What are we doing here? Worship at Trinity

Trinity is publishing a series of short introductions to our church and her life together. It’s an attempt to provide at least some answer to the occasional question "Yeah, but why do you do that?". These will be available as cards on Sunday morning, but we're putting them here for safe-keeping:

Here at Trinity, we believe that the worship of the church is the most potent thing that the church is commanded to do. This worship both transforms God's people and is the vanguard in God's work to renew the whole world. The strange thing about all this renewing and transforming work that occurs in worship is that it is not fundamentally oriented to people or to the world at all. It is fundamentally oriented towards God. We gather because God has called us. We confess our sins to God. We offer our praise to God. We listen to God speak through His word. We eat bread and wine provided by God. We are sent out by God wherein we give thanks to God. Sunday worship reorients us to God and the great work of Jesus in the gospel. And it is this reorientation that provides the means by which we and the world are renewed.

If you've been around churches much, you've likely experienced a lot of different approaches to the church's worship. Worship at Trinity may seem a little different to you. We follow a formal liturgy that is scripted for us each week. At the center of our worship, each week is the bible and the sacraments. The word is sung, read, prayed, and preached and every time we gather we eat bread and drink wine together. God calls us and speaks to us and feeds us - and in this process, we renew our covenant with God each time we gather.

All of this requires our participation. God speaks and we respond. God calls and we sing. We stand and kneel and raise our hands. For many in the broader church, worship has centered on a handful of professionals who provide an experience for attendees. But worship is meant to be work for all God's people. Work that renews. Work that is the fruit of grace, to be sure. But it is the work of God's people in his presence. Sundays should involve an ongoing conversation between God and people. Sundays should involve the whole person - our bodies, our voices, our minds, and our affections. Every part of us presented to God and engaged in the act of worship.

We sing a wide range of songs. You should pick up on old hymns as well as some newer music. But at the heart of our singing, you should hear scripture and particularly the psalms. We sing the Psalms because they are the headwaters for prayer and worship given to the church in the bible. We sing hymns and other songs because they testify to the Spirit's work throughout the history of the church.

Finally, you'll notice that you might be distracted by the people sitting and standing around you. You are not sitting in a dark room looking at a screen. You are surrounded by brothers and sisters, children and their voices (and the occasional toddler's yelp). This is very much on purpose. Worship is something we do together as a community that God has brought together. The church includes her children and we don't want them hidden away when we worship God. We believe that they are learning to worship Jesus alongside us, even when it involves challenging seasons for parents. Worship not only brings us into the presence of God, but it also binds all of us together as God's covenant family. Children, parents, friends, grandparents - all of us together. Sunday worship is not supposed to be a private experience between you and God. It's a family with all our distractions and joy and crying babies and pain and clumsy worship guides standing and singing and kneeling in a very physical and human practice. We come together from a whole slew of different contexts and backgrounds to sing and read and pray and break bread together in God's presence.

Welcome to Trinity. May God meet you here, right in the middle of his enormous gifts of word and sacrament, as well as in this growing community of people who are learning to love the good reign of Jesus, to seek the welfare of the city where God has sent us, and to worship the God who is worthy of all honor.