Doctrines

With all of the news and activities surrounding the Methodist church over the last few years, I have struggled to understand why?!  I have read hundreds of things across the diverse landscape to understand the different sides and comparing that to my understanding of the Bible.

I ended up this year, focusing on what I think are the 2 key issues behind schisms in the church: Doctrine, Style and Structure.  I mainly focused on Doctrine. 

What are our key Doctrines?

For Methodists, these are part of the Book of Discipline.

For Christians as a whole, there seems to be a lot of opinions on what are our core Christian Doctrines.  Just Google “core Christian doctrines” and look at the results:

• Some list 5
• Others 7 or 8
• Some show 12 or 14
• Up to 99

No wonder we have so many religious groups! So, I decided to identify, for me personally, what are my key doctrines.  I came up with a list of 9 different categories (my core doctrines) along with some brief descriptive words for each – to help understand what is included.

I welcome your thoughts, suggestions and support that can help improve this information!

The high level list is (a few may need to be combined):

• Belief in God
• Belief in Jesus Christ
• Belief in The Holy Spirit
• The Bible (God’s infallible revelation)
• The Church (Communion of the Saints)
• Sin
• Salvation
• Transformation
• New Heaven and New Earth

Love is the greatest commandment; however, we don’t stop there. We are called to recognize we need to change and transform our lives…

Below is a summary from various sources I have pulled together that make up my core Christian beliefs (note this has been updated to show references to the GMC Book of Discipline):

Click for the interactive version (best on desktops/large devices)

Interactive chart has small dots you can select for more details.
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(note: links above go to my download site)