ABOUT SANTA CLARITA URC

Santa Clarita URC – Our Congregational Vision

Our vision for Santa Clarita United Reformed Church is to be a church that is characterized by God-honoring worship, Christ-centered preaching, covenant nurture, and gospel witness in the Santa Clarita Valley. We believe that through the proclamation of the good news of the gospel, the Holy Spirit renews our faith, and fills us with gratitude and reverence so that we do those good works which God prepared in advance for us to do. 

 

Word and Sacrament

The primary focus of our worship is the public reading and exposition of God’s Word, and the administration of his sacraments. We trust the Holy Spirit to work through the ordinary means of grace to build up God’s people and transform them into the image of Christ. The sacraments of baptism and communion are administered as ordained by our Lord to increase our faith and confirm God’s covenant promises to us.

 

Christ-Centered, Expository Preaching

Our sermons are Christ-centered and expository, and special care is given to correctly distinguishing between law and gospel. The law shows us our sinfulness and our need of Christ. The gospel assures us of all that we have in Christ and calls us to faith in the promise. Then, out of gratitude and in response to God’s grace, we seek to live in a manner that pleases the Lord. The imperatives are rooted in the indicative of our union with Christ.

 

Form, Order, and Reverence in Worship

The Scriptures teach us that God seeks those who worship him in Spirit and in truth. Accordingly, we are called to worship God in an orderly manner, with reverence and awe. Our worship is in accordance with the regulative principle and patterned on the historic Reformed dialogical liturgy.

 

Accountability

We belong to the United Reformed Churches because we believe that the biblical pattern for ministry demands checks and balances and a structure of accountability higher than ourselves. The ecumenical creeds of the church, the Reformed confessions and catechisms, and the historic Reformed liturgy link us to other believers not only in this time and place, but across time and geographical boundaries.

 

Children and Family

Reformed covenant theology teaches us that from the very dawn of the gospel promise, God includes our children in the covenant of grace. This teaching provides us with a solid theological basis from which to build a theology of marriage and family. We believe that God has ordained covenant nurture of the family, in conjunction with the church, as the primary means of grace for raising our children in the faith. We encourage the inclusion of children of all ages in our worship services.

 

Witness

In addition to growing in our own understanding of the faith, the Scriptures exhort us to share it with those outside the church. We desire that our non-Christian friends, family members and neighbors would hear the message of Christ crucified with the prayerful and confident expectation that God will be pleased to call many to faith in Christ through the ministry of this church.

 

The Lord’s Day

While we do not view it in a legalistic manner, we do believe that God has called us to be set apart from the world. The Lord’s Day is set apart for sacred purposes and is therefore God’s gift to us for the building of our families in the faith. For this reason we are committed to gathering for worship twice each Lord’s Day. We are committed to being one of the only churches in Santa Clarita with both a morning and an evening service. The evening service is centered around a catechical sermon focused on instructing the church in the whole counsel of God.

 

More about us...

The Santa Clarita United Reformed Church exists to bring together like minded Christians who want to establish a church in Santa Clarita, CA in the trajectory of the Protestant Reformation tradition within the federation of the United Reformed Churches of North America (URCNA http://www.urcna.org).

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We believe and teach that salvation is by faith alone, through grace alone, in Christ alone, that Scripture alone is our inerrant rule and revealed will of God for life and salvation, and that all the glory in the work of salvation belongs to God alone - these are often referred to as the “Five Solas” of the Reformation.

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We believe that the Presbyterian and Reformed traditions as expressed in the historic creeds of the Protestant Reformation, namely, The Three forms of Unity (The Heidelberg Catechism, The Canons of Dordt, and Belgic Confession), and the Westminster Standards (Westminster Larger Catechism, Westminster Shorter Catechism and Westminster Confession of Faith) express the most faithful, accurate, and biblically concise system of doctrine contained in the Bible.