Our Beliefs & Practices
About us
Our History
Momentum officially organized as a body of Jesus Followers in the Fall of 2017 and launched in January 2018. Our roots began 2 years prior with a handful of families that desired to worship together. The founding Pastor, Steve Spratlin was burdened for the spiritual need of the Phoenix Metro area in 2014 and discerned God’s call to move to Arizona. The church body is currently in it's third location in Glendale. The ministry has witnessed over 100 professions of faith and 75 baptisms.
Philippians 1:6 For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus.
The culture of Momentum is a healthy generational mix. Since we are a newer church, our culture is developing. However, we do highly value Truth and desire to be people of the Word of God. We believe that Biblical Truth is vital to having Koinonia fellowship. A healthy community manifests spiritual gifts that serve the body of Christ and a direct by-product will be servant Leadership. We also believe with conviction that Generosity is a sign of a strong church body, that is both practiced by its leaders and the laity. Lastly, we desire to be a church that is Missional, both in priority and practice in our city, that shares the Gospel in personal lifestyle evangelism and corporate outreach.
Our local church body is a group of people who are passionate about their faith; and not ashamed of our love for God and people. We are a diverse group comprised of a wide range of ethnic backgrounds and a multi-generational mix. This includes a variety of believers who have come from a wide range of religious backgrounds; people rescued out of cults, paganism and even so-called Christian heresies. People have come from many denominational and doctrinal flavors and have found commonality in Christ. We are ordinary, everyday people, who desire to live extraordinary lives for God and inspire others to do the same.
Acts 2:44-47 And all those who had believed were together and had all things in common; and they began selling their property and possessions and were sharing them with all, as anyone might have need. Day by day continuing with one mind in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, they were taking their meals together with gladness and sincerity of heart, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord was adding to their number day by day those who were being saved.
Our Statement of Faith
1. The Tri-une God
We believe in one God, eternally existing in three equally divine Persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, who know, love, and glorify one another. This one true and living God is infinitely perfect both in his love and in his holiness. He is the Creator of all things, visible and invisible, and is therefore worthy to receive all glory and adoration. Immortal and eternal, he perfectly and exhaustively knows the end from the beginning, sustains and sovereignly rules over all things, and providentially brings about his eternal good purposes to redeem a people for himself and restore his fallen creation, to the praise of his glorious grace.
2. Revelation
God has graciously disclosed his existence and power in the created order, and has supremely revealed himself to fallen human beings in the person of his Son, the incarnate Word. Moreover, this God is a speaking God who by his Spirit has graciously disclosed himself in human words: we believe that God has inspired the words preserved in the Scriptures, the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments, which are both record and means of his saving work in the world. These writings alone constitute the verbally inspired Word of God, which is utterly authoritative and without error in the original writings, complete in its revelation of his will for salvation, sufficient for all that God requires us to believe and do, and final in its authority over every domain of knowledge to which it speaks. We confess that both our finitude and our sinfulness preclude the possibility of knowing God’s truth exhaustively, but we affirm that, enlightened by the Spirit of God, we can know God’s revealed truth truly. The Bible is to be believed, as God’s instruction, in all that it teaches; obeyed, as God’s command, in all that it requires; and trusted, as God’s pledge, in all that it promises. As God’s people hear, believe, and do the Word, they are equipped as disciples of Christ and witnesses to the gospel.
3. Creation of Humanity
We believe that God created human beings, male and female, in his own image. Adam and Eve belonged to the created order that God himself declared to be very good, serving as God’s agents to care for, manage, and govern creation, living in holy and devoted fellowship with their Maker. Men and women, equally made in the image of God, enjoy equal access to God by faith in Christ Jesus and are both called to move beyond passive self-indulgence to significant private and public engagement in family, church, and civic life. Adam and Eve were made to complement each other in a one-flesh union that establishes the only normative pattern of sexual relations for men and women, such that marriage ultimately serves as a type of the union between Christ and his church. In God’s wise purposes, men and women are not simply interchangeable, but rather they complement each other in mutually enriching ways. God ordains that they assume distinctive roles which reflect the loving relationship between Christ and the church, the husband exercising headship in a way that displays the caring, sacrificial love of Christ, and the wife submitting to her husband in a way that models the love of the church for her Lord. In the ministry of the church, both men and women are encouraged to serve Christ and to be developed to their full potential in the manifold ministries of the people of God. The distinctive leadership role within the church given to qualified men is grounded in creation, fall, and redemption and must not be sidelined by appeals to cultural developments.
