Our History:
Calvary Chapel was founded in the Fall of 1984 by Church Planter Lewis Nelms and his family. Its first services were held in the Banquet Hall of the South Shore Country Club. A little over a year later, a second church was formed on Sunday evenings on the north shore of Staten Island. Shortly thereafter, the two churches were brought together under one roof at Wagner College where th
e church rented space for six years. After over six years of successful ministry, in December of 1989, Pastor Nelms was led to leave to work with a missions organization. Pastor Dave Watson and his family began their tenure at Calvary Chapel in January of 1990. On May 20, 1998, God miraculously provided Calvary Chapel with its own church facility and it continues to serve the Staten Island community there today. From the start, Calvary has maintained some very special characteristics. It has maintained and emphasized a strong Bible teaching and fervent evangelism. Additionally, it has become known for its warmth and friendliness, its ethnic diversity (currently people from over 20 different nations make up our church family!), and its love and community. Our Beliefs:
1. We believe that the Bible is the Word of God, supernaturally inspired and inerrant in all its parts in the original manuscripts. As such, it is the divinely authoritative standard for every age and every life.
2. We believe that the Godhead exists eternally in three persons - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - and that these three are one God, co-equal and co-existent.
3. We believe that God, by His sovereign choice and out of His love for man, sent his son Jesus Christ into the world to save sinners.
4. We believe that Jesus Christ was both totally God and totally man, that He was supernaturally conceived of a virgin, that He lived a sinless life in which He taught spiritual truth and worked mighty wonders and miracles exactly as revealed in the New Testament, that He was crucified and died voluntarily, taking upon Himself the penalty of our sin, and that He was raised bodily from the dead on the third day. Later, He ascended into heaven where he is the head of the church, where He intercedes for believers, and from where He is coming again to the earth personally, bodily, and visibly to set up His millennial kingdom.
5. We believe that the death of Jesus Christ made a perfect and complete sacrifice for the penalty of sin and that a person is delivered from the eternal penalty of sin and its bo***ge only by deliberate and individual faith in this substitutional death of our Lord.
6. We believe that such salvation with its forgiveness for sin, its promise of eternal life, and its impartation of God's spirit, is entirely apart from good works, church ordinances, or membership, or any such effort of man, but is the gift of God in response to conscious faith in Christ.
7. We believe that a true believer is eternally secure in that he or she cannot lose salvation, but that willful and unconfessed sin will interrupt the joy of his or her fellowship with God and bring the loving discipline of our Heavenly Father.
8. We believe that baptism is by immersion and the Lord's Supper not only memorializes His suffering and death on the cross but also looks ahead to His glorious reign. These are ordinances to be observed by the church in its present age. However, they are not to be regarded as a means for man's salvation.
9. We believe that the Holy Spirit is a person and is God, possessing all of His divine attributes. He indwells every believer in Christ at the moment of conversion, unites the believer with the body of Christ, and sovereignty bestows special gifts upon each believer for service to the body of Christ. The Holy Spirit fills and controls the believer in response to that believer's confession of sin and yieldedness to Christ. Only by His power is a believer able to live a life of victory and power in Christ.
10. We believe all who receive Christ depart at death to be with Christ in conscious blessedness for eternity, and that those who have not believed in Him will spend eternity in conscious punishment, separated from God forever.
