About our Worship
Worship
in the
Episcopal
Church centers around
the
celebration of the Holy
Eucharist
(Communion service). Eucharist is
a
Greek word meaning
“thanks-giving”;
our worship is primarily a means
of
of thanking God for all that God has
done
In particular we thank God for loving us
so
that God became one of us in the person
of
Jesus of Nazareth; as such, the eternal
God
has condescended to share with us our
humanity, including our mortality. The Resurrection of Jesus is
not
just a “Jesus thing”; rather it is God’s
revelation to us of the promise of resurrection after death, of life
lived eternally with God.
The Holy Eucharist commemorates and celebrates the events of Jesus’ Last Supper, his Crucifixion, and his Resurrection. The bread and wine become for us the Body and Blood of Christ. The God who became Incarnate (enfleshed) in the person of Jesus Christ continues to be tangibly present to us through the Eucharistic bread and wine of Communion. There are no strangers at the Lord’s table.
Communion is actually the second of the two main movements of our worship service. The first part of the service focuses on the Word, i.e., God’s revelation to us through the Holy Scriptures and (hopefully) through the sermon expounding those Scriptures. In other words, our worship is a balance of Word and Sacrament. The Eucharistic liturgy of the Episcopal Church is very similar to the worship common in the Lutheran and Roman Catholic Churches.
Besides the celebration of the Eucharist, from time to time we have other services, such as Choral Evensong.