Hope Christian Community Church is founded on the great news that God has done everything necessary, through Jesus, to bring us into relationship with him. And that’s news that gives us real hope! Real hope for a great future. Real hope for peace and contentment. Real hope for finding our God-intended purpose.
What makes us a church is that we’re a new kind of family, brought together by that common hope. In Jesus, God entered our world to live a life like ours, to die a death in our place, and to rise again from the dead giving us the hope of new life in him.
Believing in Jesus is so much more than just a special interest or hobby. It’s about every part of life. It’s about God transforming us from within, renewing us by his power, so that renewal starts overflowing into all that we do and say.
At Hope Christian Community Church, it’s our goal to be a community of people who are joyfully following Jesus and sharing his love. We seek to do this through:
WIN people to a living faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.
BUILD a committed, loving community of believers for Christ.
SEND well-equipped followers of Christ to serve him with the gospel.
Hope Christian Community Church was originally established during the 1950’s and at our current address from the early 1960’s, as the St Marys Reformed Church. From then on we have grown as we have shared in Christian worship and fellowship, being ever mindful of God’s grace given to each of us through Jesus Christ.
Today, we’re called Hope Christian Community Church in order to better reflect the good news of hope that we have through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
Over the years, as Australian culture has become more mobile, so has our church family. We now come together from various locations around western Sydney, and from a variety of walks of life.
Hope Christian Community Church is a member of the Christian Reformed Churches of Australia, which were established in the early 1950s. In the early years, some 50 churches were planted across Australia. In recent years, as the vision to plant new churches has been recaptured, more new churches have been started.
Most of what we believe we hold in common with the Christian church around the world and throughout the ages. Christian Reformed believers particularly trace their spiritual roots to the Protestant Reformation of the 1500–1600s, but from there right back to the time of the early church in the Bible. The Reformation represented a call to people everywhere to return to the Bible’s teaching.
At Hope Christian Community Church, what we believe centres around the great news about Jesus who is God’s only Son, and God’s answer to all the brokenness and longing we experience. It’s the news about how we find our greater, God-intended purpose to live for God’s glory.
What we believe is largely in keeping with the key biblical truths that were rediscovered during the Protestant Reformation in which there was a call to people everywhere to return to the Bible’s teaching. Some of the key biblical truths may be summarised as follows:
Scripture alone, that is, the Bible, is the final authority by which we are to live, because through it God has spoken and reveals himself to us (2 Timothy 3:14–17).
Christ alone is the one true Saviour of the world and the eternal Son of God (Acts 4:10–12). By his death on the cross and his being raised to life again, the guilt, penalty, and controlling power of sin is removed, and God demonstrates both his perfect love and his absolute justice (Romans 3:21–26; 5:8–10).
Salvation is a gift of grace alone and is not earned, because although people were originally created in the image of God, now, owing to the fallen, sinful condition we all inherit, it’s impossible for us to make any contribution to our own salvation (Ephesians 2:8; Hebrews 11:6).
We are saved by personal faith alone – i.e. trust in God’s gift of grace through Jesus – and not by works – i.e. doing good things (Ephesians 2:8–9). God himself is sovereign in salvation and so he must move in us by his Spirit to produce such faith and the transformed life that flows from it (Romans 8:1–17; Galatians 5:21–26).
Our salvation and all we do in response is for the glory of God alone. (Romans 11:36; 1 Corinthians 10:31). The church itself exists as the community of people God has redeemed so that through them, he might be honoured and worshiped (1 Peter 2:5, 9; Ephesians 1:22; 3:21; 5:23, 25).
Our commitment to the above key truths is consistent with our being a member church of the Christian Reformed Churches of Australia.
Christian Reformed churches are confessional churches, and much more detail about what we understand to be the truth of the Bible’s message is contained in those confessions. The confessions of the Reformation that we uphold include the Heidelberg Catechism, the Belgic Confession, the Canons of Dort, and in a more qualified way, the Westminster Confession.
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