We believe that every element of our worship services should lead us to experience, worship, and love the triune God. We aim for our services to nourish those within the church as well as bless and be intelligible to anyone who is visiting.
This short guide is meant to explain why we've chosen certain parts of our regular gathering on Saturday nights. While we do many other things in our service (like baptisms, announcements, and so on), these elements are usually included every week.
It can be difficult for us to step out the frantic rush of daily life and enter church with a posture of worship, so after an opening song to gather us, we invite everyone to pause, breathe, and pray. We often read a passage of Scripture that connects to the theme of the service. This time is intended to focus our attention on the triune God who initiates and calls us to know him.
The Bible contains over fifty direct commands to sing, so we are meant to worship God vocally and musically. But what kinds of songs should we sing? We run each song that we use in our service through criteria such as biblically sound lyrics, musical accessibility, cultural relevance, and variety in themes. Our goal is to praise the Lord in one voice as the united people of God.
Throughout the Bible, from the Psalms to the early church, God's people have prayed alone, in small groups, and all together in corporate worship. Sometime we'll use a shared prayer (like the Lord's Prayer), and sometimes a leader will pray from the front. This practice unites us as a family, instructs us on how to pray, and shows the world that we worship a God who hears our prayers.
A catechism (which comes from the Greek word meaning “to instruct”) is a collection of questions and answered designed to teach biblical doctrine. This process has rich roots to the Reformation, where adults and children were equipped to know truth and correct lies. There are many good catechisms, but we love the New City Catechism for its simplicity and supplementary resources.
“Fellowship” is a church-y word that means unity, friendship, and bonding together around our common faith in Jesus. In the middle of our services, we pause to meet someone new and extend a warm welcome to one another. Extroverts may love it and introverts may hate it, but we want to create a church culture where everyone feels seen and loved.
In Paul’s first letter to Timothy, he tells him to “devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture.” Reading the Bible corporately has always been practiced by God’s people, from ancient Israel to the early church movement to our church today. It’s a powerful practice that we use in our services to immerse ourselves in the words of God and to remember who we are in his great story.
One of Paul's final instructions to Timothy was to "preach the word" (2 Tim. 4:2). To preach simply means "to proclaim," and it has been a regular practice of the church to listen to a trusted teacher who can explain, exhort, challenge, and encourage. We usually walk through a single text of the Bible, and our pastors and other preachers typically preach for around 35 minutes.
Jesus taught his disciples to be baptized at the beginning of their Christian journey and to take communion at regular times to sustain their Christian journey. We believe that communion is a sign of Jesus' broken body and shed blood as a sacrifice for our sins. It is practice reserved for Christians that is meant to to show the church's union with God and with fellow followers of Jesus.
Often throughout the Bible, the leaders of God's people would end services or letters with a benediction (a "good word") of blessing and commissioning for the week ahead. In our services, we usually include a verse in the benediction as well as our church's mission statement ("You are not dismissed but sent to declare, display, and delight in the gospel.")
The Christian calendar (also known as the liturgical calendar) is an annual schedule that commemorates certain days and seasons related to the history of salvation. Christians in different traditions celebrate these seasons in diverse ways, and they are not mandated (or often even mentioned) in the Bible.
We see the calendar not as a requirement for disciples nor as a uniquely holy season but rather as an optional practice that may help you remember the story of the gospel and walk in the way of Jesus.
Advent, from the Latin adventus, means “coming” or “visitation.” As followers of Jesus Christ, we live in between two visitations: the first coming in Bethlehem and his long-awaited second coming. We are waiting for the “day of the Lord,” when creation will be healed, the dead will be raised, and all of us together will be ushered into the life of the world to come.
The season of Christmas begins on December 25 and stretches twelve days until Epiphany on January 6. Christmas celebrates the gift of the incarnate Son of God through feasting, generosity, and joy. Epiphany is a season that remembers the visit of the magi and Jesus’ baptism, and it can help us to celebrate the revelation of Jesus to all nations and peoples.
Lent means “length” or "spring," and it designates the forty days leading up to Easter, not counting Sundays. In the ancient church, Lent was a time of preparation for those wanting to be baptized. For the Christian, it can be a time of re-initiation, repentance, and renewal as we meditate on central events of our faith: the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
Holy Week or Passion Week begins with Palm Sunday, which celebrates Christ's triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Some traditions remember Maundy Thursday (the upper room and the Last Supper), Good Friday (the crucifixion), and Holy Saturday (a vigil of silence and fasting) leading up with eager anticipation to Easter Sunday and Christ's victory over death.
Easter is the highest feast of the Christian year and the central celebration of the story of our faith as Christians. In addition to fifty days of celebrating Jesus’s resurrection, the church also celebrates the ascension of Jesus on Ascension Day, which occurs forty days after Easter (Acts 1:3), and Pentecost, the coming of the Spirit on the church in Acts 2.
In the between Pentecost and Advent, the seeds that have been planted in the first half of the Christian year now germinate, grow, and bear fruit in the second half of the year. The great acts of salvation celebrated in Advent, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, and Pentecost beckon us into the new life, and now we are called to “work out our salvation” (Phil. 2:12) in the ordinary rhythms of our lives.
For the curious, these are some of the books that have most influenced Pastor Mike on the topic of corporate worship and liturgy.
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