4. The Fall
We believe that Adam, made in the image of God, distorted that image and forfeited his original blessedness—for himself and all his progeny—by falling into sin through Satan’s temptation. As a result, all human beings are alienated from God, corrupted in every aspect of their being (e.g., physically, mentally, volitionally, emotionally, spiritually) and condemned finally and irrevocably to death—apart from God’s own gracious intervention. The supreme need of all human beings is to be reconciled to the God under whose just and holy wrath we stand; the only hope of all human beings is the undeserved love of this same God, who alone can rescue us and restore us to himself.
5. The Plan of God
We believe that from all eternity God determined in grace to save a great multitude of guilty sinners from every tribe and language and people and nation, and to this end foreknew them and chose them. We believe that God justifies and sanctifies those who by grace have faith in Jesus, and that he will one day glorify them—all to the praise of his glorious grace. In love God commands and implores all people to repent and believe, having set his saving love on those he has chosen and having ordained Christ to be their Redeemer.
6. The Gospel
We believe that the gospel is the good news of Jesus Christ—God’s very wisdom. Utter folly to the world, even though it is the power of God to those who are being saved, this good news is christological, centering on the cross and resurrection: the gospel is not proclaimed if Christ is not proclaimed, and the authentic Christ has not been proclaimed if his death and resurrection are not central (the message is: “Christ died for our sins . . . [and] was raised”). This good news is biblical (his death and resurrection are according to the Scriptures), theological and salvific (Christ died for our sins, to reconcile us to God), historical (if the saving events did not happen, our faith is worthless, we are still in our sins, and we are to be pitied more than all others), apostolic (the message was entrusted to and transmitted by the apostles, who were witnesses of these saving events), and intensely personal (where it is received, believed, and held firmly, individual persons are saved).
7. The Redemption of Christ
We believe that, moved by love and in obedience to his Father, the eternal Son became human: the Word became flesh, fully God and fully human being, one Person in two natures. The man Jesus, the promised Messiah of Israel, was conceived through the miraculous agency of the Holy Spirit, and was born of the virgin Mary. He perfectly obeyed his heavenly Father, lived a sinless life, performed miraculous signs, was crucified under Pontius Pilate, arose bodily from the dead on the third day, and ascended into heaven. As the mediatorial King, he is seated at the right hand of God the Father, exercising in heaven and on earth all of God’s sovereignty, and is our High Priest and righteous Advocate. We believe that by his incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and ascension, Jesus Christ acted as our representative and substitute. He did this so that in him we might become the righteousness of God: on the cross he canceled sin, propitiated God, and, by bearing the full penalty of our sins, reconciled to God all those who believe. By his resurrection Christ Jesus was vindicated by his Father, broke the power of death and defeated Satan who once had power over it, and brought everlasting life to all his people; by his ascension he has been forever exalted as Lord and has prepared a place for us to be with him. We believe that salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name given under heaven by which we must be saved. Because God chose the lowly things of this world, the despised things, the things that are not, to nullify the things that are, no human being can ever boast before him—Christ Jesus has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness, and redemption.
8. The Justification of Sinners
We believe that Christ, by his obedience and death, fully discharged the debt of all those who are justified. By his sacrifice, he bore in our stead the punishment due us for our sins, making a proper, real, and full satisfaction to God’s justice on our behalf. By his perfect obedience he satisfied the just demands of God on our behalf, since by faith alone that perfect obedience is credited to all who trust in Christ alone for their acceptance with God. Inasmuch as Christ was given by the Father for us, and his obedience and punishment were accepted in place of our own, freely and not for anything in us, this justification is solely of free grace, in order that both the exact justice and the rich grace of God might be glorified in the justification of sinners. We believe that a zeal for personal and public obedience flows from this free justification.
