We are a Community of Christ-Followers who want to:
- Celebrate God in all areas of life,
- Communicate the good news of Jesus' love,
- Cultivate faithful service to God, and
- Care for one another and the world.
What Does "Christian Reformed" Mean?
We are CrossPoint Christian Reformed Church, a member of the many Christian Reformed Churches (CRCs) of North America. If you're wondering who we are and what we believe, here goes..........
The Christian Reformed Church calls itself "Christian" because it forms one small part of Christ's church on earth. It recognizes as fellow-Christians all people who accept the teachings of the Bible as they are so beautifully summarized in the Apostles' Creed. This includes believers from many denominations such as Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Baptist, Presbyterian, and Pentecostal. We may disagree with these believers on some practices or teachings. But we recognize them as brothers and sisters in Christ if they believe in God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and if they confess that Jesus died for their sins, rose from the dead, and ascended into heaven.
The CRC calls itself "Reformed" because it stands in the tradition of the Reformed churches who struggled valiantly in the sixteenth-century to return Christianity back to its biblical roots. CRC teachings are closely akin to Presbyterian and other Reformed churches, and it enjoys solid relationships with many of them.
On the meaning of the term "Reformed", we are a Bible believing church that accepts both the Old and New Testaments as the revelation of God for the purpose of leading people into a saving relationship with him through the death of Jesus Christ for the sins of human beings and through his resurrection from the dead."
The term "Reformed" or "Reformation" for our churches comes from the international reformational movement of the 16th Century when Bible believing Christians tried to reform the Roman Catholic church. The mottos of the reformation included "Scripture alone" as the only source of knowledge for salvation, "Christ alone" as the way of salvation, through God's "grace alone" and not by our flawed, sinful works, and through "faith alone" in God's Son, Jesus Christ, as the only way to receive that salvation.
When the desired reformation failed to happen in the Roman Catholic church, many Reformed and Lutheran churches formed, which still exist to this day, some which remain faithful to these Scriptural mottos and some which do not. As for whether we believe in the whole Bible, yes, it was and remains the goal of the Reformation to let the entire Bible guide and direct our lives. We believe that "all Scripture is inspired by God and useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness." (2 Timothy 3:16, The Bible). While it may be true that we don't always live up to our ideal to believe and obey the whole Bible, it is our goal to submit all of our lives to the teaching and instruction of Scripture."
