identity & beliefs
Jesus shows us that God is Love
We believe that God is love and that all are created in the image of God. This means that the core of our identity is rooted in love, and we seek to live out this identity within the context of community, starting right here in Chestermere. Our love for God is reflected in the way we love our neighbours and our faith is expressed through tangible acts of love and service. We believe that the Holy Spirit calls and empowers us to participate in God’s good mission to make all things right and reconcile all to him. Our homes, schools, workplaces, communities and the City of Chestermere are the very places where we live out our faith and discover that the Kingdom of God is near.
Jesus is the Way
We believe that Jesus is the son of God and that we come to know God through relationship with Him. We believe that when we focus on nurturing an authentic relationship with Jesus, we can become more like Him. As we grow in our Christ-likeness, our lives are filled with a deeper sense of meaning and purpose and we come to experience not only our own sense of belovedness, but we begin to recognize and respond to the belovedness of all those around us. A relationship with Jesus transforms us and all of our other relationships by allowing us to look out at the world with the mind of Christ. A relationship with Jesus changes everything.
Jesus makes room
We believe that God invites all people into relationship with Him and Jesus makes a way so that everyone can have fellowship with God. God rewards those who earnestly seek Him (Hebrews 11:6). We believe we can model the example of Jesus, who sought friendship with sinners, outcasts and those on the margins, and invited them to follow Him. We seek to welcome the stranger and turn strangers into friends. We acknowledge that no one is perfect and we all fall short of the glory of God. We celebrate that the perfection of God is demonstrated by His ability to include and redeem imperfection in the process of healing a broken world.
Jesus is the living Word of God
“So the Word became human and made his home among us. He was full of unfailing love and faithfulness.” (John 1:14) We believe we’re invited into the story of God, fulfilled in Jesus, and lived out today. We believe that the Bible reveals the heart of God for his people and is the foundation by which our faith can be nurtured and grounded. We are surrounded by a “great cloud of witnesses,”(Hebrews 12) - pioneers, veterans, and wise voices of faith who have walked with Jesus before us and demonstrate what a life of faith in Christ looks like. We are shaped by the influence of Christian saints and mystics, the historic creeds of our Christian faith, and the statements of faith expressed by the Evangelical Covenant Church. We believe that God’s story of love, redemption and reconciliation is being told today, and that Jesus is Good News for everyone - and that’s a message worth sharing!
Our Roots
Lake Ridge Community Church is part of a larger church family called the Evangelical Covenant Church of Canada. The ECCC was founded in 1904 in Winnipeg, Manitoba by Swedish immigrants who had a passion for the Bible, for sharing the good news of friendship with Jesus, for gathering to worship and for working together for the sake of our neighbours.
Today the Evangelical Covenant Church is a growing multiethnic denomination in the United States and Canada with ministries on five continents of the world. We are united by Christ in a covenant of churches empowered by the Holy Spirit to obey the great commandments and the great commission: to love God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind, to love our neighbours as ourselves, and to go into all the world and make disciples. As a family of churches, we enjoy diversity as we work together in unity for our common mission in Jesus.
Find Out More: Covenant Affirmations
“A disciple is a person who had decided that the most important thing in their life is to learn how to do what Jesus said to do”
— Dallas Willard