about us

what we believe

Our Mission Statement

The Albany Vineyard is a community of disciples who give their hands to serve and their hearts to love, fulfilling Jesus's command to love God and our neighbor as our self.

Hands to serve- heart to love
Small things, done with great love, will change the world.

Community
A people who have found a vital relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ and each other, through the power of the Holy Spirit.

Disciples
A people who are fully devoted followers of Jesus Christ and have chosen to be equipped to live as citizens of His Kingdom.

Hands to Serve
A people who's faith is put into action, touching the poor, broken and hurting in our community, region and world with the love of Christ.

Hearts to love
A people who worship and love the Lord their God with their whole heart, mind, soul and strength- and their neighbors as themselves.

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Our Priority Statement

Priorities describe how we spend our time, energy and money. They are the things we do. Priorities grow out of the things we value and believe in.

The basis of our priorities
The Bible is the Word of God and is the standard for all that we do at the Vineyard. In other words, nothing that we do should ever be opposed to the Bible's teaching. We aim to do all that the Bible teaches. We have a particular approach to the Bible. We think that it was given not only to give us insight and understanding but also to equip us to do God's work.
Thus we emphasize training, which is doing the truth, in addition to knowing the truth. Because we stress doing, our teaching and preaching are intended to be practical and relevant. We aim, through expository preaching, to call people to decision and to engage the whole person.

Exalting God's Presence (Worship)
The highest priority of God's people is to worship Him. That is, to give to God the worth that He ought to have in our lives. In the Bible, one meaning of worship is to draw near. Thus, in worship we give ourselves to God in love and He comes to us in the fullness of His Spirit. We believe that an intimate relationship with God is the basis of all that we do as Christians.
Worship is an expression of our love for God. It, therefore, should involve our whole persons: our intellect, our emotions, our spirits, our wills, our bodies and our money. We believe it should be enthusiastic, since our love for God is passionate. And as an expression of love, worship is also self-disclosing. As such, it should be in our own language, expressing our thoughts and our hearts in simplicity and truth.

Expressing God's Love (Ministry)
Ministry at the Vineyard flows from two basic assumptions. First, it is based on the compassion and mercy of God. Jesus was the embodiment of God's compassion and mercy toward those in need. Thus, through the imitation of Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit, we seek to minister out of hearts which are filled with Christ's mercy and compassion. Second, Jesus Christ as the Messiah came to establish the Kingdom of God, that is, God's right to rule in the world (Mt. 9:35 - 10:10). This Kingdom rule and reign of God is extended through the world in, among other things, the following ways: Preaching the gospel with the aim of making disciples, Healing the sick, Teaching believers to follow Christ, Feeding the poor, Counseling those in need of God's wisdom, Giving to the work of Christ, Building up families, Social and political action.

Enfolding God's Family (Fellowship)
Vineyard exists to care for and to build up people, not programs. Fellowship begins with our relationship with Jesus. But fellowship is more than our individual relationship with Jesus. It also involves our commitment to Christ's body. We believe that this commitment to Christ's body can best be expressed by kinship and small groups. We must know one another in order to love one another and to share one another's burdens. Small groups are the basic structure in Vineyard for comfort and counsel, service to one another, intimate relationships, healing and prayer. In these groups, we stress such things as honesty, integrity, reality, acceptance and love. Small groups are also a basic structure in the worldwide expansion of the church today.

Edifying God's People (Discipleship)
The New Testament calls Christians to a radical commitment. We believe that we are called to an unconditional surrender of our whole lives to Christ. We do not do this in a legalistic way or to impress or judge one another. Instead, our surrender to God springs from a response of love and thanksgiving to God who loved us and gave Himself for us. As a church we stimulate one another to discipleship. One meaning of disciple is pupil or learner. It involves binding oneself to another so that the disciple does what the master does. In Christian discipleship our aim is to be bound to Christ and imitate Him. We believe we are to imitate Jesus in all that He did: preaching, healing, praying, delivering the demonized, and caring for the poor.

Evangelizing God's World (Evangelism, Church Planting & World Missions)
Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners (1 Tim. 1:15). He accomplishes that salvation through the witness of His people accompanied by signs and wonders (Mk. 16:20). There are almost 150 million unchurched people in the United States right now. Depending upon the statistics, between 60 and 80 million of these are people in the post-war generation. That means that an enormous mission field exists for churches, like the Vineyard, here in the United States. The large urban centers of this country, including Albany, New York, are ripe for the harvest. There are also tens of millions of unreached peoples around the world who we are called to reach (Mt. 28:18-20). Vineyard believes that God has called us to be a church-planting church in the Capital region with the ability to impact this area for Christ. In addition, we are planting other Vineyard churches in the Dominican Republic.

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Our Vision Statement

Vision is a clear picture of what we see the church being or doing. Vision is the product of God working in us. He creates the vision and we receive it. It becomes our rallying point; goals toward which we move as His people.

The Albany Vineyard is a community of disciples who give their hands to serve and their hearts to love, fulfilling Jesus' command to love God and our neighbor as our self. Our community will relate to each other in settings other than our Sunday celebrations . We will meet in annual retreats and weekly small groups , where we will study together and mentor each other. Our gatherings will be filled with fun, prayer and honest communication. We will gather on-line through our interactive web site, using our own chat rooms , bulletin boards and calendar of events in order to develop closer relationships with other brothers and sisters in our church family.

