s own image. In the sight of God, male and female are created equal and complementary. To reflect the divine image is to worship, love, and serve God.
The natural world is God’s. Its resources, beauty, and order are given in trust to all peoples, to care for, to conserve, to enjoy, to use for the welfare of all, and thereby to glorify God.
God exercises providential care over all creatures, peoples, nations, and things. The manner in which this care is provided is revealed in the scripture.
God ordinarily exercises providence through the events of nature and history, using such instruments as persons, laws, and the scriptures, yet remains free to work with them or above them. The whole creation remains open to God’s direct activity.
The purpose of God’s providence is that the whole creation be set free from its bondage to sin and death, and be renewed in Jesus Christ.
God never leaves or forsakes his people. All who trust God find this truth confirmed in awareness of his love, which includes judgment upon sin, and which leads to repentance and to greater dependence upon divine grace. All who do not trust God are, nevertheless, under that same providence, even when they ignore or reject it. It is designed to lead them also to repentance and to trust in divine grace.
God ‘s providence embraces the whole world, but is especially evident in the creation of the church, the covenant community. Through patient discipline, God guides this chosen community in her mission of witness and service in the world.
God’s providence is sufficiently displayed to be known and experienced, but, at the same time, it partakes of divine mystery, and is the occasion for wonder, praise, and thanksgiving. Thus even in illness, pain, sorrow, tragedy, social upheaval, or natural disaster, persons may be sure of God’s presence and discover his grace to be sufficient.
God gives the moral law to govern human actions and relations. It is the principle of justice woven into the fabric of the universe and is binding upon all persons.
ABOUT JESUS
God’s mighty act of reconciling love was accomplished in Jesus Christ, the divine Son who became flesh to be the means by which the sins of man are forgiven.
Jesus Christ, being truly human and truly divine, was tempted in every respect as every person is, yet he did not sin. While fully sharing human life, Christ continued to be holy, blameless, undefiled, and thoroughly fitted to be the Savior of the world, the only hope of reconciliation between God and sinful persons.
Jesus Christ willingly suffered sin and death for every person who put their trust and faith in Jesus Christ alone. On the third day after being crucified, Christ was raised from the dead, appeared to many disciples, afterward ascended to God, and makes intercession for all persons.
Through the Holy Spirit, people are able to acknowledge and repent of their sin, believe in Jesus Christ as Savior, and follow Christ as Lord. Believers experience Christ’s presence and guidance, which helps them to overcome the powers of evil in ways consistent with God’s nature and will.
God’s work of reconciliation in Jesus Christ occurred at a particular time and place. Yet its powers and benefits extend to the believer in all ages from the beginning of the world. It is communicated by the Holy Spirit and through such instruments as God is pleased to employ.
ABOUT MAN
God, in creating persons, gives them the capacity and freedom to respond to divine grace in loving obedience. Therefore, whoever comes to Jesus will be saved.
Because of their God-given nature, persons are responsible for their choices and actions toward God, each other, and the world.
In rejecting their dependence on God and in willful disobedience, the first human parents disrupted community with God, for which they had been created. They became inclined toward sin in all aspects of their being.
As did Adam and Eve, all persons rebel against God, lose the right relationship to God, and become slaves to sin and death. This condition becomes the source of all sinful attitudes and actions.
In willfully sinning all people become guilty before God and are under divine wrath and judgment, unless saved by God’s grace through Jesus Christ.
The alienation of persons from God affects the rest of creation, so that the whole creation stands in need of God’s redemption.
ABOUT SALVATION
God acted redemptively in Jesus Christ because of the sins of the world and continues with the same intent in the Holy Spirit to call every person to repentance and faith.
The Holy Spirit works through the scriptures, the sacraments, the corporate worship of the covenant community, the witness of believers in word and deed, and in ways beyond human understanding. The spirit moves on the hearts of sinners, convincing them of their sins and their need for salvation, and inclining them to repentance and faith toward God.
The call and work of the Holy Spirit is solely of God’s grace and is not a response to human merit. The call precedes all desire, purpose, and intention of the sinner to come to Christ. While it is possible for all to be saved with it, none can be saved without it. Whoever will, therefore, may be saved, but not apart from the illuminating influence of the Holy Spirit.
Persons may resist and reject this call of the Holy Spirit, but for all who respond with repentance and trustful acceptance of God’s love in Christ, there is salvation and life.
Repentance and Confession
Repentance is that attitude toward God wherein sinners firmly resolve to forsake sin, trust in Christ, and live in grateful obedience to God.
Persons do not merit salvation because of repentance or any other human exercise. Yet repentance is necessary to partake of the saving grace and forgiveness of God in Christ.
In response to God’s initiative to restore relationships, persons make honest confession of sin against God, their brothers and sisters, and all of creation, and amend the past so far as is in their power.
Saving Faith
Saving faith is response to God, prompted by the Holy Spirit, wherein persons rely solely upon God’s grace in Jesus Christ for salvation. Such faith includes trust in the truthfulness of God’s promises in the scriptures, sorrow for sin, and determination to serve God and neighbor.
Persons do not merit salvation because of faith, nor is faith a good work. Faith is a gift made possible through God’s love and initiative. Yet God requires the response of faith and those who do receive salvation and reconciliation.