9. The Power of the Holy Spirit
We believe that this salvation, attested in all Scripture and secured by Jesus Christ, is applied to his people by the Holy Spirit. Sent by the Father and the Son, the Holy Spirit glorifies the Lord Jesus Christ, and, as the other Paraclete, is present with and in believers. He convicts the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment, and by his powerful and mysterious work regenerates spiritually dead sinners, awakening them to repentance and faith, and in him they are baptized into union with the Lord Jesus, such that they are justified before God by grace alone through faith alone in Jesus Christ alone. By the Spirit’s agency, believers are renewed, sanctified, and adopted into God’s family; they participate in the divine nature and receive his sovereignly distributed gifts. The Holy Spirit is himself the down payment of the promised inheritance, and in this age indwells, guides, instructs, equips, revives, and empowers believers for Christ-like living and service.
10. The Kingdom of God
We believe that those who have been saved by the grace of God through union with Christ by faith and through regeneration by the Holy Spirit enter the kingdom of God and delight in the blessings of the new covenant: the forgiveness of sins, the inward transformation that awakens a desire to glorify, trust, and obey God, and the prospect of the glory yet to be revealed. Good works constitute indispensable evidence of saving grace. Living as salt in a world that is decaying and light in a world that is dark, believers should neither withdraw into seclusion from the world, nor become indistinguishable from it: rather, we are to do good to the city, for all the glory and honor of the nations is to be offered up to the living God. Recognizing whose created order this is, and because we are citizens of God’s kingdom, we are to love our neighbors as ourselves, doing good to all, especially to those who belong to the household of God. The kingdom of God, already present but not fully realized, is the exercise of God’s sovereignty in the world toward the eventual redemption of all creation. The kingdom of God is an invasive power that plunders Satan’s dark kingdom and regenerates and renovates through repentance and faith the lives of individuals rescued from that kingdom. It therefore inevitably establishes a new community of human life together under God.
11. God’s New People
We believe that God’s new covenant people have already come to the heavenly Jerusalem; they are already seated with Christ in the heavenlies. This universal church is manifest in local churches of which Christ is the only Head; thus each “local church” is, in fact, the church, the household of God, the assembly of the living God, and the pillar and foundation of the truth. The church is the body of Christ, the apple of his eye, graven on his hands, and he has pledged himself to her forever. The church is distinguished by her gospel message, her sacred ordinances, her discipline, her great mission, and, above all, by her love for God, and by her members’ love for one another and for the world. Crucially, this gospel we cherish has both personal and corporate dimensions, neither of which may properly be overlooked. Christ Jesus is our peace: he has not only brought about peace with God, but also peace between alienated peoples. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity, thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both Jew and Gentile to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. The church serves as a sign of God’s future new world when its members live for the service of one another and their neighbors, rather than for self-focus. The church is the corporate dwelling place of God’s Spirit, and the continuing witness to God in the world.
12. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper
We believe that baptism and the Lord’s Supper are ordained by the Lord Jesus himself. The former is connected with entrance into the new covenant community, the latter with ongoing covenant renewal. Together they are simultaneously God’s pledge to us, divinely ordained means of grace, our public vows of submission to the once crucified and now resurrected Christ, and anticipations of his return and of the consummation of all things.
13. The Restoration of All Things
We believe in the personal, glorious, and bodily return of our Lord Jesus Christ with his holy angels, when he will exercise his role as final Judge, and his kingdom will be consummated. We believe in the bodily resurrection of both the just and the unjust—the unjust to judgment and eternal conscious punishment in hell, as our Lord himself taught, and the just to eternal blessedness in the presence of him who sits on the throne and of the Lamb, in the new heaven and the new earth, the home of righteousness. On that day the church will be presented faultless before God by the obedience, suffering and triumph of Christ, all sin purged and its wretched effects forever banished. God will be all in all and his people will be enthralled by the immediacy of his ineffable holiness, and everything will be to the praise of his glorious grace.
CONTROVERSIAL TOPICS
WHAT IS MOMENTUM’S STANCE WITH THE CURRENT HEALTH AND POLITICAL CRISIS?
