We Believe…

We at St. Paul's affirm the essentials of the Christian faith as stated in the historic creeds of the Christian Church such as the Apostles' Creed. Stated simply: we believe Jesus Christ is God who has come to earth in the flesh, suffered, died and rose mightily and bodily from the grave - becoming the ONLY means of salvation for sinful human beings.

In 1983 the essentials of the faith were restated in what is known as the Dubuque Declaration. This document is an excellent summary of the Christian faith we confess at St. Paul's. The Dubuque Declaration is included below minus its original preamble.

The Dubuque Declaration

1. We confess our faith in the triune God--Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
2. We confess that Jesus Christ is truly God and truly man. Because of our sin and estrangement from God, at the Father's bidding the Son of God took on flesh. Conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary, He became like us in all things apart from sin. He died on the cross to atone for our sin and reconcile us to God and on the third day rose bodily from the dead. He is the sole head of the church, the Lord and Savior of us all, and will one day return in glory, power and judgment to usher in the kingdom of God in its fullness.
3. We hold that the Bible is the written Word of God, the infallible rule of faith and practice for the church of Jesus Christ. The Scriptures have binding authority on all people. All other sources of knowing stand under the judgment of the Word of God.
4. We affirm that the central content of the Scriptures is the gospel of reconciliation and redemption through the atoning sacrifice of Christ and His glorious resurrection from the grave. The good news is that we are saved by the grace of God alone, the grace revealed and fulfilled in the life and death of Jesus Christ, which is received only by faith. Yet this faith does not remain alone but gives rise to works of piety, mercy, and justice. The Holy Spirit who spoke through the prophets and apostles, calls us today, as in the past, to seek justice and peace for all races, tongues and nations.
5. We confess as our own the faith embodied in the great ecumenical and Reformation creeds and confessions, finding them in basic conformity with the teaching of the Holy Scriptures.
6. We confess that the mission of the church is to bear witness to God's law and gospel in our words and deeds. We are sent into the world as disciples of Christ to glorify God in every area of life and to bring all peoples into submission to the Lordship of Christ, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. We seek to obey this commission in the full assurance that our Lord and Savior is with us always, even to the end of the age.

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History of St. Paul's

1759 - 1903

St. Paul's Reformed Church dates its beginning to 1759. In that year, a German Reformed congregation and a Lutheran congregation, worshipping in the same building, called their first pastor: the Rev. James Martin, a Swiss Reformed pastor.

These German immigrants who made up the two congregations had arrived in this country seeking religious freedom and economic relief.

The historic building pictured was built in 1818 and is the oldest church structure west of the Catawba River.

1904 - 1974

This Reformed/Lutheran, union-church arrangement continued until 1904 when the Reformed congregation decided to relocate a few miles away to the Startown Community to be closer to the homes of its members. In Startown the Reformed congregation constructed a Victorian-style, one room church building. At this point in its history, St. Paul's was part of a four-church charge.

In 1937 The Reformed Church joined with the Evangelical Synod to form the Evangelical and Reformed Church. The Startown congregation was then referred to as St. Paul's E&R Church.

1975 - present

In 1974, the congregation relocated again, one-half mile from the 1904 church, and built a new facility. The two-church arrangement continued with Bethel Church until 1978 when the St. Paul’s congregation began supporting a full-time pastor on its own.

The congregation is nondenominational.

Two of the former buildings used by St. Paul's still stand today: the one constructed in the early 1800’s (Old Conover Road, Newton) and the Victorian-style structure (Startown Road and Dove Street, Newton). Both of these older buildings are registered historic landmarks.

Affiliation

St. Paul's is not affiliated with any denomination.

Connections with other Christian congregations, however, are very important to us. To increase our association with other churches, we recently affiliated with an association: the Evangelical Association of Reformed and Congregational Christian Churches.

In our local community, we enjoy many activities with a variety of Christian churches:

At Thanksgiving we join with various AME Zion, Lutheran, Church of God, Baptist and Moravian churches for the Community Thanksgiving service.

During Lent we get together with six other churches - United Methodist, Lutheran (ELCA), United Church of Christ and Baptist - in our area to share pulpits and churches on Ash Wednesday and the six Sundays of Lent. On Good Friday we worship together with Church of God (Anderson) and ELCA churches.

