AWAKE is guided by a core set of theological beliefs that help to bind our affiliated people and ministries together, and to shape our work in the world.
NOTE: For a shorter version of this Statement, read only the bold text.
We believe in the existence of one supreme and divine Being—the self-existent source of all creation. By means of self-revelation, humans come to know aspects of this Being, whom we generally call God, though never completely, exclusively, or perfectly; that is to say, we don't know all there is to know about God, we aren't the only ones who know about God, and some of what we think we know about God is wrong. As a 2-dimensional object can only comprehend a thin slice of a 3-dimensional thing, we humbly acknowledge that the created can never fully comprehend the Creator.
We recognize that people relate to God in different ways for different reasons, and acknowledge that our revelation of God does not exhaust the scope of all there is to know. We are, therefore, careful not to dismiss or demonize conceptions of God that may not perfectly match our own.
Although often referred to with gendered pronouns (as in this document), because He is ontologically spirit, God has no gender. Still, because people relate to God in different ways, we do not expect or require people to perceive Him through a male-oriented lens (Father, He/Him/His, etc.). God is within and beyond all human understandings and expressions of gender.
God is, in His quintessential nature, good. While we are careful to not dismiss or demonize conceptions of God that do not match our own, we also do not accept all conceptions as true. The fundamental truth that God is good provides a filter through which we interpret life experiences, and a standard by which we accept or reject claims made about God (whether in sacred texts, or otherwise).
Acting out of His goodness, God was incarnated into the human experience as the one we know as Jesus of Nazareth, in order to show us how to know Him, not as a far away Deity, but as a near and loving Divine Parent ("Father" in the New Testament). His life and teachings are an example of how to love God, ourselves, and one another, and of how to live into our heritage as divine offspring of God.
The nearness of God is experienced through the indwelling of His Spirit, who inhabits all who have accepted God's gift of eternal life.
Comprised of the Old Testament (the Hebrew Scriptures) and the New Testament, we believe that the Bible is the sacred text of Christianity and is profitable as an instrument for faith formation and instruction.
The Bible is inspired of God in the sense that He moved upon the hearts of its writers to record a life-giving and empowering witness of Him, their communities, and their experiences. The Bible is a part of, not the end of our journey of faith, inviting us to have our own personal and communal experience of God and God's Kingdom.
We believe that the lessons we learn from the Bible are more important than whether or not it is historically accurate in every detail. We recognize that its writers were particular people with particular understandings of their world and the God who created it. We honor their contributions to our own faith formation, while not imprisoning ourselves to their scientific, sociological, and theological limitations and worldview.
We believe that humanity was created to provide an image or representation of God in the physical realm. As a result, all human beings hold sacred worth and value, even when their created intent is experientially unrealized.
There is a fundamental brokenness in humanity that resulted and results from our failure to understand, accept, and live into our divine identity as God-imagers. Hatred, cruelty, greed, indifference to suffering, etc. are but symptoms of our underlying identity problem. God, in Christ, provided us with the means to repair this identity, and live out His divine purpose for our lives.
In our new-birth salvation experience, we intentionally and progressively move toward the ultimate restoration of our divine identity ("from glory to glory"). As we shift our consciousness to higher levels, empowering ourselves to think and act more fully out of our divinity, we reclaim our commission to image God in the world.
As God-imagers, we affirm and embrace all people, with no distinctions between race, ethnicity or culture (Jew nor Greek), socioeconomic status (slave nor free), sex (male or female), or in principle, many other categories. Consequently, we do not discriminate on the basis of these and other factors, including, but not limited to sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, or ableness.
We believe that the Kingdom of God/Heaven is a present-day reality qualified by the reign of God over Heaven and in the earth. It provides humanity with a better, higher way of thinking, speaking, and behaving, one that is consistent with our divine identity and citizenship.
By its very nature, the Kingdom of God is supernatural, and offers us the ability to tap into God's divine power to live supernatural lives, and to lead supernatural ministries characterized, in part, by healings, miracles, signs and wonders.
God's Kingdom is one of choice, not compulsion. As salt and light, we invite people into the Kingdom; we don't demand their entry as dictators and tyrants. Consequently, we reject attempts to seek socio-political and economic power in order to force people to conform to our sense of a Christian way of life. Instead, we invite them into the Way so that the Spirit of God will help them grow into a more fully realized expression of their higher, divine self! Thus, the Kingdom is expanded through transformation, not manipulation.