Worship

People often ask, “What do Episcopalians believe?”  Well, the shortest answer is, “Come and see.”  We have few doctrinal statements.  We have no formulated dogma.  There is only our experience of God in worship.  How we worship says a lot about what we believe.  It begins with The Book of Common Prayer.  Filled with the richness of our Anglican heritage—prayers, liturgies, psalms—it is the root of our all our worship.  Nearly every service we conduct comes directly from the BCP.

Every Sunday we celebrate the Holy Eucharist.  Eucharist is just a fancy word for “Thanksgiving,” but you might know it as Communion, or Mass, or Lord’s Supper.  In this meal we remember Christ’s profound sacrifice and are spiritually fed to do the work God has for us to do.  Eucharist is the core of our Sunday worship.  But we also sing, pray, and hear the stories of Scripture.

At the request of our URI students we have also begun having Taize services once a month.  According to the founder of Taize, “Nothing is more conducive to a communion with the living God than a meditative common prayer with, as its high point, singing that never ends and that continues in the silence of one’s heart when one is alone again.  When the mystery of God becomes tangible through the simple beauty of symbols, when it is not smothered by too many words, then prayer with others, far from exuding monotony and boredom, awakens us to heaven’s joy on earth….”