The Elders and Pastors have stayed true to scripture during the last few years of unrest. In the case of public health, we have not given into fear and threats. We have shown respect to some logical recommendations but have spiritually discerned the motives of evil intent, manipulative actions of so-called trusted experts and the misrepresentation of scientific data. Yet, we have not succumbed to tyrannical demands that threaten God-given rights and freedoms. We respect individual choices on health matters and have encouraged each person to do what they need to do, without prejudice or condemnation. In respect to ethnic tensions and upheavals, as well as politically driven race agendas, we have discerned these behaviors are demonically influenced, an obvious scheme of the devil, and ultimately another form of spiritual warfare. It is the priority of the Elders and Pastors to not make the pulpit a political platform, but at times a cultural issue may need to be mentioned with a Biblical position and/or answer.
DOES MOMENTUM ISSUE RELIGIOUS EXEMPTIONS FOR SPECIFIC STANCES?
Yes, our Elders from time to time will issue statements for members who are facing a controversy outside the church (in their workplace, etc) that may be tempting them to compromise their beliefs, ethics, and moral code.
DOES MOMENTUM GET INVOLVED IN POLITICAL ACTION CAUSES?
We do not prefer to do so since we know how divisive it can become within the body of Christ, and hence create a unnecessary schism. We do not like jumping on bandwagons of social causes or community tensions. We use extreme discretion on political issues and are slow to react to political unrest by using the pulpit or our public influence to sway our congregation. Our best weapon for political causes is prayer and the proper application of the Bible.
WHAT IS MOMENTUM’S VIEW OF GOVERNMENT, SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE, AND NON-PROFIT STATUS?
We believe in obeying responsible, God fearing government. Government that subverts, usurps or violates God’s commands and that inhibits or manipulates the church is unreasonable to follow. If government abuses it’s God-given authority, it is itself evil and thereby influences it’s citizens to commit or support evil. To follow such government is a violation of conscience and causes compromise of moral and ethical living. The U.S. Constitution is not a government created document for the people, but a people’s document created to establish the boundaries of government. The premise of the Constitution was made for the government’s decisions to be conditioned and challenged by men and women who have moral and ethical and spiritual convictions. As for the non-profit status within the U.S. tax codes, it is vital to state that the local church has the liberty to employ this tool to avoid paying revenue taxes on financial gifts. The non-profit statuses is another way to keep the government out of the financial affairs of the church’s revenue sources.
WHAT IS MOMENTUM’S VIEW OF THE TRANSGENDER MOVEMENT?
God made only two genders: male and female, and nothing in between. Who He designed each of us to be (manifested at birth), is who we are to be during our life. He called male and female very good and told them to be fruitful and multiply. Men are designed to provide seed, copulate with a woman in a monogamous relationship and father/raise children. Women are designed to produce eggs, carry babies in her body, birth them and nurture them. God did not design men to be women (in mind or body) and did not design women to be men. As for “trans” attempt by mankind to delineate from God’s original design, it is forbidden. God judged the world of sexual perversions and deviations prior to the flood and cities after the flood.
WHAT IS MOMENTUM’S LEADERSHIP POSITION ON RECENT ISSUES WITH SO-CALLED APOSTATE & HERETICAL CHURCHES AS WELL AS PASTORS WHO HAVE FALLEN?
Every church and their respective pastors are all accountable to God for what they do and teach. Much criticism has risen in recent years about certain pastor’s teachings and even condemnation about worship music genres and lyrics. Many critical saints have taken a boycott stance on music groups because one song or one word in one song is not accurate or in line with their doctrinal bend. They often point out the speck in their brother’s eye while ignoring the log in their own eye. Our best reaction is not to publicly condemn (through social media) solid pastors who have fallen into error since each of us is just as easily able to fall. Our responsibility is to restore them with love. We should be concerned about public condemnation that the world views, for to do so runs a high risk of publicly shaming the name and honor of Christ. As for heresies, factions, “isms” and doctrinal bends, it is necessary to handle those heresies from the pulpit and personal discipleship. We are commanded to test every spirit and prophet to see whether they are from God. We see many sincere saints jump on church bashing bandwagons. These saints always criticize others unlike them (a different denomination, etc) or those who believe different on non-essentials. It is our position that “In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity”. The Bible is clear that in the last times, there will be a great falling away (apostasy) from the truth; so it is not surprising on what we are seeing today. We must use great wisdom and discernment to recognize the errors, love to forgive and show mercy, prayer for them to change, and discretion on what we do in reaction to such offenses.