Welcome to our service of worship. The purpose of this service is to give glory to God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and receive from Him grace that leads us to faith, confirms our faith, and deepens our faith.
A lot of what we do might seem out of the ordinary. For newcomers and old hands, here are some explanations for what happens in this service.
We share announcements prior to the start of our service because we don’t want to interrupt the service to do church business. The things that get shared in announcements are important, but they are not about worship of God, so we do them before the service starts.
The candles we light at the beginning of the service are a reminder of the light of Christ, who is our hope. The entrance of the light and the music that plays call us to enter into a time in which our focus is on God and what He is doing.
The church did not begin with us. We are just the current version of a people who have called Jesus Christ Lord for 2,000 years. As we begin to worship, we remember who God is and the essentials of the faith we have received.
To worship God, we often have to put aside things that keep us from being fully present to Him. This includes the weight of unconfessed sin that acts like a wall between us and God. To make ourselves ready to worship, we confess in prayer our sins and we together claim the promise of forgiveness that Jesus Christ makes possible for all who believe in Him.
In practice, this is often a time of warm greeting to those around you, especially newcomers. But there is a deeper purpose to this time. It is an opportunity for us to make peace with each other. As those who have confessed our sins, we are invited to seek and offer forgiveness and peace if there is anyone in our gathered congregation who we need to make peace with.
Our first hymn is often a hymn of praise or celebration of God’s mighty and good works. This is the first time we worship together, with our focus on God and our voices joined together. As we sing, we are invited to listen to the words and sing them as if we were singing for and to God.
We pray for God to work among us in this time or worship. We are not coming here to be entertained but to be engaged by God’s Holy Spirit, and so we ask Him to be active.
Together we read Scripture, the inspired word of God. Most of the time, the Responsive Reading is from the Book of Psalms. As we read it, we are invited to hear what we are saying and what is being said to us.
Having heard the words of Scripture, we are called to respond to God. Praying together is one of the great privileges of the people of God and something we have done since the very first gathering of Christians mentioned in the Book of Acts.
The prayer Jesus taught us, the Lord’s Prayer, ends our time of prayer, but also sets our model for what and how to pray, and so we lift up praise and thanks to God as well as petitions for ourselves and prayers of intercession for others.
God calls us to give our whole selves to Him. Paul calls this our true worship. When we give our tithes (10% of our blessings) and other offerings to the work of the church, we are saying God gets the best and first of all we have. It is worship because it says God is first.
During choir season, the choir sings to lead us in offering. They provide us an example of what it means to take the gifts that God has given us and share them for the glory of God.
This comes from Greek root words that mean “word of glory” or “word of praise.” As the offerings are brought forward, we give praise to God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who has provided all the good things we have. The words of the doxology remind us that He is the source of all our blessings and that heaven and earth join together in praising Him.
As we prepare to hear Scripture read, we sing once more. This is often a hymn or song calling us to turn our focus on Jesus or inviting us to prepare for a response to what we are about to hear.
We are invited to stand when the Scriptures are read to show respect to God who has given us these words.
Children are invited to worship in the service because they are part of the church and we together have taken vows to help them grow in their faith. There is no better way to do that than to learn how to worship. The children’s sermon is a moment when we recognize the gift of children in our midst and make an extra effort to help them hear a message from God that relates to the Scripture that was read or something happening in the world.
This name comes from the Latin words that are the first two words of the song. We translate those words into English as Glory be to the Father. We sing this in response and praise to God for the Scripture and for the children’s sermon.
The sermon is when we ask the Holy Spirit to speak to us through the words of Scripture. The question the pastor asks each week as he prepares to preach is “What does God want us to hear in this Scripture?” You are invited to take notes that you can use to pray or reflect upon after the service has ended.
The Word read and the sermon preached call for a response. That response begins in the service of worship, but should be lived out in the week that is just beginning. This response may take different forms. Monthly, we are invited to receive the body and blood of Christ, a sacred meal where Jesus Christ’s real presence meets those who come to receive it in faith. Sometimes the response is an invitation to receive anointing. Sometimes it is an invitation to pray at the altar or make some other gesture in line with what we have heard. Usually, it includes praying our Breakthrough Prayer, asking God to lead us where He wants us to go.
We join our voices together once more and sing. This is often a song meant to carry us out from the service of worship into the world and the week ahead. It also frequently becomes part of our Response to the Sermon.
This is a word derived from Latin that means “speak well.” It is how we close our worship. The responsive element of this good word comes from an African tradition. It invites us to give over to the cross all that troubles us and place our hopes for this life and the life to come in the promise of the resurrected Christ.