worship

          Human beings were created to worship God.  When we gather for corporate worship on Sunday mornings, we are fulfilling the God-designed purpose of our existence.  Remembering this keeps us eager and earnest in our enjoyment of our God through worship. 

          We believe that the corporate worship of Christ’s people is the time during the week when we should think the hardest and feel the most deeply.  Thus, we strive to plan, organize and lead our worship services in such a way that they are characterized by an abundance of both “light” (proclamation of & reflection upon God’s revealed truth) and “heat” (responding to that revealed truth with our affections).

          God—His beauty, His character, His purposes, His Kingdom, and the wonder of His achievements for us in Jesus Christ—deserves the best and most strenuous exertions of our minds.  Worship that does not lead people to love God with their minds fails of its purpose.

          At the same time, Biblical worship must also aim to capture and captivate our affections. We are called to love God not just with our heads, but also with our hearts.  Just as God deserves our best and hardest thinking, so He ought to have no peer in our affections.  We therefore strive to design our worship services to assist the people of God, in dependence upon the Holy Spirit, by demonstrating the peerless beauty and value of God, to the end that our affections will be stirred and directed Godward. 

          We believe that corporate worship is an essential means by which the Lord disciples His people.  In other words, we recognize that our weekly worship service is teaching our people—young and old alike—what it means to be a Christian and how to live the Christian life.  It literally shapes us as the people of God.  We agree that “[w]orship is the workshop where we are transformed into His image” (Hughes Oliphant Old).