What We Believe
Who Are We?
Grace Bible Church International (GBCI) is a Baptist Church located in the Greater Toronto Area, welcoming all people to join us for worship and fellowship. Our church mission is to care and share God’s grace. We invite you to come attend one of our worship services this Sunday at GBCI for a time of prayer, learning, and worship.
Our congregation is multicultural, with a large Filipino segment. All services are conducted in English. Alongside our Sunday services, we have many activities you can be involved in, including sunday school, ministry work, prayer meetings, bible study groups and more!
Mission Statement
Our mission is to glorify God by evangelizing to the lost through the preaching of the Gospel, personal witnessing and carrying on a vigorous missionary program around the world. We aim to edify believers through the preaching of God’s Word and maintain our testimony for Christ through our actions. We believe in equipping members for service in the different church ministries. The Lord’s Great Commission is our mandate, and Christ is our model in translating our vision and reaching our goals.
Statement of Faith
We believe that “all Scripture is given by inspiration of God,” by which we understand the whole Bible is inspired in the sense that holy men of God “were moved by the Holy Spirit” to write the very words of Scripture. We believe that while there was progress in revelation from God, this divine inspiration extends equally and fully to all parts of the writings-historical, poetical, doctrinal, prophetical and to the smallest word and inflection of a word as appeared in the original manuscripts. We believe that the whole Bible in the originals is therefore without error. We also believe that all the Scriptures were designed for our practical instruction ( 2 Tim. 3:16; 2 Pet. 1; 20-21).
We believe that the Godhead eternally exists in three persons—the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit—and that these three are one God, having precisely the same nature, attributes and perfections, and worthy of precisely the same homage, confidence and obedience (Matt. 28:18-19; Mark 12:29; John 1:14; Acts 5:3-4; 2Cor. 13:14; Heb. 1:1-3; Rev. 1:4-6).
We believe that Jesus Christ came into this world that He might manifest God to men, fulfil prophecy and become the Redeemer of a lost world. To this end He was born of the virgin and received a human body and a sinless human nature (Luke 1:30-35; John 1: 18; 3:16; Heb. 4:15).
We believe that in infinite love for the lost, He voluntarily accepted His Father’s will and became the divinely provided sacrificial Lamb and took away the sin of the world, bearing the holy judgements against sin which the righteousness of God must impose. His death was therefore substitutionary in the most absolute sense—the just for the unjust—and by His death, He became the Saviour of the lost (John 1:29; Rom. 3:25-26; 2 Cor. 5:14; Heb. 10:5-14; 12 Pet. 3:18).
We believe that according to the Scriptures, He arose from the dead in the same body, though glorified, in which He had lived and died, and that His resurrection body is the pattern of that body which ultimately will be given to all believers (John 20:20; Phil. 3:20-21).
We believe that the Holy Spirit, the third Person of the blessed Trinity, though omnipresent from all eternity, took up His abode in the world in a special sense on the day of Pentecost according to the divine promise, dwells in every believer and, by His baptism, unites all to Christ in one body and that He, as the indwelling One, is the source of all power and all acceptable worship and service.
We believe that He never takes His departure from the church, nor from the feeblest of the saints, but is ever present to testify of Christ; seeking to occupy believers with Him and not with themselves nor with their experiences. We believe that His abode in the world in this special sense will cease when Christ comes to receive His own at the completion of the church (John 14:16-17; 1 Corinthians 6:19; Eph. 2:22; 2Thessalonians 2:7).
We believe that man was created by God as a human being, and did not evolve from a lower order of life. We believe that man was originally created in the image and after the likeness of God and that he fell through sin and, as a consequence of his sin, lost his spiritual life becoming dead in trespasses and sins, and that he became subject to the power of the devil.
We also believe that his spiritual death, or totally depraved human nature, has been transmitted to the entire human race of man, and hence that every child of Adam is born into the world with a nature which not only possesses no spark of divine life, but is essentially and unchangeable bad apart from divine grace (Gen. 1:26; 2:17; 6:5; Psalm 14:1-3; 51:5; Jeremiah. 17:9; John 3:6; 5:40; 6:53; Rom. 3:10-19; 8:6-7; Eph. 2:1-3; 1 Tim. 5:6; 1 John 3:8).
We believe that the new birth of the believer comes only through faith in Christ and that repentance is a vital part of believing, and is in no way in itself a separate and independent condition of salvation; nor are any other acts, such as confession, baptism, prayer, or faithful service to be added to believing as a condition of salvation (John 1:12; 3:16,18,36; 5:24; 6:29; Acts 13:39; 16:31; Romans 1:16-17; 3:22, 26; 4:5; 10:4; Gal. 3:22).
We believe that the church is composed of all who are united by the Holy Spirit to the risen and ascended Son of God, that by the same Spirit we are all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, and thus being members one of another, we are responsible to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, rising above all sectarian prejudices and denominational bigotry, and loving one another with a pure heart fervently (Matt. 16:16-18; Acts 2:2-7; Romans 12:5; 1Corinthians 12:12-27; Eph. 1:20-23; 4:3-10; Col. 3:14-15).
We believe that Christ, the head over all things to the church (Eph. 1:22), has commanded us to baptize in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit (Matt. 28: 19); and to partake at the Lord’s Supper.
We believe that according to the Word of God the next great event in the fulfilment of prophecy will be the coming of the Lord in the air to receive to Himself into heaven both His own who are alive and remain unto His coming, and also all who have fallen asleep in Jesus, and that this event is the blessed hope set before us in Scripture, and for this we should be constantly looking (John 14:1-3; 1Corinthians 15:51-52; Philippians 3:20; 1Thessalonians 4:13-18; Titus 2:11-14).