Mankind was made to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. In other words, we were made to worship God. We were made to respond in a worthy manner to His goodness and faithfulness, His justice and majesty, His mercy and patience. Our reasonable service to the Lord our God is our entire life lifted up to Him, and the Lord’s Day worship is in particular set apart for His people to come into His presence together.

When God’s people gather together in His name to meet with Him and respond to His grace poured out, this is the joining of heaven and earth. The saints gathered on Sunday have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering. By faith we are to see this and rejoice with great joy.

Since this is the case, the Lord’s Day worship is held in honor and esteemed highly in our eyes. We believe it is the very heart of this world since it is the heartbeat of the new humanity established in Christ—the Church. It is the engine that drives redemption and renewal in this earth. It is in our corporate worship of our living Lord that the tide of our battle turns; it is where God gives the victory, where His enemies are put to rout, where the darkness flees away.

The seemingly mundane thing of going to church every Sunday is the most important thing that we do or will do, and so we are jealous to see this flame burn and burn strong and bright, knowing that the presence of the Lord is with us.

Many worship services in churches today tend to be fairly informal. They are modeled off a concert or entertainment venue, with a very come-as-you-are attitude toward visitors. When a visitor coming from that kind of setting joins us Sunday morning for worship, our approach to worship can be a bit jarring. There is a reverence and dignity to it that does not typically characterize more ‘seeker-friendly’ churches.

The fact is every church’s approach to worship speaks loudly about what that church think about God and our relation to Him. As for Trinity Church, when we gather before the Lord, we believe that we are gathering before the Holy One—the One who is served by thousands upon thousands of angelic creatures far greater in majesty than you, or me, or any merely human king. We have been invited into His Kingdom—a Kingdom destined to rule over every kingdom; He has made us kings and priests in His royal service. This is gloriously good news. But never something to take lightly. It is our highest honor, and so we seek to approach our God and Father in a holy manner, lively and full of joy, as well as dignified and serious.

C. S. Lewis somewhere spoke about this sort of posture: it is the posture of solempne, a medieval word that suggests the opposite of what is familiar, free and easy, much less ordinary; but unlike solemn, it’s not plagued by the oppressive air of gloom or austerity. That’s what worship ought to look like.

Our worship service has a lot in common with what some might call a traditional worship service, but there are also certain elements about it that stand out as peculiar to Trinity Church and the broader CREC. A notable practice of ours that falls under this category is our habit of referring to our worship services as ‘covenant renewal’ services. This requires a little unpacking.

To begin with, remember that all who are baptized into Christ are in covenant with the Triune God. Baptism serves as the ‘initiation’ rite, just as circumcision was for the people of Israel. Belonging to this covenant means that we are God’s particular people—His people set apart from the rest of the world. The chief privilege of being numbered among God’s covenant people is that we are invited into the very presence of God.

Even though we are always God’s covenant people and God always dwells in us wherever we are, Sunday is a time set apart from the rest of the week for us to come together as God’s united people to worship before Him and to renew covenant with Him. On Sunday, we ascend the hill of the Lord. On Sunday, the living stones that make up the temple of God are gathered together, and the Lord descends to visit with us, even as He walked with Adam in the Garden.

Sunday worship is not merely a time for us to learn more about the Lord. It’s not a social gathering. It’s certainly not a box to check so that we might be thought of as ‘religious’ by our neighbors. On Sunday, we gather as the covenant people of God in order to meet with our covenant Lord. It is here where the Lord our God renews and reapplies His pledge of redemption to us and where we renew and recommit ourselves as His loyal and faithful servants. God’s gracious service to the Church in weekly covenant renewal provides strength for us to go out and be His Church in the midst of a world in deep need of renewal.

When we look in Scripture at those occasions where God meets with His covenant people, whether to establish or to renew covenant with them, we find that there is a basic order or pattern to be discerned. When we likewise turn to consider the traditional liturgies of the church, we also find that the covenant worship of the Christian church has historically followed along with this same biblical pattern. In our approach taken to worship, this biblical and traditional pattern is foundational.

The general patterns can be helpfully broken up into five C’s: Call, Confession, Consecration, Communion, and Commission.

The Lord our God draws near and calls His covenant people out of the world in order to gather us into His presence. He, then, reminds us of what He has done for us, how He has ransomed us from our old ways. We confess to Him where we have sinned, and He reassures us of His love and mercy upon us in Christ. After God has cleansed us, He then instructs His people and consecrates us by addressing us through His Word. Following this, the Lord our God invites us to commune with Him at His covenant meal. We are welcomed to the Lord’s Table where He is pleased to banquet us on the body and blood of Jesus Christ, the true food and true drink of eternal life. Our Lord, then, having renewed covenant with us, commissions us to serve Him in this world, seeking its renewal and salvation; and He does this by sending us out with His rich blessing.

The Scriptures are the bedrock of the church. Through the Scriptures, that is, the Old and New Testaments, God is pleased to pour out His grace upon His people, for through the Scriptures we behold the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ who is the Word of God. The Holy Spirit who dwells in our midst takes all of what belongs to Christ and proclaims Him to us so that we might be built up and matured in Him.

