OUR LITURGY

At Ascension Presbyterian Church, we believe having a consistent liturgy for our Sunday service is vital to the life of the church. It is the thing which unites the people every Sunday as we come together to worship God and be nourished by the Word and Sacrament. From this the people are able to go out with a refreshed heart and spirit to love and serve Christ, confident that they belong to Christ and equipped to obey His commands. Thus the liturgy provides a time of covenant renewal between God and His people.
Since the liturgy serves such a central role in the life of the church, it is important to consider every aspect of the liturgy and how it helps us renew our covenant with God. At Ascension, we believe that there are five means by which this renewal is achieved: calling, confession, consecration, communion, and commission. Therefore, our liturgy draws from the historic Christian faith to contain all five of these. This is how each element of our liturgy helps accomplish this.

In order to begin the process of covenant renewal, we must first be called up to the mountain of the Lord. Thus our service begins with a call to worship where we receive God’s summons to enter into His presence for worship.
Having received this invitation, we respond by offering up a prayer of invocation, asking the Lord to be present with us in our worship. This is our answer to His summons, and God graciously grants us entrance into His presence.

It is at this point, upon entering the presence of the holiness of God, that we become stricken with our own unworthiness to come before Him because of our sin. Therefore we respond to entering His presence with a corporate confession of sin where we seek His forgiveness for the sins we have committed over the past week.
God responds to this confession by immediately granting an assurance of pardon wherein we are shown that in Christ we are forgiven and that we need not be ashamed. This wondrous news prompts us to show our gratitude to God for His great mercies by offering up our praises in the singing of hymns and psalms.

Once we have offered up our praises, the Lord speaks to us through the reading of the Word. This is the beginning of our consecration as we receive a word from the holy Scriptures.
We then respond to this with the confession of faith by singing the Apostle’s Creed. Here we affirm the core truths of the Gospel which we and all Christians everywhere must hold to.
We continue to consecrate ourselves by offering our prayers and petitions to the Lord in the prayers of the people.
God then continues His work of consecration through the preaching of the Word.  Here we submit ourselves to biblical teaching so that we might take  encouragement for the Scriptures and learn from them how to serve God better. Thus the pastor concludes the sermon with a prayer of application where he prays on behalf of the people that God would empower us by His Spirit to obey the teaching we have received.
We then respond by consecrating money toward the advancement of God’s kingdom through the presentation of tithes and offerings. This immediate act of obedience is then punctuated by praising God with the singing of the Gloria Patri, a traditional Christian song of doxology.

Now that we have been consecrated by the preaching of the Word, we prepare to go up to the Lord’s Table to feast at the Lord’s Supper. We come to the Lord’s Table and partake of the body and blood of Christ by receiving the bread and wine. As we do so, we sing hymns of praise to remember and thank our Savior for the sacrifice He made on our behalf even as the Lord feeds us at His Table.
Once every believer present has partaken of the Table, we offer a prayer of commitment to thank the Lord for the spiritual nourishment we have just received and asking for His blessing to go out and serve Him. We then stand to sing the Doxology to offer up our praise to the Triune God for the grace which has bestowed upon us.

At the conclusion of the Doxology, we receive the Lord’s benediction where He grants us His blessing. Many in the congregation will raise their hands in a receptive posture here to signify the receiving of this blessing.
We then sing the Song of Simeon, which is based on the words of Simeon in Luke 2. We are here remembering having seen our Savior through the Word and Sacrament and asking that we might in light of this depart in peace.
The Lord then grants this request through the commissioning. We offer him our thanks and depart into the world to there love and serve our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.