Goals of Worship - What We Are Aiming At

God - God is the object as well as the goal of worship.  True worship gives glory to God for the sake of getting God and His glory.  Put simply, we worship because of His worth and our want.  His worth demands whole being worship, and our need cries for a God of such worth.

Community - The climax of true God-satisfaction is the cry for others to participate (Psalm 34:8; Isaiah 6:3; Rev 5:11-14).  Worship is thus communal by its very nature.  It both creates and builds community (1 John 1:3; 1 Cor 12:7; Col 3:16).  Worship that does not overflow into community is not genuine worship.

Principles of Worship - How We Get There

Centering on Christ - God’s supreme and central display of His glory is Jesus Christ and Him crucified.  We are as God-centered in our worship as we are Christ-centered.  It is necessary, then, for us to spotlight in our worship our sin and God’s grace, divine justice and a bloody cross, our unworthiness and Christ’s excellence, our need of repentance and the free gift of forgiveness, and our inability and Jesus as the author and perfecter of faith.

Shunning Man-Centeredness - Though we seek to contextualize the gospel, we shun any attempt to attract others to this gospel through man-centered appeals.  We cannot improve upon the beauty of Christ, only effectively communicate it.  We do not base the forms of our worship upon human approval, but rather upon what leads to glorifying God in our minds and affections.

Expecting the Spirit - The Spirit is the most God-enthralled and Christ-savoring being in the universe, and so we both long for and expect Him to powerfully affect and transform our community in worship.  His incomparable work often moves in unanticipated ways, and so we avoid the constraint of strict formalism, while also guarding against excessive novelty.

Saturating with the Word - Since the Spirit works through the Word to transform the church and exalt Christ, we saturate all acts of our worship (singing, reading, praying, preaching, etc.) with Bible.  We further desire to conform even the forms and structures of our worship to the principles of God’s Word.

Avoiding Individualism - Since true worship overflows into community, we avoid forms of worship that distract from corporate encounters with God and promote isolated experience and individual performance.

Seeking Undistracting Excellence - We will try to sing and play and pray and preach in such a way that people's attention will not be diverted from the substance by shoddy ministry nor by excessive finesse, elegance, or refinement. Natural, undistracting excellence will let the truth and beauty of God shine through.1

Engaging Head and Heart - The goal of our worship is to experience God in deep, profound affections, and we desire to be affected by the God of truth.  We long for true God-ward emotions, such as awe, love, repentant sorrow, and joy, but believe that they must be grounded in more than private, subjective, and sentimental experiences.  Therefore, we reject both shallow sentimentality and lifeless doctrine.  Instead, we pursue powerful and robust emotional experience based upon rock solid, objective truth.

Encouraging Authentic Passion  - We renounce all forms of triviality and flippancy as well passionless formality.  We further reject all pretense, facade, and affectation, but seek instead to cultivate sincere, heartfelt zeal for the glory of Christ.