Since this is the case, the Scriptures are the centerpiece when we gather together before our God on a Sunday morning. Scripture forms the backbone of our worship. Our typical song list is heavy on the psalms. We have three lectionary readings in the course of our service. Scripture directs our corporate prayers. We also prioritize expository preaching, meaning that most sermon series work through an entire book of the Bible with application drawn from God’s word to our personal lives. Some other sermons might address a certain topic pertinent to the life of our church, while some are tied to an evangelical feast day (e.g., Christmas, Easter, Pentecost). In all of our preaching, our ultimate goal is for the living voice of Christ to be heard.

We speak the Scriptures to one another, we sing the Scriptures, we pray the Scriptures, we read the Scriptures, we proclaim the Scriptures, we feast upon the Scriptures. We do all this with the earnest prayer that the Holy Spirit would be pleased to take up His Word, wielding it as His sword, in order to cleanse, encourage, convict, rebuke, correct, and instruct us, His church.

The Church lives by the grace of our Triune God: grace that flows from the Father, through the Son and in the Holy Spirit. The two chief means of grace in this present age are Word and Sacrament. Two Sacraments were instituted by our Lord Jesus Christ for His Church: Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. These two Sacraments are distinct but not separate.

Like circumcision in the old age, Baptism is the Sacrament that initiates us into the people of God. Through Baptism God washes away our sin. He welcomes us into the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church; we are adopted into the Family of God; we are built into the Temple of God; we are grafted onto the Vine of Christ; we are incorporated into the Body of our living Head, the Lord Jesus Christ. The water is not magical. The water itself does not create this new birth, or drown our sin. But God through the blood of Jesus and the renewing presence of His Spirit is pleased to impart His grace to us by the sanctified waters of Baptism.

The Lord’s Supper is the Sacrament that continually nourishes us as the people of God. At the Lord’s Supper we are fed with the children’s Bread; we are nourished by the sap of Christ; we are further united mystically to Him, the Church’s Husband, in loving union; we eat and drink immortal life for soul and body, even the body and blood of Jesus Christ. God our Father imparts His grace to us, not in a carnal manner through any priestly hocus-pocus, but according to the high mystery He effects through Jesus, in the Spirit, at the Supper of our Lord.

We partake of the Lord’s Supper every Sunday. This practice is the natural progression of our worship service. We move from confession to consecration, and from consecration to communion. The heart of biblical worship is communion with God centered on Word and Sacrament. Heeding the Lord’s Word to us leads to fellowship with Him. This fellowship is around the Lord’s Table where He dines with us, assures us of His sworn promise with the sign and seal of the Bread and the Wine, and feeds us with Himself—with His blood poured out, His body broken. The Lord’s Supper is one of the high mysteries of the Christian faith, and one of the high privileges for Christians as sons and daughters of Almighty God.

We love to baptize babies born to Christians. For many swimming in mainstream evangelicalism, this practice will appear oddly Roman Catholic. Truth be told, it is Roman Catholic—and it’s Presbyterian, and Eastern Orthodox, and Anglican, and Methodist, and Lutheran. In short, nearly all of Christendom delights to baptize babies. We’re not really the odd ones, on this point at least.

While a number of arguments could be marshaled to defend this practice, the clearest and simplest is what our Lord said to His disciples who thought to keep children from Him. In short, He rebuked them. “Let the little children come to Me,” Jesus said, “and do not forbid them, for of such is the kingdom of God” (Luke 18:16). In fact, in Mark’s account, Jesus is described as being indignant with His disciples. After correcting them, Jesus called the families over, took their babies up into His arms, laid His hands on them, and blessed them (Mark 10:16). We delight to do the same, and since God has blessed us with a steady flow of children, this means we will have a steady stream of baptisms. It is a joyful thing.

With that said, we also recognize some Christians aren’t quite there. If you’re in that camp, know that we likewise welcome you to come and join us in worshipping the Lord, provided you are willing to live at peace on this issue. And, who knows? You may even find yourself persuaded to join us in this practice, too.

We not only enjoy baptizing children, but we also delight in having them join us at the Lord’s Table. This practice is, admittedly, an odd one; for while baptizing children of believers is a common practice throughout the Church, both historically and across the various traditions, communing little children at the Table is less common. But through our study of the Scriptures, we have been persuaded of the rightness of this practice. We also believe the Holy Spirit who animates His Church will gradually lead our Christian brothers and sisters throughout the world to likewise move in this direction.

Our practice of communing baptized children is grounded in an understanding of the Sacraments and their relationship to the Body of Christ. The logic goes like this. Since Baptism incorporates a person into the Body of Christ, shouldn’t the newly incorporated member be nourished by Christ’s life? Or, to put it another way: If a baptized child has been adopted into God’s Household, what would we expect our good Father to do? He will feed His children. He will nourish them. And that is exactly what our heavenly Father does at the Supper—for adult children and the little ones.

The Lord spreads His Table with the Food of the Covenant, even with the Passover Lamb who has been slain. It is spread with the Bread of Life and with True Drink. And all who are in the covenant are welcome to partake. This means that as soon as little baptized members can eat solid food and taste a little wine—they are invited, indeed compelled, to partake of the divine nourishment graciously given them by their heavenly Father. Parents are likewise encouraged to instruct their communing children in the meaning of the Lord’s Supper so that their faith and understanding may grow according to their age.

This is what it looks like to obey the Apostle’s command when he calls us to discern the Body of Christ—the Body of Christ, of which even our littlest children become members in Baptism.