Our beliefs can best be summed up with three words: Scripture, Sacrament, and Spirit.

When writing about what constitutes the church, Lesslie Newbigin, the great theologian and missiologist of the 20th-century, claimed that if the church is to be whole in its faith and mission, it must bring together the Protestant, the Catholic, and the Pentecostal “streams” of today’s church. That is, for the church to do worship, formation, and mission well, it must believe Holy Scripture to be authoritative, practice a liturgical and sacramental spirituality rooted in the early centuries of the church, and take bold action in life and mission through dependence on the power of the Holy Spirit.  

All Saints Waco desires to be that kind of church. We do this by holding to the faith once delivered to the saints (Jude 3) that has been believed “everywhere, at all times, and by all” Christians. This means that we’re a church rooted in the ancient faith and practice of the Apostles’ teaching, which was handed down through the early centuries of the church and comes to us through the Anglican way, an expression of the Christian faith that is at once based on God’s story of the world revealed in Holy Scripture, Sacramental in its worship and worldview, and Spirit-led. In the words of C.S. Lewis, we’re a church that practices “mere Christianity.”  

Because we are connected to the ancient faith of the historic church, our beliefs are best summed up in The Apostles’ Creed and The Nicene Creed. But because we practice an Anglican expression of this ancient faith, we also look to The Thirty-Nine Articles and the Jerusalem Declaration for further articulation of our beliefs.  

But if you really want to know what we believe, we invite you to come worship with us. A theologian of the early church once wrote, “Lex orandi, lex credendi” — “the law of prayer is the law of belief.” Our beliefs are not merely studied and committed to memory, a mere exercise in cognition. Instead, through the Daily Office and eucharistic liturgies of our Prayer Book, we pray our beliefs, and in praying them, they become more rooted in our hearts and shape and form us in a way that mere information about God on its own cannot do. Indeed, when we pray and worship together, we encounter the living God through his Word and the sacraments so that we become more and more Christ-like through that encounter. So if you really want to know what we believe, we invite you to join us for Sunday worship. “Come and see” (John 1:39).