Apostles' Creed

I believe in God, the Father Almighty,
  maker of heaven and earth.

And in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,
  who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
  born of the virgin Mary,
  suffered under Pontius Pilate,
  was crucified, died, and was buried.
  He descended into hell.
  The third day he rose again from the dead.
  He ascended into heaven
    and sits at the right hand of God
    the Father Almighty.
  From thence he will come to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit,
  the holy Christian Church,*
  the communion of saints,
  the forgiveness of sins,
  the resurrection of the body,
  and the life everlasting. Amen

* The original says "the holy Catholic Church", and some people capitalize "catholic" and some don't. As I'm getting this out of a Protestant hymnal (mostly to make sure I have the punctuation right), I decided to put it this way as it showed a few more variations than could be shown otherwise.

Commentary:
- Probably the most used and commonly memorized of the creeds, at least amoung denominations I am familiar with. Short and fairly simple, it is well suited to act as a quick guide to Christian beliefs without causing too many disagreements among the various denominations.
- Originally written in Latin - if your version is different from mine, it might be due to differences in translation (ex. I learned it as "From thence he will come to judge the quick and the dead.").

A New Creed

We are not alone, we live in God's world.
We believe in God:
   who has created and is creating,
   who has come in Jesus the Word made flesh,
   to reconcile and make us new
   who works in us and others by the Spirit.
We trust in God.
We are called to be the church:
   to celebrate God's presence,
   to live with respect in creation,
   to love and serve others,
   to seek justice and resist evil,
   to proclaim Jesus, crucified and risen,
   our judge and our hope.
In life, in death, in life beyond death,
   God is with us.
We are not alone.
Thanks be to God.

Commentary:
- I encountered this while attending a United Church service, and it was one of the factors in finally getting this project started. I had not intended for it to be the first one (quite likely it will be moved later), but I felt I should post it before I lost the bulletin it came from.
- It is unfortunate that it is called the "New" Creed, as this results in it being confused with any new creeds that appear on this site. In order to avoid confusion, quotation marks and capitalization will be used to mark this creed as different from other more recently developed creeds.
- A quick check of Wikipedia suggests that slightly different line breaks and indentation are normal. Unless this is found to significantly affect the meaning during analysis, the line breaks found in the bulletin I pulled this from will be used (mostly because I don't feel like changing it at this point).

Why?

I have grown somewhat dissatisfied with the creed's that are recited each Sunday in Church. It isn't so much that I disagree with them (at least not substantially), but that I find them somewhat lacking. I get the feeling that a lot of time and effort went into making those creeds, and specifically making them so that they used many words to say as little as possible, and preferably say nothing that would get any feathers ruffled. I realize that wars and executions took place over the wording of those creeds, but that just shows why it was that people were so careful to not ruffle any feathers.

I hope that we are past the days of routine executions for differences in theological opinion, and hopefully also past the days of starting flame wars on the internet over the same such issues. What I want to do is start exploring the various Christian Creeds and examine what the purpose of each one is, what it's strengths are, what it's weaknesses are. I want to eventually be able to come up with a different creed which describes what I believe, or at least pick a creed that I will be satisfied with. I welcome contributions and suggestions, provided they are submitted with respect. I reserve the right to delete any comment on any post.

Please bear in mind, as you read these posts, that I am, by no means, a trained student of creeds. I have no formal theological, historical or even language training. If I have made a mistake in my analysis of a creed, or if I have failed to take all of the possible interpretations into account, it is probably because I am unused to doing this sort of thing. Please feel free to correct me in a constructive manner.

At the risk of making this too long, I should also mention that the dates of the post mean very little. They will only be used to keep everything in a reasonable order.