THE APOSTLES CREED
I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth; And in Jesus Christ his only Son, our Lord; who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; the third day he rose from the dead; he ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.
“Now there was a Pharisee, a man named Nicodemus who was a member of the Jewish ruling council. He came to Jesus at night and said, 'Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the signs you are doing if God were not with him.' Jesus replied, 'Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.'” - St. John 3:1-3
SACRAMENTS IN OUR CHURCH
In the African Methodist Episcopal Church, we believe that sacraments are means whereby God expresses God’s grace to humanity. In keeping with this belief, the AME Church celebrates The Lord’s Supper and Baptism as sacraments while recognizing and occasionally participating in other diverse Christian liturgical practices when deemed appropriate.
The Lord's Supper
We believe The Lord’s Supper is a symbol of God’s covenant made to humanity for the purposes of reconciling the diverse peoples of the world necessitated by the natural human inclination to turn from God and pursue certain activities and/or thoughts that lead us away from the path God calls each person to pursue. In our church, we call these activities and thoughts sin. Because we believe in accordance with the Holy Scriptures that all persons have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory, through the Lord’s Supper, we commemorate Christ's passion/crucifixion and commit to living our lives in greater accordance with God’s unique call on our lives.
This sacrament is administered by deacons and elders in our church on the first Sunday of each month. During the celebration of The Lord’s Supper, individuals are invited by our celebrants (persons serving communion) to come to the chancel rail, kneel if able, and receive unleavened bread and a cup of grape juice symbolic of Christ's last meal with His disciples.
The unleavened bread symbolizes the brokenness that comes into our lives and our communities when we fail to love God, our neighbors, and ourselves properly. The grape juice symbolizes the blood Christ shed on the cross because of the world’s inability to appreciate and value the gifts of love, grace, and mercy Christ offers all of us as children of God.
Baptism
We believe that when an individual, for the first time, publicly repents or apologies for the wrong thoughts and actions that he or she has taken that seek to separate himself or herself from God, the individual is in the process of undergoing a transformation in their heart. This transformation causes an individual to desire more fully to know God through Christ Jesus and model His teachings. During this process, an individual’s entire ideological outlook is reoriented/surrendered to Christ, causing the person to be “born again.” The symbol of this new birth is affirmed in the sacrament of baptism, where an individual is either immersed in water, sprinkled with water, or has water poured on them.
This sacramental act dates back to water cleansing rituals found in the Ancient Near East and other parts of the globe. In some of these traditions as well as in ours, we believe the purification powers found in water and the importance of water as a natural resource indispensable to human life culminated in the production of a liturgical ritual that allows individuals to be cleansed of past wrong thoughts and actions and freed to live a new life.
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© 2017 Sacraments in Our Church by Dominique Isaac Grate. Used with permission.