by Jared Hardin

February 15, 2023

When I became the pastor at Mt. Pleasant, one of the first things I did was walk through the church cemetery. It sounds odd, I know, but I have a deep appreciation for cemeteries. They remind us that our lives are bound by time, and that we owe a great deal to those who have gone before us. Churches are by nature historical, and I believe pastors should try to understand them as such.

As I studied Mt. Pleasant’s past in more detail, I learned of the church’s founding 180 years ago, and of the construction of the little brick meeting house in 1922. I also learned the stories of former pastors whose faithful work has led the church through good times and bad.

One day, I was reading a History of Churches of Orange County published in 1940, and I noticed something that caught my attention. It tells of Mt. Pleasant’s beginning, when the founding men of the church "with their wives and families subscribed to the Articles of Faith, the Covenant of the Church, and the Rules of Decorum as prepared and became a separate and distinct church organization.”(1)

I was familiar with the Mt. Pleasant Church Covenant, and the Rules of Decorum had given way to a more comprehensive church Constitution. But the church’s Articles of Faith were missing. I spent a period of time digging through the church’s documents and history, but they never turned up. The church’s founding doctrines, for whatever reason, had been lost to history.

Finding our Roots

For several months, then, several members of the church met on Wednesday nights to study what the Bible has to say about God, Scripture, salvation, the church, and other important Christian teachings. The goal of this was to come to an agreement and eventually clarify our beliefs in writing, as the church had once done. We used as a starting point the New Hampshire Confession of 1833. This statement of faith provided a wonderful framework of biblical teaching that would have been very similar to the teachings held by the church’s founders.

Unfortunately, this very confession had been rejected by our own denomination in 1922. This rejection of the New Hampshire Confession came after one liberal preacher delivered a fiery sermon questioning the necessity of the virgin birth, the truthfulness of Scripture, and the substitutionary death of Christ as tenets of the Christian faith.(2)

Mt. Pleasant readily affirms these doctrines as Christian essentials, and so in November, the church unanimously adopted a Statement of Faith (based heavily on the New Hampshire Confession) that articulates these beliefs with clarity and conviction. In a return to the vision of our founders, Mt. Pleasant once again had adopted Articles of Faith.

Stability in a Chaotic World

Jesus never said that the church consists of documents and doctrines. The church, rather, is an assembly of people. But that assembly must be firmly fixed on a confession of who Jesus is and what he has done (Matt. 16:17-19). Without a clear confession of what matters most, a church will be adrift in this chaotic world like a boat with no rudders or sails. Without doctrinal stability, the church will be blown along by the winds of a rapidly changing culture.

It is our prayer that from now until Jesus comes back, Mt. Pleasant will be a church that affirms the truthfulness of Scripture, the Tri-unity of God, the salvation of sinners by grace through faith, and the future return of Jesus Christ to earth to make all things new. And perhaps someday, when our gravestones are old and weather-worn, our stand for the truth of God’s Word will live on.

Click here to read Mt. Pleasant's Statement of Faith