At Grace Community we believe that worship is the most significant thing we are called to do together as the Church in the world. The goal of witnessing to our Lord Jesus is so that we will see men, women, boys, and girls come to a saving knowledge of and become worshipers of Him. So much of the discipleship that we read of in Scripture occurs in the gathered assembly of believers who have come together to worship God.
To that end, we earnestly want to know how God desires to be worshiped. We do not believe that the term worship should be used merely with regard to the musical or singing elements of our collective gathering. When we use the term "worship" we use it with reference to the totality of the service we render as we gather as a covenant community to ascribe to God the glory due His name. We believe the hour in which God's people meet to corporately worship on the Lord's Day is the highlight of the week for the believer. We offer a nursery through three years old for families that need it, but we also place great value and emphasis on entire families worshiping together from the earliest of ages.
As we search God's Word we find the following elements of a corporate worship service: prayers, singing, reading of God's Word, preaching of God's Word, confession of sin, confessions of faith, giving, and the sacraments (baptism and the Lord's Supper). As such, most of our morning services follow a format similar to the following:
A time of preparation to worship while a prelude is played
Call to worship from God's Word
A Hymn of Praise
Prayer of Invocation followed by the Lord's Prayer prayed together
The corporate confession of faith
The singing of the Gloria Patri
The public reading of the Scripture
The public confession of sin and private confession of sin
The assurance of pardon
The pastoral prayer
The worship through tithes and offerings
The singing of the doxology
The singing of a Psalm
The reading of the sermon text from God's Word
The preaching of God's Word
The Hymn of Praise and Response
The Benediction
Our worship services are laid out how they are so as to be a running dialogue between God and the worshipers where God speaks through His Word and His people respond through prayer, confession, or song. We also believe that our worship services are a covenant renewal with God. Like when God would gather His people the Israelites before Him in the wilderness to renew covenant with Him, and God would always remind them of all He had done for them (like bringing them out of slavery out of Egypt) so that they could now go live differently than the nations around them, so today through our worship services God reminds us of all the many blessings we have through Jesus, so that we are fueled up and energized to go out and live for God's glory in our daily lives. Grace Community believes something "special" happens when God's people are together in corporate Lord's Day worship: God draws near and inhabits the praise of His people and is spiritually present when we worship.
More often than not, the preaching during our worship services is expository preaching, meaning that the main thrust of the sermon is taken from the main thrust of the Bible text that is being preached. We believe the Lord's Supper to be crucial to our spiritual growth, so we celebrate the Gospel by gathering at our Lord's Table on the first Sunday of each month. We then often have a fellowship meal together after worship each first Sunday of the month.