BETH ARIEL CONGREGATION
Beth Ariel is a messianic congregation, situated in Montreal, Quebec. We are Jewish and Gentile believers who worship Yeshua and view the Scriptures through the lens of a Jewish perspective.
The term messianic comes from the word Messiah. Messiah is the anglicized form of the biblical Hebrew word Mashiach, which means “anointed one”. The term messianic can be used in the same way as the word Christian is used, since Christ, in Greek, also means the anointed one. Jewish believers in Yeshua (Jesus) however, will very often choose to call themselves “Messianic Jews” because it further defines their ethnicity as Jewish and avoids using the term “Christian” since this word has had a delicate and negative history in relationship to the Jewish people.
Just as there are many types of teaching or styles of worship that fall under the banner of “Christianity”, the same is true of messianic. It would be wonderful for example, to say that all messianic congregations or that all messianic Jewish believers held to the same doctrine and even the same belief concerning the deity of the Messiah Yeshua, but they do not. Messianic congregations also differ in their style of worship, their orientation to Torah, and to their understanding of rabbinic authority.
We at Beth Ariel believe that diversity of worship style in the various congregations poses no problem, however we always advise people to read the statement of faith while investigating a messianic congregation since the term “messianic” can take on a much broader or diverse theological platform than one might have thought.