Core Values
- In everything we do, we present campers with the gospel of Jesus Christ.
- Our desire is that no camper is turned away from Cross Bar X due to a lack of resources.
- Each camper receives individual attention.
- We foster spiritual growth through discipleship and mentoring.
- Campers are encouraged to participate in a Bible believing church.
- We seek to provide life skills and opportunity for spiritual growth through experiential education
- We seek to support and enrich the families of our campers.
Statement OF Faith
At Cross Bar X we believe:
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 in his love and holiness. He is the Creator of all things, visible and invisible, and is therefore worthy to receive all glory and adoration. He is Immortal, eternal, 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.
Revelation God has graciously disclosed his existence and power in the created order. He 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. It is 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. While prophecy and natural revelation is an authoritative speech from the Lord, they are only authoritative insofar as they are in complete submission to and agreement with the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments. We confess that both our finitude and our sinfulness preclude the possibility of knowing God’s truth exhaustively. However, we affirm that, enlightened by the Spirit of God, we can truly know God’s revealed truth. 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. The Sixty-six books of the Bible are the final authority for the New Covenant Church and the final source of what we believe.
Creation of Humanity 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. We believe God’s design of a person’s maleness, or femaleness, is clear through their biology. Since God creates everything according to its purpose, we believe that a person’s soul is always born with the body it was designed Therefore, a person’s gender is a person’s sex and vice versa. A person’s sex is accompanied by distinct responsibilities and functions within the family, the church, and society. This is good and was decided before the foundation of the world. Because we trust in the sovereignty of God, this is all to be received with thanksgiving. 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 union between Christ and his church. In God’s wise purposes, men and women are not simply interchangeable but 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 church’s ministry, both men and women are encouraged to serve Christ and 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.
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 originally stand, Therefore, 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.
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, language, people, and nation, and to this end, foreknew 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 (trust), having set his saving love on those he has chosen and having ordained Christ to be their Redeemer.
The Gospel 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). The Gospel 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”).
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 all of God’s sovereignty in heaven and on earth, 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 reconciled to God all those who believe by bearing the full penalty of our sins. 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 is preparing 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—our righteousness, holiness, and redemption.
The Justification of Sinners We believe Christ, by his obedience and death, fully discharged the debt of all 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. Since 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.
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. 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.
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 decaying world and light in a dark world, believers should neither withdraw into seclusion from the world nor become indistinguishable from it. Instead, 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 the lives of individuals rescued from that kingdom through repentance and faith. It, therefore, inevitably establishes a new community of human life together under God.
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.
Baptism and the Lord’s Supper We believe that the Lord Jesus himself ordains baptism and the Lord’s Supper. The former is connected with entrance into the new covenant community, and the latter with ongoing covenant life. Together they are simultaneously signs of God’s promises 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 the consummation of all things. We believe baptism and the Lord’s Supper are to be administered only to those who have given sufficient evidence of faith in Christ and repentance from sin.
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 the immediacy of his ineffable holiness will enthrall his people, and everything will be to the praise of his glorious grace.
