We Believe

“A Place of Spiritual, Emotional, and Physical Growth”

What we believe at Hilltop can best be described as “being a Christian on purpose.” For us, that means two things:

1. To be a Christian, a person must accept for himself or herself God’s grace offered to us through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. You can’t be a Christian accidentally. It takes making a decision to be a follower of Jesus Christ.

2. All Christians are called to live according to the example of Christ. That means that our personal faith is to be lived out in concrete ways in the world. We place a high value on trying to make the world more like what God intends it to be through acts of love and service.

We believe that our faith is to be formed in four ways:

• First through Scripture - we believe that the Bible is the authoritative word of God and is our primary source for understanding God;
• Secondly through reason - we believe that God gives us the gift of intelligence and we don’t have to check our minds at the door of the church;
• Thirdly through experience - we believe that God is still at work in the world and that God can teach us through the experiences of our lives;
• And finally through tradition - we believe that we should respect and use as a guide the accumulated wisdom of 2000 years of history of the church, but at the same time we should not get stuck in tradition and hold on to the traditions of people that no longer honor God.

As part of the ministry of Roscoe United Methodist Church, the Rockford District and the Northern Illinois Conference of the United Methodist Church, Hilltop is not a dogmatic church. We believe that it is not only acceptable, but that there is benefit in, allowing for different opinions within the church, as long as we remain faithful to the essential doctrines of the Christian faith. We don’t have to agree with each other to love each other.

As a group of believers committed to being Christians on purpose, Hilltop seeks to help individuals grow in their faith by growing closer to God through Jesus Christ so that they will be able to live out Jesus’ promise of abundant life.