Worship at Eastmanville URC

What a great privilege it is to worship the true and living God!  It is with this in mind that worship at Eastmanville URC is God-centered rather than man-centered.  We see worship quite literally as 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.  Drawing upon the rich traditions of the historic Christian Church, worship at Eastmanville URC is characterized by reverence and joy.

A Guide For Visitors

If you visit with us, you will be joining with us in the most important of all human activities: the worship of the living God.  It is our sincere hope and prayer that you will find your worship experience to be encouraging, challenging, and invigorating, renewing you in the knowledge of God and the wonderful hope that we have through the Gospel of Christ.  Most of all, though, we hope that God will be glorified by the worship we render to him.

Worship at Eastmanville URC is…

• God-Centered.  All too often worship is man-centered; that is, it is overly preoccupied with our needs, our feelings, our aspirations.  But since the primary purpose of worship is to give glory and honor to God, the most important thing that we could say about our worship is that it is God-centered.  There is a time and a place to focus on people, to celebrate their character and accomplishments. What should be front and center in Christian worship is the radiant and glorious character of the Triune God and the greatness of his redemptive work on behalf of his people.
• Dialogical.  We see worship as a marvelous dialogue between God and his people.  As we move throughout the service, you will find it helpful to think of our alternating between God’s speaking to us and our jouful response to God.
• Covenantal.  One of the basic ways to describe God’s relationship with his people is that it is a covenant, a reciprocal relationship of love and faithfulness.  We entitle our worship “A Service of Celebration and Covenant Renewal.”  Worship is, quite literally, a meeting with God in which we commune with him and draw near to him, and he to us.
• Objective.  Sometimes we evaluate worship purely in terms of our subjective impressions and feelings.  Thus, for many people, worship is good only insofar as it makes them feel good.  While not wishing to discount the importance of our subjective response—indeed it is our hope that we will be subjectively engaged in worship—we would suggest that worship is first and foremost an activity, not a feeling.  “What are we doing?” is thus a more important question than “How do we feel?”
• Joyful and Reverent.  Worship that is very informal, while certainly making people feel at ease, has the distinct disadvantage of encouraging a light and sometimes, even irreverent view of God. Our God is not our on-call best buddy.  He is majestic and glorious, and we are to rejoice with reverence  in his presence.  We believe that such a view of God is best encouraged by a service characterized by reverence and great joy.  While we thus run the risk of not being “upbeat” enough for some people’s tastes, we believe that we are promoting a view of God which is consistent with the magnificence of his character as revealed in Scripture.
• Corporate and Participatory.  To put it bluntly, worship is not a spectator sport, nor entertainment.  Rather, it is an activity in which God’s people actively participate together for the glory of God. To this end, we are called as co-participants—not spectators—in the worship of our Holy God.
• Historic and Reformed.  While our ultimate authority in worship is the Word of God, we gladly stand in the tradition of the historic Christian Church and the Protestant Reformation.  This link with the past bears witness to our having fellowship with the great multitude of God’s people who have gone before us and enables us to take advantage of the rich history of Christian worship.

Brief Thoughts on Specific Elements

• The Singing of Praise.  One of the great privileges we have is to sing the praises of him who called us out of darkness into his wonderful light.  But what to sing and how to sing are often matters of disagreement among believers.  Our approach is fairly simple: we believe that a rich legacy is to be found among the Psalms (which are worship songs given by divine inspiration) and the great hymns of the historic Christian Church.  We seek to emphasize and take full advantage of this legacy in our singing. As the New Covenant is characterized by the “priesthood of all believers,” in which all of God’s people offer up an acceptable sacrifice of praise, we believe that singing in public worship is most appropriately characterized by the singing of the entire congregation.  We are open, of course, in dimensions of church life other than worship, to there being opportunities for non-congregational singing.

• Prayer.  We believe in the value of both corporate, unison prayers and extemporaneous prayers.  With corporate prayers, we are able to join our voices together with wording that is well thought through and rich in biblical content.  With extemporaneous prayer (in which one person leads), there is opportunity for greater freedom and responding to the immediate prayer needs of God’s people.
• The Ministry of the Word.  Central to our worship is reading and preaching of the Word of God.  Scripture is read at a number of places in the service; it permeates all that we do.  Prior to the sermon, a portion of Scripture is read that is the basis for the sermon.  The sermon itself seeks to be a faithful explanation and application of that portion of Scripture in light of all of God’s Word.  For the most part, our pastor adopts an expository approach, preaching through entire books of the Bible.  In this way, we are exposed to the whole counsel of God.
• The Collection.  As a response to the Lord’s mercy to us, and as a means of supporting and participating in the work of the Kingdom, we gladly give a portion of the financial resources with which God has blessed us.  While we do not want you as a visitor to feel under any pressure to give, we do think it’s important for you to know why we believe in making great sacrifices, financial and otherwise, for the sake of Christ.  It is because he and his Kingdom are worthy.  It is with glad and grateful hearts that we give…and it is with glad and grateful hearts that we offer all of our worship to the Lord.