As a New Testament church, we look to the Scriptures to understand what principles should guide us. We are not a perfect church, yet we are chasing after the following scriptural values that form our unique identity as a church.
Trenton Values
Gospel Centered
"Gospel" is a word that means "good news." This message of God's Good news serves as the basis of who we are and what we believe. The Gospel tells us things about ourselves. It tells us of our need (Rom 3:23). We are far from God due to our sin. Yet God desires to draw near to sinners like us. He showed us this by how he, himself took on flesh and lived among us in the person of Jesus Christ. By living his perfect life, Jesus did what we failed to do. Then by dying his substitutionary death on the cross, Jesus paid the penalty for our sin. So when we approach the Gospel, we believe some bad news and some very good news: we are the worst sinners that we know, but God's grace is greater than all our sin (Isa 6:5; Rom. 3:10; Eph 2:4-10). And yet it doesn't stop here. By the power of the Gospel, we are asking God to help us live changed lives. We are far from perfect, but God has promised to finish his work in us (Phil 1:6; 2 Cor. 3:18).
Word Focused
How do we get from where we are to where we need to be? How does God do his work in our lives? He has promised to use his Word - his revelation to us - to accomplish this work (Isa 55:11; 2 Tim 3:16). It alone has the power to accomplish God's purposes in our lives. As we remind ourselves weekly at Trenton Baptist, the Word of God does the Work of God.
For this reason, we seek to let the Scriptures occupy center of all our teaching, ministry, and focus because God's message and purposes are higher and better than anything we could come up with on our own.
We therefore value expository preaching and emphasize a Word-Focused method of ministry among one another.
Health Minded
Churches are only healthy insofar as they are believing true things about life and God and are making disciples who make disciples. We desire to be a people who live out of the very change that has occurred in us because of Christ. Therefore, we desire to be a healthy church more than to be a large church. We desire to be people who bear one another's burdens (Gal. 6:2), push one another toward Christlikeness (Heb. 10:24-25), and live lives reconciled to God and to people (2 Cor. 5:20). Because of all this, we hope to grow in healthy church belief and practice.
Mission Oriented
We believe God has providentially placed Trenton Baptist Church in our community for His glory and for their good. We desire to grow each year as an others-focused church in our community for the purpose of sharing the life-changing message of God's good news recorded in his Word. For these reasons and others, we strive to be a church that exists for our neighborhood. Yet as we look to the Scriptures, we see that God's plan includes every tribe, tongue, people, and nation (Hab. 2:14; Matt. 28:18-20). God never intended his Gospel to only go to the convenient, nearby, and easy places. Indeed, he desires his glory fill the Earth as the waters cover the sea (Habakkuk 2:14). As such, we seek to be a church that is involved in praying, giving, and going toward international missions efforts.Therefore, we seek to join in God's work of seeing his Good News reach the nations. The shorthand we use at Trenton Baptist is For our Neighborhood; For the Nations.