Our Worship

What a great privilege it is to worship the true and living God!  It is with this in mind that worship at Christ Church is God-centered rather than man-centered.  Worship quite literally is a meeting with God, a wonderful dialogue in which we speak to him in prayer and praise and in which he speaks to us through the reading and preaching of the Word and in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper.  Drawing upon the rich traditions of the historic Christian Church, worship at Christ Church is marked by reverence and joy, majesty and intimacy, the greatness and grandeur of God and the mercy and compassion of God. We strive to help the congregation offer scriptural worship presented in the following manner.

Simple

Christian public worship ought to be simple. It requires no elaborate ritual, no prescribed book of common prayer, on the one hand, nor does it have need for some high-tech, electronic, technologically sophisticated setting on the other. True Christian public worship is merely based on the principles and order found in the Bible, by precept and example, which supply the substance of new covenant worship.

Spiritual

Christian congregational worship is Spirit led, because left to ourselves we will not worship the right object, according to the right standard, for the right motivation and to the right end. It is God the Holy Spirit who creates, enables and energizes our desire and capacity to worship. By his ministry we are ushered into God’s presence and commune with him.

God-Centered

Christian worship is all about God. He is the object of our worship, the focus of our worship. We gather as a congregation, not to seek an experience but to meet with God and give him praise. The whom of worship is central to true worship. We aim to worship the God of the Bible.

Christ-Led

Sinners (and that’s what we are) are incapable of approaching a Holy God directly. We need a mediator, one who will represent us before God and make us acceptable to God. In the Old Testament, human priests symbolically fulfilled this function, but Jesus Christ is the only real mediator for the people of God. It is he who has paid the penalty for our sins and opened the way to God. Through him, and him alone, we can approach God with confidence.

Corporate

We believe that it is important that we worship corporately, for God has made us for his worship and for community with other worshipers. Worship is the one thing he “seeks”. Corporate worship is not evangelism, nor is it even mutually edifying fellowship.

It is a family meeting with God, it is the covenant community engaging with God, gathering with his people to seek the face of God, to glorify and enjoy him, to hear his word, to revel in the glory of union and communion with him, to respond to his word, to render praise back to him, to give unto him the glory due his name.

Evangelistic

Evangelism is one important by-product of true worship. Paul expected that unbelievers would come to the worshiping assembly of Christians and declare that “God is certainly among you!” (1 Corinthians 14:25).

Consequently, we are always mindful that not all those who attend our worship services are believers. We welcome them, speak in language they can understand, preach the Gospel clearly and boldly, and pray, as did Paul, that they experience the presence of the living God and find the way of salvation in our public worship.