Worship

At Trinity, every action in our life together begins from our worship life together. Our worship shapes our beliefs and who we are as God’s people. The Episcopal Church is described as a "liturgical church.” Come sing, pray and grow with us.

Below is an explanation as to why we use and love liturgy.

Liturgy is participatory

Liturgy literally means, “the work of the people.” Since the beginning of the Church, worship has been liturgical. At its best, liturgy is never a passive experience but a participatory action, an event in which the assembled people of God actively worship together.

Liturgy connects us to Christians throughout the Ages

Liturgy incorporates the form and content of the worship of the Early Church. The Psalms, our creeds, hymns and verses have been passed down by the earliest Christians. They remind us that we do not worship God in a historical vacuum, rather we are connected to Christians throughout the centuries.

The “Gloria in excelsis” was derived from the angelic hymn at our Savior’s birth and is an ancient Messianic song of the Jews. All of the major components of the liturgy, including the Eucharistic prayer, find their origins in Jewish, Biblical or early Christian worship.

Liturgy is holistic worship

Liturgy invites participants to worship God with our bodies, minds and spirits. God invites us to worship with our whole bodies and not just our minds. In a liturgical worship environment, one’s body and senses are fully engaged. Your body participates along with your mind and spirit through physical acts of kneeling, crossing oneself, rising and coming forward to the altar.

Our worship engages the senses through visual means in art, candles and symbol, through the hearing and singing of music and bells, through taste and touch in Communion and the Sacraments. All of these invite us to lift up our hearts, minds and bodies to God in praise, adoration and worship.

Liturgy is Incarnational

Our faith is an incarnational faith. (Incarnation is the embodiment of the spiritual in a material form.) Christianity is focused on a person: Jesus Christ who is God Incarnate.

Christianity affirms the inherent goodness of all creation, including the physical and material (Genesis 1:31 “God saw everything that God had made, and indeed, it was very good.”). Christians also recognize that God comes to us, communicates with us and works in our lives in incarnational ways.