About the United Methodist Church

Saint Mark United Methodist Church is a local congregation of the United Methodist Church. We are an 11 million-strong global church that opens hearts, opens doors, and opens minds through active engagement with our world.

• We are doers, committed to social justice, ending hunger, eradicating diseases of poverty, and being the healing faith community as God calls us to be.
• We accept you for who you are, and guide others searching for deeper meaning. We respect other religions and welcome diverse opinions.
• We offer thousands of ways to experience church so you can find a journey you can call your own. We aren't striving to be all the same, but we are striving to work together to make a significant difference in the world.

The United Methodist Church is a church in the Wesleyan tradition (founded by John Wesley) that was formed by the merger in 1939 of three Methodist bodies (Methodist Episcopal, Methodist Episcopal South, and Methodist Protestant), and a 1968 union of the Evangelical United Brethren and The Methodist churches.

John Wesley believed that the living core of the Christian faith was revealed in Scripture, illumined by tradition, vivified in personal experience, and confirmed by reason. As a church in the Wesleyan tradition, the United Methodist Church holds these principles as fundamental. We believe in:

• God's Grace as the undeserved and unmerited favor of God through which we can be brought to salvation;
• Justification by Faith in Jesus Christ alone;
• Sanctification and Perfection as the work of God's grace through the Word and Spirit to cleanse us from sin; and,
• Good Works, not to remove our sins or avert divine judgment, but as an evidence of our faith.

We have basic beliefs about the social world, which is summed up in our Social Creed:

• We believe in God, Creator of the world; and in Jesus Christ, the Redeemer of creation. We believe in the Holy Spirit, through whom we acknowledge God’s gifts, and we repent of our sin in misusing these gifts to idolatrous ends.
• We affirm the natural world as God’s handiwork and dedicate ourselves to its preservation, enhancement, and faithful use by humankind. We joyfully receive for ourselves and others the blessings of community, sexuality, marriage, and the family.

We commit ourselves to:

• the rights of men, women, children, youth, young adults, the aging, and people with disabilities;
• improvement of the quality of life; and
• the rights and dignity of racial, ethnic, religious minorities.

For more information about the United Methodist Church worldwide, click here to read about our Christian roots, and click here to read about our history as a denomination.

Saint Mark United Methodist Church is a member of the Atlanta-Emory District of the North Georgia Conference. For more on the organization of the United Methodist Church, see the UMC Web Site.

Note: All the links on this page will take you away from the Saint Mark website.