OUR VALUES
What To Expect
A PLACE OF REST
As we say around here, we walk at a slower pace. We take seriously Jesus’ invitation, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest . . . learn from me . . . and you will find rest for your souls” (Mt. 11:28-30). Our services are a little quieter, with a few more pauses, and many moments of prayer. Some call us ‘contemplative.’ We think the rush of modern life (including church life) can cause us to miss one another, and what the Spirit of God might be saying and doing among us. And so we come before him each week stilling our souls that we might receive and know that He is God (Psalm. 46:10).
CONNECTION AND COMMUNION
The gift of small churches in the Anglican ‘parish’ tradition is that we can actually get to know everyone and be known by them. And because ‘parish’ also refers to the church’s ‘village’, we seek to know our neighbors and care for them as well. (We belong, after all, to the C4SO Diocese: Churches for the Sake of Others.) It is through all these relationships that we come to know Jesus Christ more deeply. Let’s call it all “communion.” And this happens to describe too, the “Eucharist” or “Holy Communion” that we receive together each week. Together we come to receive the ‘good gift’ of Christ’s invitation to eat with Him at his table. There he receives us right where we are, bidding us again, “Come follow me.” In doing so, we ourselves are becoming ambassadors of Christ’s same love (2 Cor. 5:20) that rivers of living water (John 7:38) would flow from us to one another and our neighbors
ANCIENT AND GLOBAL RHYTHMS OF WORSHIP
As Anglicans, we are inheritors of a rich tradition of biblically-grounded, liturgical worship going back not just 500 years to the English Protestant Reformation, but all the way back to the early church and the people of God before them. We are a people of the book twice over—first the Scriptures, and then the Book of Common Prayer, filled with the poetry, prose and prayers of the Bible, crafted in the age of Shakespeare, and edited in the modern era by the likes of C.S.Lewis, T.S. Eliot, and others. In these liturgical rhythms of worship, we connect with the Anglican family worldwide from New Zealand to Nigeria, from India to Ireland, who are worshiping with these same words in their own languages. Anglicans indeed are worshippers above all, believing that we become like the One we worship.
THOUGHTFUL, CHRIST-CENTERED FORMATION FOR ALL AGES
You’ll hear us talk quite a bit about spiritual and faith formation (also called discipleship or sanctification). And this is for all ages, for we are a multigenerational church. Each week we involve our children , whom Jesus (Mt. 18:3) “set before us as a model for all who seek the kingdom of God” (in the words of our blessing upon them each week). You’ll see our church’s children front and center, blessing us and being blessed, forming us by their example and being formed by our Godly Play curriculum. We are fortunate to have many educators, spiritual directors, therapists, theologians, artists and writers among us, all of whom are helping us understand how we might cooperate with what the Holy Spirit is doing in our lives that we might be formed into the likeness of Christ. We believe formation is an interdisciplinary journey, starting with the authoritative ‘special revelation’ of Scripture and integrating the ‘general revelation’ of the other disciplines (like psychology, the arts, history, literature, etc.) that can help us walk in it.
BEAUTY
It is not unusual for us to open our services with a painting or a poem and always the simple beauty of the Sunday ‘Collect’—the prayer that invites us into God’s presence. Images speak the language of the body, and Jesus, the Word who created the world, knew this–using parables, metaphors, and symbols to help us see Him and the hope He brings. Humans are not—as one writer puts it—just ‘brains on a stick’. It is beauty that often leads us to the truth and goodness of God, and in our age it is through beauty that others often come to meet God for the first time. Beauty, of course, comes in many forms—in creation, visual art, poetry, narrative, the liturgy but also in the beauty of goodness that emerges from embodied acts of love, courage, vulnerability, and reconciliation. And what is it we do each week when we come together to worship–to ‘gaze on the beauty of the Lord’ (Ps. 27:4)?