Our Worship
Our service begins at 9:15am and usually finishes around 10:30am. On most Sundays we will go downstairs for a time of fellowship with coffee and bagels before our Sunday school classes begin at 11:00am. On the first Sunday of every even month we share a fellowship meal after the service instead of our normal Sunday school programming. You can find the lastest information and updates for all our services and events on our Church Calendar.
Here are some of our priorities in worship
Weekly
Worship is a sacred meeting between God and His people. In creation, God established the one-day-in-seven pattern for all humanity. One day every week is to be set apart as holy unto God. And ever since the resurrection of Christ on Sunday, Jesus’ Church has always gathered together to worship him on the first day of the week. That is why we will often refer to Sunday as the Lord’s Day, because all 52 of those days each and every year belong to Him. There is no substitute for worshiping the Lord on His day and we should always make this the priority of our week.
Word-focused
Right away in the book of Acts we see a clear emphasis on the preached Word as a means of grace through which Jesus builds His Church. As the Church grows and spreads from Jerusalem into all of Judea and Samaria and then to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8), it is always accomplished through the Scriptures read and preached. It is no different for us today. That is why we place a large emphasis on the regular, expositional, preaching of God’s Word, going verse-by-verse through the holy books of Scripture. Faith comes by hearing the Word (Rom. 10:17) and God’s Word never returns empty but always accomplishes that which God purposes in accordance with His perfect will (Isa 55:11).
Sacramental
Not only do we benefit spiritually from the reading and preaching of God’s holy Word each week, but we share in a ‘visible word’ through the Lord’s Supper. That is why we participate in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper every week. In this covenant meal, Jesus again blesses us, through His Spirit working by faith, in nourishing us through His body and blood, sacramentally given to us through the bread and wine. In the same way that food is digested and assimilated into the body for nourishment, so too are we nourished spiritually in this means of grace.
We invite all attenders to our services, who have been baptized in the Triune name and profess their faith in Christ, to partake of the Lord’s Supper with us. For more information on our distinctive Reformed understanding of the Lord’s Supper, please see this helpful article.
Liturgical
The word ‘liturgy’ simply means an order of worship. In that sense, every church has a liturgy. Every church must decide how many songs to sing, what passage to preach, how many prayers there will be, and what order all of those elements will be in. At Christ the King, we place a high emphasis on our liturgy (order of worship) because it is designed to aid us in our worship. We understand worship to be a dialogue between God and man (patterned for us in Isaiah chapter 6), and that is why will we include dialogue, or call and response, in our services. In each of the elements of our worship service, God is speaking to and ministering to His people, and we respond to God in prayer and praise. What an immense privilige that God Himself seeks us out and ministers to us through His Word, and we can use that very same Word to respond to Him in thanksgiving and praise!
Family-oriented
When God saves us, we are not left by ourselves. Rather, we are saved into a community, the family of believers. This covenant community, the household of God, is rightly made up of all believers and their children. Because of this biblical conviction, we love having our littlest church members with us during the worship service. We encourage parents to keep their children with them throughout the service. However, we do keep the back two pews reserved for those families with young children to make it easy to step out if needed. We also have a wonderful nursery available downstairs during the service for children four and under (please note: we do not have nursery during the summer months of June and July).