A Very Special Service on April 28 at 10:00 AM
Our 10:00 AM service on Sunday, April 28 will be a very special one. We hope you will join us to experience an Instructed Eucharist, the first communion of two of our young parishioners, AND specials guests: the Servants of the King, a select high school choir from Hawthorne Christian Academy in Hawthorne, NJ.
Why do we do what we do, each and every Sunday? Within the Episcopal Church tradition, we have a pattern of worship: we call this liturgy. Though the Episcopal Church does not have a doctrinal document the way many denominations have developed, we have our liturgy as passed to us through The Book of Common Prayer. This is our broad statement of belief: our liturgy is what we hold as core to our understanding about God.
So: what is liturgy? Our worship, as formed through centuries of tradition, is a statement of who we believe God to be, and what our relationship to and with God looks like. Though the Holy Spirit guides the church to evolve the way we worship, the basic pattern of what we do is similar to how the earliest Christians gathered in the name of Jesus Christ. Sunday worship and liturgy are by no means the only way to express and experience this relationship, but through God and our long tradition we are assured of this relationship through our liturgy. We are strengthened through communal worship to encounter God elsewhere in our lives.
On April 28, we will hold an “Instructed Eucharist” – our usual liturgy, interspersed with descriptions about what we are doing. The question to ask is not what all of this means, but what all of this does. Finding meaning is up to you, and may well be different than your neighbor. But the liturgy does one thing: in our worship, we are brought into closer relationship with our living and loving God
Our guests for this service, the Servants of the King, is an award-winning group that has performed in a variety of venues throughout the United States, including performances with the National Youth Choir and the National Sacred Honor Choir at Carnegie Hall. Servants of the King has won top awards at recent national competitions in Anaheim, San Diego, Boston, Nashville, and Washington DC. Last spring, they toured the United Kingdom presenting a concert of American Sacred Music in cathedrals, churches, nursing homes and food pantries. Servants of the King has three Christmas CDs available, and annually performs with modern hymn-writers Keith and Kristen Getty in a Christmas concert at Carnegie Hall. As they strive for excellence in music, these students are united in offering public praise to God, serving others in love, and encouraging everyone they encounter to join in worship through music.
If you want to hear something from last year, here is a YouTube video of the choirs from a Music in the Parks event. The Servants of the King starts at about 28:30 in the video.Please join us and provide a warm welcome to these very talented students, congratulate our soon to be new confirms, and learn about our Eucharist.
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