About Us:

Greenbelt Baptist Church is a church that believes God’s Word—the Old and New Testament—is the authority that guides, shapes, and directs who we are as God’s people.  From Scripture we learn that God is our creator, and He made us to worship and enjoy him. Everything we do as a church revolves around this. In our services we seek to extol the greatness, holiness, justice and love of God, as we revel in the gospel that tells how rebels can find redemption and restoration in Christ.

When Greenbelt church was constituted in 1957, it adopted a document known as “The Abstract of Principles” as the church’s statement of faith. This document was originally written in 1859 to be the statement of faith for the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and remains so to this day. The writers of this document drew heavily from the Westminster Confession of Faith, written around 1649. Our statement of faith is a summary of the faith that Christians have believed throughout centuries. Our beliefs are important because it is our beliefs that define us as a church. If we were an organization that existed solely for the purpose of doing good to others, then we could all believe many different things, and it wouldn’t really matter—so long as we were doing good. But we are not. We are an organization which has Christ as our head. We exist to know Him and make Him known. Therefore, what we believe about Christ and our relationship with Him is of paramount importance for shaping how we gather together as His body.

History:

Greenbelt Baptist Church began out of the concern of a couple, Mr. and Mrs. Charles C. Edwards, for a Baptist Church to be established in the City. In the early summer of 1953, concerned Baptists began to meet in the Greenbelt Theatre. They appealed to Dr. G. Walter Carpenter, Pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church, for help and for advice in promoting the work. He in turn referred the group to Dr. William Crowder, Director of Evangelism and Missions for the D.C. Baptist Convention. After consultation with First Baptist Church of Hyattsville and it’s Pastor, Dr. Henry Osgood, the Hyattsville church agreed to sponsor the new Chapel.