Connecting with God through worship and the Word.

Connecting to build the community of faith.

Connecting to serve in response to God’s grace.

Our mission as a church is three-fold:

First, our mission is to win the lost to Jesus Christ as their personal Savior and Lord. We believe God’s Word teaches us that all people need to be saved from the penalty of their sin, and that is only possible through repentance and faith in Jesus Christ. Jesus came to “seek and to save” those who were lost and to reconcile them to God through Himself. We, as Christians, desire to bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ to a hurting and lost generation.

Second, we are to equip those who are followers of Jesus Christ by way of a thorough and systematic study through the Bible. We encourage each believer to develop the personal habit of Bible reading and prayer in their own home. In addition, while we do have topical sermons throughout the year, the primary focus of our main services is the verse-by-verse, chapter-by-chapter preaching and teaching of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. In this way, the church is equipped for the work of the ministry by learning God’s Word and its application to our personal lives.

Last, our mission is to send those who attend our church into the world, equipped and confident in what they believe, and most importantly, confident in whom they have believed. Whether a Christian is ministering in the church or reaching out to the lost, we believe every believer is a minister of the Gospel and is called to serve the Lord by serving others.

We Believe In The Gospel

We believe the only true basis of Christian fellowship is Christ’s Agape love, which is greater than any differences we possess, and without which we have no right to claim ourselves as Christians.

We believe worship of God should be spiritual. Therefore, we remain flexible and yielded to the leading of the Holy Spirit to direct our worship.

We believe worship of God should be inspirational. Therefore, we give great place to music in our worship.

We believe worship of God should be intelligent. Therefore, our family worship services are designed with great emphasis upon the teaching of the Word of God that He might instruct us how He should be worshipped.

We believe worship of God should be fruitful. Therefore, we look for His love in our lives as the supreme manifestation that we have been truly worshipping Him.

We believe in all the fundamental church doctrines of orthodox evangelical Christianity.

We believe in the inerrancy of Scripture, that the Bible, Old and New Testaments is the inspired, infallible Word of God.

What we believe is that God is eternally existent in three persons: Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.

We believe that God the Father is the personal, transcendent, and sovereign Creator of all things.

We believe that Jesus Christ is fully God and fully human, that He was born of a virgin, lived a sinless life, provided for atonement of our sins by His vicarious death on the Cross, was bodily resurrected by the power of the Holy Spirit, ascended back to the right hand of God the Father, and ever lives to make intercession for us.

After Jesus ascended to Heaven, He poured out His Holy Spirit on the believers in Jerusalem, enabling them to fulfill His command to preach the Gospel to the entire world, an obligation shared by all believers today.

What we believe is that all people are by nature separated from God and responsible for their own sins, but that salvation, redemption, and forgiveness are freely offered to all by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. When a person repents of sin and accepts Jesus Christ as personal Savior and Lord, trusting Him to save, that person is immediately born again and sealed by the Holy Spirit, all of his/her sins are forgiven, and that person becomes a child of God, destined to spend eternity with the Lord.

We believe in the gifts of the Holy Spirit mentioned in the Scriptures, and that they are valid for today if they are exercised within the Scriptural guidelines. We as believers are to covet the best gifts, seeking to exercise them in love that the whole body of Christ might be edified. We believe that love is more important than the most spectacular gifts, and without this love all exercise of spiritual gifts is worthless.

What we believe is that church government should be simplistic rather than a complex bureaucracy, and we depend on the Holy Spirit to lead, rather than fleshly promotion.

We await the pre-tribulation rapture of the church, and we believe that the second coming of Christ with His saints to rule on the earth will be personal, pre-millennial, and visible. This motivates us to holy living, heartfelt worship, committed service, diligent study of God’s Word, regular fellowship, and participation in church baptism by immersion and Holy Communion.

We seek to teach the Word of God in such a way that its message can be applied to an individual’s life, leading that person to greater maturity in Christ.

Mark Byrd – Senior Pastor

For more than 10 years, Pastor Mark Byrd put his call to be a church leader on the back burner, feeling God wanted him to wait. Instead he worked in the corporate world for Colgate-Palmolive as a sales representative while doing ministry outreach on the side and waiting patiently for the Lord to reveal His timing.

In 1986 Mark and his wife, Donna, moved to Atlanta from Macon, GA. A friend invited them to attend a church that had just started with five families, and did not yet have a pastor, called “Calvary Chapel.” That night they unexpectedly asked him to be their pastor. After teaching for a couple of months, the Byrd’s decided that this was where they needed to be and in January 1987, they started regular Calvary Chapel Gwinnett services on Sunday mornings in Lawrenceville.

Pastor Mark and Donna, along with their four children Jeremiah, Grace, Rachel and Hannah, reside in Talmo, Georgia.