Faith
Faith is our response to the revelation of God. We read the evidence of the Gospels, we seek God in our prayers, and we come to know the presence of God. We know that God is all around us, but when our human ability to comprehend the reality of God through our senses or even through our intellect falters or falls short, we turn to faith - the power to believe and to trust, based on what we have come to know.
We learn to trust things in our everyday lives. We trust our mother when we are young to feed and care for us and to come to us when we need her. We trust our friends to support us when we are troubled and to rejoice with us when something good has happened. We even trust the chairs we sit on to bear us and the trains we take to arrive safely at our destination. These all require an element of faith. We have seen the evidence of their faithfulness in action, and we in turn in have faith in them, even if sometimes we can not feel them near and at other times feel 'let down'.
To have a Christian faith is our way of responding to the divine reality that is beyond our experience and indeed our capacity for experiencing it. It is trusting that what we can understand is only a small part of something much greater, which we are not capable of understanding in our human condition.
We come together in a community of faith through a common belief in the nature of God and the relationship of Jesus to the essential nature of Divinity. As the people of God, we affirm who God in Christ is for us in the statements to which we all subscribed when we came to faith, a shared conviction of each one in the revelation of God in Christ held by all of us. Our faith is not an accumulation of the beliefs we each share, but the nature of God in Christ in us as the people of God. Faith is God working in us to connect us to Him through all our weakness and doubt, though our distractions and lack of understanding. Faith does not make us safe, it makes us secure, because the God in us never fails.