What Are We Doing Here Anyway?

What are we doing here anyway?

Why do you come to church?  Here are a few of the reasons people told a Pew Research Study. 

I come to church:

• to become a better person
• to continue their family’s religious traditions,
• and to find comfort in times of trouble or sorrow.

Here at Gloria Dei, we participated in a survey by the Flourishing Congregations Institute in 2019.  You identified the following as the top three most valued components of the Sunday morning services:

• the music and worship
• the sermon and teaching
• Holy Communion

As we see from these responses, worship can be experienced in many different ways. It can comfort, uplift us, challenge us, and even frustrate us. But apart from our subjective experience, did you know that the shape and design of the church’s worship has a very clear “agenda’ toward us? As one Lutheran pastor and teacher says:

the overall shape of the liturgy and its individual parts exist to affect and change us. In fact, liturgy makes a daring claim:

God is here,

and this is what God is doing to you!

~ Linards Jansons

Beginning tomorrow, October 20  and continuing in the Sundays in November we will be taking a closer look at the individual parts that make up our Sunday worship and learn how they fulfill God’s desires and purposes for us.