At the Easter Sunrise Service we worship together with Baptist, Korean, Church of God and Lutheran congregations.

Our history began with the German Reformed Church in 1759. Over the years, due to a large influx of people from different traditions, we have become quite an assortment of evangelicals who love the Lord and seek to follow Him.

Although we are not officially affiliated with a denomination, we seek to be obedient to God's Word and the leading of the Holy Spirit as we serve our Lord Jesus Christ.

spring, 2010

If you are a regular visitor to the St. Paul's web site, you will have noticed right away that things are a lot different around here.

What happened? Well, my name is Shaun and I am a student at CVCC. One of my last courses before graduation is called "System Support Project," where I have to do something that requires all of the knowledge and skills I am supposed to have gained since I started college. Since I've been attending CVCC off and on since 1995, I felt that the project should be complex and demanding.

From the first, I felt that my project should involve web development in some way. I'm not sure why I had this feeling, since none of my courses have been in that field, but I did. Perhaps a week later, I was in the first week of classes for the semester, and I happened to look at the St. Paul's web site. Ideas flooded into my head and I was immediately sure of what my project should be.

I already had the page template for the site and some other work completed by the time I was able to correspond with Pastor Disher and Junior Deal (Junior maintained the old site for a couple of years), and they were both very positive and encouraging about the idea of the update, so here I am.

goals

There were a number of goals in developing the new site. They are all important, so they're not in any particular order.

• Clean, attractive design
• Uniform look and feel throughout the site
• Presentation of valuable content so that it is easy to access and use
• Comply with web standards with respect to code validity and accessibility
• The site should be easy to update and maintain

Clean, attractive design…

A very subjective goal, certainly, but one hopefully achieved via the use of advanced layout and styling techniques. This was augmented by the use of various scripting technologies to keep the design simple and intuitive.

Uniform look and feel…

By maintaining continuity from page to page, the visitor is able to feel more at ease when using a web site. Here are some basic rules for the St. Paul's site:

Blue text means a hyperlink, either to an email address, to another location within this site, or to another web site. The links will turn red when the mouse pointer is hovered over them.

The navigation bar is along the right side of the page, and also any links to external content (other web sites).

On the left, taking the majority of the space, is the section designated for the content unique to each page. There are several subsections to this.

- Title, short definition of purpose, sub-headings and instructions (if applicable), then the content the page is intended to deliver.

content that is easy to access and use…

As much as possible, similar content has been grouped together. To prevent content from running together and looking like a mess, and to control the amount of scrolling a user must do to look at everything, some of the pages are segmented into tabbed panels or sliding areas. Where this is the case the sections are clearly marked.

This web site makes use of quite a few images. In order to promote fast page load times and a better user experience, all of the images have been optimized so that they don't have to be resized in the web page code, and are also compressed to conserve bandwidth.

Compliance with web standards…

It is important that everyone, regardless of computer, web browser, or physical handicap, be able to participate in the community of St. Paul's. By using standardized design and coding methods, we try to ensure that no one is left out. The pages should look very close, if not exactly the same, across all modern web browsers, as well as allowing those using text-to-speech and similar technologies to enjoy the content as well.

However, an admission on the part of the developer: the primary browser used in the design and implementation of the St. Paul's web site was Mozilla Firefox 3.6. In cases where other browsers don't render the page exactly right, but don't destroy the design, it was left as-is. In time, as all browsers gravitate slowly toward standards-compliance, the differences are likely to become even less noticeable than they already are.

The site should be easy to update and maintain…

The reality of web development is this: the design and implementation of a web site is the easy part.

After all of that is done, the web site will (hopefully) remain in use for years, being updated, growing and changing to accomodate the needs of its users.

My design philosophy is that, once a page is finished, there should be no reason to have to touch that page again. Obviously, there are reasons why that might happen, but they should be outside of the norm.

In order to reduce or eliminate the need to manually edit web pages, this design makes liberal use of php and javascript programming code to provide dynamic content. Where appropriate, the php is used to extract data from a database. In the case of the photo gallery, the page is generated on the fly, and will display all of the pictures in the gallery, even if new ones have been added since last time the page loaded.

Uploading images and adding database records is facilitated by a special password-protected web page (usually called a back-end or control panel). From the control panel page, it's easy to process images, add in next month's youth events and newsletter items, or upload sermons in MP3 format.