We have three goals in our worship together: 1) to encounter God’s Spirit, 2) to tell the story of God (especially Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, ascension, and awaited return), and 3) to be formed to think and love like God does. We hope we all will experience these richly, every time we meet.
Each Sunday, you can find specific information about our worship, like the order of our service and song titles and Scripture references, on our website.
In general, we begin with a Scripture passage that expresses God’s invitation to us to know, hear, speak to, sing to, and be near to God. We also open our service recognizing that God’s Spirit is with us constantly, and no less as we’re gathered for worship.
Then we pray and sing. Some of our prayer is recited together, and some of our prayer is all of us praying in our own words, together. We sing mostly contemporary worship songs with older/ancient songs mixed in, too. We like to think of our songs as prayer, sung instead of spoken. As we sing and speak our prayers, people might clap, dance, lift their hands, bow their heads, and more. These are all physical expressions of prayer that God has welcomed in the Christian Bible and throughout church history.
We “pass the peace of Christ” every Sunday too. In other words, we offer a sign
to each other that the peace we know with Christ is also peace we share with
each other. It can be a simple handshake or saying “Welcome, glad you’re here”
or introducing yourself to someone near you.
We often hear stories from different people in our community. These stories are pretty diverse—they can be about work, relationships, the church, experiences of Jesus, and more—but they are all meant to help us get to know each other and encourage one another in knowing God.
The sermon is another part of our worship. Our sermons are typically expositions of a Scripture passage, and we hope you will find them thoughtful, candid, and affecting, leading you to a deeper encounter with God.
On the first Sunday of each month, we eat wafers and grape juice in a ritual called communion. This celebrates the body and blood of Jesus, broken and poured out for our sake. We often recite Scripture or an ancient creed (a summary of Jesus’ story) as we celebrate communion.
We also collect offering, or financial contributions to the church, on Sundays. If you’re new, please don’t feel any obligation to give. But we do this as a way for our community to be generous with our finances and to express our trust in God’s provision.
Finally, our service ends by recognizing that we are sent to others. Just as we’ve experienced good things in Christ and his Spirit, we know we’re also being sent, every day, to help others experience them too.