COMMITMENT TO STRATEGIC CAMPUSES

RELATIONSHIP TO THE CHURCH

METHOD OF FINANCIAL SUPPORT

Campus Outreach South Africa (COSA), is committed to building ministries on strategic varsity campuses.  We generally look for campuses with strategic locations and resources.

THE TRIUNE GOD

REVELATION

CREATION OF HUMANITY

THE FALL

THE PLAN OF GOD

THE GOSPEL

REDEMPTION OF CHRIST

POWER OF THE HOLY SPIRIT

The Triune God We believe in one God, eternally existing in three equally divine Persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, who love and glorify one another. This one true and living God is infinitely perfect both in his love and in his holiness. He is the Creator of all things, visible and invisible, and is worthy to receive all glory and adoration. He is immortal, and perfectly and exhaustively knows the end from the beginning, sustains and sovereignly rules over all things, and providentially brings about his eternal good purposes to redeem a people and restore his fallen creation, to the praise of his grace.

God has graciously disclosed his existence and power in the created order, and has supremely revealed himself to fallen human beings in the person of his Son, the incarnate Word. Moreover, this God is a speaking God who by his Spirit has graciously disclosed himself in human words: God has inspired the words preserved in the Scriptures, the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments, which are both record and means of his saving work in the world. These writings alone constitute the verbally inspired Word of God, which is utterly authoritative and without error in the original writings, complete in its revelation of his will for salvation, sufficient for all that God requires us to believe and do, and final in its authority over every domain of knowledge to which it speaks. Both our finitude and our sinfulness preclude the possibility of knowing God’s truth exhaustively, but enlightened by the Spirit of God, we can know God’s revealed truth truly. The Bible is to be believed, as God’s instruction, in all that it teaches; obeyed, as God’s command, in all that it requires; and trusted, as God’s pledge, in all that it promises. As God’s people hear, believe, and do the Word, they are equipped as disciples of Christ and witnesses to the gospel.

We believe that God created human beings, male and female, in his own image before the fall. Adam and Eve belonged to the created order that God himself declared to be very good, serving as God’s agents to care for and govern creation, living in holy and devoted fellowship with their Maker. Men and women, equally made in the image of God, enjoy equal access to God by faith in Christ Jesus and are both called to move to significant private and public engagement in family, church, and civic life. Adam and Eve were made to complement each other in a one-flesh union that establishes the only normative pattern of sexual relations for men and women, such that marriage ultimately serves as a type of the union between Christ and his church. God ordains that they assume distinctive roles which reflect the loving relationship between Christ and the church, the husband exercising headship in a way that displays the caring, sacrificial love of Christ, and the wife submitting to her husband in a way that models the love of the church for her Lord.

We believe that Adam, made in the image of God, distorted that image and forfeited his original blessedness—for himself and all his progeny—by falling into sin through Satan’s temptation. As a result, human beings are alienated from God, corrupted in every aspect of their being (e.g., physically, mentally, volitionally, emotionally, spiritually) and condemned finally to death—apart from God’s own gracious intervention. The supreme need of all human beings is to be reconciled to God under whose just and holy wrath we stand; the only hope of all human beings is the undeserved love of this same God, who alone can rescue us and restore us to himself.

We believe that from all eternity God determined in grace to save a multitude of guilty sinners from every people group, and to this end foreknew and chose them. We believe that God justifies and sanctifies those who by grace have faith in Jesus, and that he will one day glorify them—to the praise of his grace. In love God commands and implores all people to repent and believe, having set his saving love on those he has chosen and having ordained Christ to be their Redeemer.

We believe that the gospel is the good news of Jesus Christ—God’s very wisdom. Folly to the world, it is the power of God to those who are being saved, this good news is Christological, centering on the cross and resurrection: the gospel is not proclaimed if Christ is not proclaimed, and the authentic Christ has not been proclaimed if his death and resurrection are not central. This good news is biblical (his death and resurrection are according to the Scriptures), theological and salvific (Christ died for our sins, to reconcile us to God), historical (if the saving events did not happen, our faith is worthless, we are still in our sins), apostolic (the message was entrusted to and transmitted by the apostles, who were witnesses of these saving events), and personal (where it is received, believed, and held firmly, individual persons are saved).

We believe that, moved by love and in obedience to his Father, the eternal Son became human: the Word became flesh, fully God and fully human being, one Person in two natures. The man Jesus, was conceived through the miraculous agency of the Holy Spirit, and was born of the virgin Mary. He perfectly obeyed his heavenly Father, lived a sinless life, was crucified, arose bodily from the dead on the third day, and ascended into heaven. As the mediatorial King, he is seated at the right hand of God the Father, exercising in heaven and on earth all of God’s sovereignty, and is our High Priest and righteous Advocate. We believe that by his incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and ascension, Christ acted as our representative and substitute. He did this so that in him we might become the righteousness of God: on the cross he canceled sin, propitiated God, and, by bearing the full penalty of our sins, reconciled to God all those who believe. We believe that salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name given under heaven by which we must be saved.

We believe that this salvation, attested in all Scripture and secured by Christ, is applied to his people by the Holy Spirit. Sent by the Father and the Son, the Holy Spirit glorifies the Lord Jesus, and is present with and in believers. He convicts the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment, and by his powerful and mysterious work regenerates spiritually dead sinners, awakening them to repentance and faith, and in him they are baptized into union with the Lord Jesus, so that they are justified before God by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone.