Our Beliefs

St. Peter is a congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. What does that mean for our beliefs? It means...

  • We trust God's grace, rather than our own efforts, to be made whole and right with God.
  • We proclaim that God is Triune: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three in one and one in three. Don't get it? Don't worry. It's kind of incomprehensible.
  • The ELCA’s official Confession of Faith identifies the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments (commonly called the Bible); the Apostles’, Nicene and Athanasian Creeds; and the Lutheran confessional writings in the Book of Concord as the basis for our teaching. ELCA congregations make the same affirmation in their governing documents, and ELCA pastors and deacons promise to carry out their ministry in accordance with these teaching sources.
  • We believe that worship is at the core of our life together. When we gather for worship, here's what you'll see and hear:
    • We hear God's Word proclaimed in Scripture and preaching that is faithful to the good news of Jesus Christ.
    • We pray together as Jesus taught us.
    • We share in the Sacraments: Holy Baptism and the Lord's Supper. We remember our baptism daily in our prayers and publicly as we confess our sins and hear God's forgiveness. We believe that Jesus Christ is truly present in the Supper and that when he says, "given for you," he means it.

There are Lutherans around the world. (Did you know the largest-growing Lutheran church body in the world is in Ethiopia?) We trace our theological roots to a movement that took off in the early 16th century, where a German monk/scholar named Martin Luther called for reforms in the Church. Curious? Here's more.

Martin Luther didn't want churches named after him. He thought the church should be called Evangelical, from the Greek word for "good news." We are not the church of Martin Luther--we are the church of Good News!