Together we will seek to be authentic disciples who radically love each other and our Lord Jesus Christ. We will be known in our community as a church with GREAT worship. We will be a people who will make room in our community for the broken, the lost and the outcasts of our society. We will lovingly extend our hands to the unchurched, pre-Christians in our neighborhoods, inviting them to join us in authentic experience of Christianity in the 21st century America.

We will serve our community through both planned and spontaneous expressions of Christ's love through simple acts of kindness. Every member will be encouraged to develop their own gifts and skills to be used in serving our community and the world. We will open our doors to invite the world to participate in seeker-friendly Sunday celebrations, as well as pre-Christian-friendly coffee house events.

Visitors will be warmly welcomed and will easily find their way into membership in our community. Children and teens in our community will be treated not as "the church of tomorrow", but they will be respected as members of the church of today. We will provide experiences for them that will nurture them as people, addressing their emotional, spiritual and social needs. We will be an authentic Christian church that exists for the sake of being a living witness to the world, extending our hands to serve and our hearts to love.

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Our Faith Statement

Vineyard stands firmly in the center of orthodox Christian teaching. Out of loyalty to Christ and the gospel we have come to a number of convictions concerning the clear teaching of the Bible. At the same time, we have not included in our statement of faith much that can be legitimately debated by orthodox Christians. In other words, we do have boundaries, but our boundaries are broad and inclusive. On the spectrum of Christian churches: We are orthodox. We are evangelical. We are empowered evangelicals.

Our Statement of Faith reads:

I confess my affirmation of the Apostle's, Nicene, and Chalcedonian Creeds, which I believe to reflect Christian orthodoxy and the clear teaching of Holy Scripture. In addition, as a member of Vineyard Christian Fellowship of Albany, I make the following confession of faith my own:

1. In the unity of the Godhead there are three persons, of one substance, equal in power and eternity: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

2. I believe that Jesus Christ is truly God and truly man, yet one Messiah, the only mediator between God and man. There is no other name under heaven by which we must be saved.

3. I believe that Jesus Christ came down from heaven, was incarnated by the Holy Spirit and was born of the Virgin Mary. He lived a sinless life in perfect obedience to the Father, and was crucified for my sins. He suffered, died, and was buried, and He rose bodily from the dead on the third day. As the God-man, Jesus Christ ascended into heaven and now sits at the right hand of God the Father, interceding for His people. At His first coming, Jesus inaugurated the fulfillment of the Kingdom of God.

4. I believe in the Holy Spirit, who came forth from the Father and Son to convict the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment, and to regenerate, sanctify and empower for ministry every believer in Jesus Christ. He is an abiding Helper, Teacher and Guide. I believe in the present ministry of the Holy Spirit and in the exercise of all the Biblical gifts of the Spirit.

5. I believe that I, along with all men and women, am a sinner by nature and choice and was under condemnation. I am now accounted righteous before God only by the merit of my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, through faith in Him alone, and not by my own works or deserving.

6. I believe that I have been born again by the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit. This same Holy Spirit now lives in me, producing faith, holiness, love and power.

7. I believe in the divine inspiration, truthfulness and authority of both the Old and New Testament Scriptures in their entirety, without error, in all that they affirm, and as the only infallible rule for my faith and practice.

8. I believe that the church is intended by God to be a worshiping community of believers, observing the ordinances of Christ, governed by His law, exercising the gifts, privileges and discipline invested in the church by His Word and His Holy Spirit, and seeking to extend the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the ends of the earth.

9. I believe Christ committed two ordinances to the church: water baptism and the Lord's Supper. I believe water baptism is available to all Christian believers following a clear profession of Christian faith. I believe that the Lord's Supper is open to all believers. Through the working of the Holy Spirit, the Lord's Supper nourishes my soul. It brings to my remembrance the sacrifice of Christ for my sins, my communion with Christ and the church and my obligation to persevere in faith and holiness to the end of my life.

10. I believe in the personal, visible, appearing of Christ to earth and the consummation of His Kingdom; in the resurrection of the body, the final judgment and eternal blessing of the righteous and the endless suffering of the wicked.

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Our Value Statement

Every house is built upon a foundation. Vineyard is built upon the foundation of our theology, how we think about God, and our values, the kinds of ideas and attitudes that we feel are important. Here are some of the things that we value at Vineyard:

We value CHRIST-CENTEREDNESS.
We desire Jesus:. His person, His love, His mercy and His power to shine through all that we do.

We value being SPIRIT-LED.
We believe that Jesus is our Head and the Holy Spirit our Counselor. We seek to be responsive to the Holy Spirit in life and ministry.

We value PRAYER.
We seek genuine intimacy with God the Father and growth in our communion with Him.

We value INTEGRITY.
We seek completely truthful, consistent and open relationships with God, with others and with ourselves.

We value EXCELLENCE.
We desire to do all to the Glory of God which requires our very best.

We value SIMPLICITY.
We want every expression of ours whether speech, music, architecture, or mannerÑto be non-hyped, natural and reality-based.

We value being CULTURALLY RELEVANT.
We want to use music, terminology and outreach methods that are in touch with the needs of our community.

We value LEADERSHIP.
We approach leadership as a team effort with one person, the Senior Pastor, operating as a visionary and goal-setter.

We value GENEROSITY.
We are committed to freely give away all that we have freely received from God.

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