Renew Bible Church is small church family that came together in early 2015 when a number of us started longing for something more than what we were experiencing in our former churches. Most of us were from large, well-established and respected churches with the typical worship services and programs, but something was missing. We longed to be fed directly from the Word, one book at a time, instead of trendy, topical series. We enjoyed the music, but often felt entertained or like we were attending a concert. We took advantage of the Sunday morning programs, with kids going one way and adults going another, but realized in doing so we were no longer attending church together as families.
As we started to think through what church should be, we arrived at the three primary convictions below. They pretty much describe what we think church should be. As to what you can expect at a service, we keep it pretty simple and rather informal. We're small so it keeps things a bit more personal, and it allows us to interact with each other. We learn and worship together as families, but provide child care for those under five if preferred. Because we believe God's Word should be front and center, we place the teaching at the beginning of the service, and we teach verse by verse through one Bible book at a time. We love both praise and worship music and traditional hymns, so our singing includes both. We also believe that prayer is an important part of worship so we even take time to share prayer requests and pray for one another during the service before we go our separate ways for the week. If this sounds like something you're interested in, we'd love to have you join us!
Welcome to Renew Bible Church
The Bible Should be Taught Expositorily
The local church is God's training ground for Christians. According to Jesus, the Great Commission of the Church is to make disciples of every nation by baptizing them and teaching them to obey all that He commanded. This involves both evangelism and discipleship. The local church is to be the place where Christians come together to worship, be trained, built-up, strengthened and encouraged (i.e. discipled) so that we can then go out and reach others with the Gospel (i.e. evangelism). While we welcome and encourage those who don't know Jesus to come worship God with us, our services are designed with the primary goal for believers to worship and honor God and secondarily to meet their needs for maturity and relationship. We believe this best prepares and enables us to honor God and carryout the work to which He has called us.
Families Can Worship Together
God's Word is central to the life of the believer. According to 2 Peter 1:2-4, God has given us "everything pertaining to life and godliness through a true knowledge of Him..." This has been revealed by God through the Bible. Psalm 19 states that it's the Word of God that can restore the soul, make one wise, give joy to the heart and open one's eyes. Our conviction is that the best way to preach and teach using the Bible is with an expository approach. While there is a place for the topical message or series from time to time, we believe the most effective and beneficial preaching and teaching is expositional, where the teacher opens the Word of God, asks the listeners to join him in the Biblical text, and then explains the passage in a verse-by-verse manner. Most of the Sunday morning teaching at Renew Bible Church is done in this fashion, one book of the Bible at a time, with an occasional topical message or series designed to help round out our understanding of God and His will for our lives.
Worship is essential to a Christian's relationship with God and we believe families should do this together. Children learn best through consistent example and worshiping together with their parents provides them with an opportunity often missed when parents and children go their separate ways on Sunday mornings. While we believe that age-appropriate teaching is an important part of raising children to love the Lord, we also believe that children can pickup and understand more than we often realize. We also believe such age-related teaching can be done at other times rather than separating families during the main worship time on Sunday mornings. We believe worshiping together on Sunday mornings is the best practice for families.