Sunday Worship – Palm Sunday – April 5, 2020 | 10:30am
Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Below you will find additional resources you will need in the coming weeks to prepare your hearts and your homes for Sunday worship.
Preparing Your Heart for Online Worship
Please take time before worship to read the guide that Ross Hauck, CPC Music Director, put together for us.
Practical Tips on Worshiping from Home
1. Remember the promise of our Lord Jesus Christ: Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am with them (Matt. 18:20). He is present with us — all of us — by his Holy Spirit.
2. Set aside a place in your home where you will gather as a family for worship, and have someone take charge of setting up the screen for viewing livestream worship.
3. Have a plan for viewing the livestream along with the PDF bulletin with the liturgy. You may want to use another screen for the liturgy or print copies ahead of time.
4. To help stay engaged and deepen your worship, have Bibles nearby, along with a notebook, and something to write with.
5. Because the worship is live, you’ll want to gather on time, maybe 10-15 mins prior to make sure the livestream is working and to prepare your hearts. We don’t typically use screens for worship, so preparing our hearts is important.
6. Try to limit distractions: talking, toys, phones, other open tabs on your browser, etc.
7. Be patient with one another, especially with kids, as we do in the sanctuary.
8. As Ross mentioned in his guide to worship, your home is now a mini-sanctuary. Worship God with heart, soul, mind and strength, using your body to respond: sit, stand, kneel, and so on just as we do when we gather together.
9. There is an unprecedented strangeness to all this, yet it remains true that in these “services” in coming weeks, what matters is that we are in God’s presence. The famous Latin term Coram Deo means exactly this: before the face of God. All of life is lived Coram Deo, but never so much as in worship. As Paul said, “you are serving the Lord Christ” (Col 3:24).