Our Mission Statement and Policy

As a congregation of believers in our Lord Jesus Christ, we endeavour to glorify the Triune God, our Creator, Saviour and Lord, enjoying fellowship with Him as we love, worship and serve Him in a manner worthy of the Gospel of grace.

We are an independent Reformed Baptist church. Under the blessing of God, the following points show the key biblical policies we aim to follow.

A believing church

We teach the doctrines of grace (in the reformed faith, often summarised as the 'five points of Calvinism'), together with all doctrines laid out in Holy Scripture, in harmony and balance with each other.

Our doctrinal basis is The Second London Confession of Faith (1689), as translated into Maltese and published by QUM Publications.

A worshipping church

We believe that we should worship the triune God not according to our own imaginations and devices but in line with the clear teaching of the Bible. Worship is to be God-centered, in spirit and in truth, intelligent, glorious and pious, lifting up our minds, hearts and lips in praise, gratitude, repentance and dedication to our Saviour and Lord. Our desire is not to accommodate our public worship to what pleases carnal men, but to be sensitive to what kind of worship pleases God.

The reading and preaching of God’s Word, corporate prayer, singing, free-will offerings, and the Lord’s Supper are all regular components of our public worship.

The singing of psalms is highly recommended. Hymns for public worship are to be selected wisely, considering their theological content and appropriateness. Worship is to be kept distinct from the decadent and profane worldly culture and therefore if music is used, it ought to be of a proper genre and style, serving as an accompaniment and assistance to the faithful, not drawing attention to itself.

Public worship is definitely not ¬inten¬ded to entertain or please, be shallow and informal, ecstatic or hypnotic, as though the house of God were a theatre or dance-hall, but to bring us to appreciate Almighty God, draw us closer to him in obedience, as well as motivate us to love and serve him joyfully and thankfully.

A praying church

We believe in the great importance of prayer. Without the blessing of God in answer to prayer, all our witness would be in vain. Private, family and corporate prayer in its various forms, is paramount. Rather than seeking to advance the gospel through carnal means, we seek to share it diligently, while calling on God the bless and cause the seed to grow. We hold that there are very great advantages and manifold blessings in holding separate meetings for prayer.

An evangelizing church

We believe in the universal tender of salvation, also called the free offer of the Gospel, regularly dedicating ¬Sunday services to persuasive evangelistic preaching, and praying that God will use this for the salvation of precious souls. Compelled by love, we endeavour to involve ourselves in evangelism, using different means of outreach – personal contacts, tracting, literature, Bible distribution, audio recordings, home visitation, home Bible studies, street outreaches – in accord with the dignity of the gospel. The judicious use of modern computer technology in communication is recommended.

We firmly reject all forms of evangelism that use psychological manipulation and gimmicks, and consider as unbiblical and unnecessary all worldly methods of evangelism in order to get a hearing with lost people, such as marches, amusement activities, dance, and any kind of drama.

A working church

We try to honour the ¬concept of the working church, which means that all true believers serve the Lord, if it is possible for them to do so, joining together in various avenues of Christian service to bring glory to Him. With this emphasis, as a church, we try to maintain significant and God-honouring ministries, exhorting one another and making it possible for all to use their Spirit-given gifts and talents, so that all may grow in grace and be presented mature in Christ Jesus. Christians are not just a ‘Sunday audience’, loyally attending the services only as comfortable observers, but a company of willingly committed, dedicated workers for the Lord, labouring sacrificially for his glory.

We hold that the ¬local church (that is, every individual ¬congregation) is designed by God to carry out many tasks. Therefore wider ministries, such as missions, the training of preachers, and the issuing and distribution of lit¬erature, should be undertaken by individual churches if the Lord leads and enables them.

A learning church

We firmly believe in the importance of discipleship, that is, each believer must necessarily grow in the grace and knowledge of Christ, our Lord and Saviour. With this in view, we acknowledge our responsibility of supporting a sound teaching ministry among us, so that regular Bible studies might be held. We also believe in the value of reading good Christian literature and producing it ourselves, especially in the Maltese language to be used in evangelism.

A separated church

We believe the plain commands of God’s holy and infallible Word that the Lord’s people must be set apart for God. We cannot obey this command without at the same time obeying the call to be set apart from any form of sin, worldliness and false teaching.

False teaching denies the inspiration and infallibility of the ¬Bible, as well as other fundamental doctrines of the faith. It is the duty of true churches to defend and preserve the Truth at all costs, never compromising the only way of salvation. Therefore, as a faithful church, and conscious that separation is always a careful and sensitive act, we endeavour to walk according to these guidelines:

1. We reject all ethnic religions as false and utterly inadequate to bring human beings to their Creator and reconcile them to him.

2. With love and sensitivity, and yet courageously and faithfully, we expose Roman Catholicism. Most of its official teachings deny the true gospel of grace, besides upholding various unbiblical and antibiblical beliefs and practices.

3. We will have nothing to do with modern cults and sects who deny the deity of Christ and other major tenets of Bible doctrine.

4. We recognize the need to be careful in fellowshipping and prudent in cooperating with Protestant and evangelical denominations, and to what extent, seeing that we are to recognize other Christians as fellow brethren, without forgetting that while walking in love we are also called to uphold the truth without compromising it. We are not ready, for the sake of a superficial show of unity, to lay aside important biblical truth and endanger ourselves with subchristian or faulty teachings, worldly lifestyle and practices.

5. We gladly promote fellowship and seek to cooperate with churches of like faith, both locally and abroad, in unity and love, seeing that such goodwill honours our Saviour who prayed for such genuine unity and blesses us through it.

Biblical separation is not negative, as some suggest, but positive, for it keeps alive precious purity and biblical obedience in our church. The careful, thoughtful, prayerful and faithful implementation of biblical separation will preserve the spiritual health of God’s people and safeguard against falling away from evangelical purity.

A loving church

Our duty and delight as a church is to honour the ‘new’ commandment of the Lord. We must have ‘brotherly love’ and therefore we will make every effort to cultivate, preserve and nourish it by our acts and attitudes especially towards those within the household of faith.

Our hearts and church are also open and ready to welcome any ‘outsiders’ and we should always be ‘casting the net’ of hospitality and friendship to an ever-widening circle of people, and not restrict our love to the inner circle only.

This list of policies does not, of course, cover all the duties of a church, but should give us a fair picture of the tradition in which our church stands.