When persons repent of sin and in faith embrace God’s salvation, they receive forgiveness for their sin and experience acceptance as God’s children.
In the life of faith, believers are tested and suffer many struggles, but the promise of ultimate victory through Christ is assured by God’s faithfulness. Both the scriptures and the experiences of the covenant people throughout the centuries witness to this promise.
Justification
Justification is God’s act of loving acceptance of believers whereby persons are reconciled to him by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. When they in repentance and faith trust Christ, who is their righteousness, God gives them peace and restores their relationship with him.
In this relationship God continues to forgive sin. Although believers sometimes disrupt their peace with God through sin and experience separation from God, yet they are assured that it is by God’s grace that they are accepted and the relationship is sustained. Only by growth in grace can the believer experience the fullness of relationship with God.
Those who are reconciled to God through Jesus Christ continue to know a sinful nature. They continue to experience within themselves the conflict between their old selves and their new selves, between good and evil, between their wills and God’s will, between life and death.
Regeneration and Adoption
Regeneration is God’s renewal of believers and is solely of God’s grace. Those who trust in the Lord Jesus Christ are recreated, or born again, renewed in spirit, and made new persons in Christ.
Regeneration is necessary because all persons who are separated from Christ are spiritually dead and unable of themselves to love and glorify God.
Regeneration is accomplished by the Holy Spirit showing sinners the truth of Christ, enabling them to repent and believe God in the light of that truth and to receive the saving grace and forgiveness given in Jesus Christ.
When empowered by the illuminating influence of the Holy Spirit, believers are able to love and glorify God and to love and serve their neighbors.
All persons dying in infancy and all who have never had the ability to respond to Christ are regenerated and saved by God’s grace.
Adoption is the action of God to include in the covenant family all who are regenerated and made new persons in Christ. This action assures community with God and one’s brothers and sisters in Christ, both now and in the full redemption of the family of God.
Sanctification and Growth in Grace
Sanctification is God’s setting apart of believers as servants in the world.
As believers continue to partake of God’s covenant of grace, to live in the covenant community, and to serve God in the world, they are able to grow in grace and the knowledge of Jesus Christ as Lord. Believers never achieve sinless perfection in this life, but through the ministry of the Holy Spirit they can be progressively conformed to the image of Jesus Christ, thereby growing in faith, hope, love, and other gifts of the Spirit.
The struggle with sin continues, for believers are still imperfect in knowledge and the power to do God’s will. Their freedom to trust, love, and serve God and neighbors is compromised sometimes by distrust, hate and selfishness. This inner struggle drives them again and again to rely on God’s power to conform them to the image of the new person in Jesus Christ.
Preservation of Believers
The transformation of believers begun in regeneration and justification will be brought to completion. Although believers sin and thereby displease God, the covenant relationship is maintained by God, who will preserve them in eternal life.
The preservation of believers depends upon the nature of the covenant of grace, the unchangeable love and power of God, the merits, advocacy, and intercession of Jesus Christ, and the presence and ministry of the Holy Spirit who renews God’s image in believers.
As a consequence of temptation and the neglect of the means of grace, believers sin, incur God’s displeasure, and deprive themselves of some of the graces and comforts promised to them. But believers will never rest satisfied until they confess their sin and are renewed in their consecration to God.
HOLY SCRIPTURE
God’s words and actions in creation, providence, judgment, and redemption are witnessed to by the covenant community in the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. *
God inspired persons of the covenant community to write the scriptures. In and through the scriptures God speaks about creation, sin, judgment, salvation, the church and the growth of believers. The scriptures are the infallible rule of faith and practice, the authoritative guide for Christian living.
God’s word spoken in and through the scriptures should be understood in the light of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. The authority of the scriptures is founded on the truth contained in them and the voice of God speaking through them.
In order to understand God’s word spoken in and through the scriptures, persons must have the illumination of God’s own Spirit. Moreover, they should study the writings of the Bible in their historical settings, compare scripture with scripture, listen to the witness of the church throughout the centuries, and share insights with others in the covenant community.
BAPTISM
Baptism symbolizes the baptism of the Holy Spirit and is the external sign of the covenant which marks membership in the community of faith. In this sacrament the church witnesses to God’s initiative to claim persons in Christ, forgive their sins, grant them grace, shape and order their lives through the work of the Holy Spirit, and set them apart for service.
The sacrament of baptism is administered to infants, one or both of whose parents or guardians affirm faith in Jesus Christ and assume the responsibilities of the covenant, and to all persons who affirm personal faith in Jesus Christ and have not received the sacrament.
Water is the element to be used in this sacrament. The person receiving the sacrament is to be baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
In administering the sacrament the pouring or sprinkling of water on the person by the minister fittingly symbolizes the baptism of the Holy Spirit; however, the validity of the sacrament is not dependent upon its mode of administration.
It is the privilege and duty of all believers to seek baptism for themselves and their children, and to accept its benefits. However, baptism is neither an indispensable condition of salvation nor effective apart from life in Christ and the church.
*For a more in depth look at our beliefs you can click on this link to our Confession of Faith