We unashamedly follow the Anglican pattern of liturgical worship expressing such worship of God in a ‘form’ or ‘order’ that seeks to be obedient to the plain teaching of Scripture in such passages as Colossians 3:16-17; The Pastoral Epistles (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus), Hebrews 13:7-17.
Therefore, the elements of our worship will demonstrate an emphasis on an ordered form of penitence, praise, prayer, and the preaching (explanation and application) of God’s Word. This public worship of God is the primary duty of God’s people; God even set aside a certain day to demonstrate its principal requirement! What we do in public worship must be in accordance with His teaching; if we do not get our public worship right, everything else we do will be adversely affected! We meet or assemble to firstly honour God in our corporate worship of Him. He is to be at the centre of our thoughts in such worship; we meet primarily to greet God, not one another. Three important consequences follow subsequently as a result of our public worship. We grow in our understanding of God / godly living; we greet and serve one another as Christ’s body, and we go into all the world to proclaim the gospel.
The pattern of our public worship (ie., the Church gathered or assembled) is expressed within our own liturgical framework. We use a slightly modified form of Morning Prayer from An Australian Prayer Book (AAPB) and the First Form of the Service of Holy Communion from the same Book. Our doctrinal standard remains the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.
Such liturgical worship is not a slavish attachment to our historic heritage from the past. It is rather a thoroughgoing obedience to those Biblical injunctions which God has given to His Church, and which He has not altered.
We believe that such a pattern is not only honouring to God, but that it also serves to protect the Church from the encroachment of heresy and error.
We believe that some form of liturgical pattern is essential if we are to maintain obedience to the elements of public worship expressed in Scripture.
While we do not believe our liturgy is inspired and can suffer no alteration or deviation in its details, we do believe that that an ordered pattern of worship, in obedience to the plain teaching of Scripture, is inspired, and must not be disregarded for novel experiments in modern worship that are supposed to suit our cultural expectations.
The immense benefit of biblical liturgical worship is its capacity to express and maintain a ‘balance’ of biblical teaching that maintains correct doctrine (or belief), not only containing those elements of penitence, praise, prayer and proclamation of God’s Word, but doing so with regular expression of ‘balanced’ prayers and exhortations that prevent us from forming incorrect biblical thinking.
For example, the Collect for Trinity 17 says, Lord, we pray that your grace may always uphold and encourage us, and make us continually to be given to all good works. The Collect reminds us that the grace that makes possible our salvation is also the grace that compels us in a life of continued
obedience. Cranmer’s Collects not only excel in a beauty of expression which is memorable and easily retained with repetition, but they also excel in a beautiful symmetry of balanced biblically truth that assists the Church being catholic ie., the true Church in contrast to those that hold heretical opinions.
Public worship that pursues biblical integrity is not entertainment, rather, it is the expression of our obedience to what God requires of His people in His Word. God has set the agenda and we are not at liberty to alter it! When we disregard that agenda to appease our culture we become idolaters with all its attended errors.
Our teaching of God’s Word follows the example of that doctrine or belief that is expressed in the theology of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, and the further teaching of our Reformers as expressed in the Book of Homilies.
Consequently our understanding of God’s grace (the mercy of God whereby He forgives us sins through Christ) is never detached from a life that seeks to obey God’s holy will, expressed in its completion in the gospel of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.
While we believe that salvation is by faith alone, through grace alone, through Christ alone; such salvation is manifested and confirmed in a sincere striving after a holy manner of life. We believe there is presently a great deal of confusion over the biblical doctrine of justification by faith alone. It appears fashionable, either though ignorance or intention, to hold an unbalanced teaching about God’s grace, in which obedience to God is minimized through fear of teaching a salvation by good works. Such teaching is leading to a certain indifference, expressed in absenting oneself from weekly public worship whenever its suits, shunning sacrificial giving and neglecting the serving of the body of Christ. We also fear, and this is far more serious, that it is the basis for a false assurance concerning salvation, ie., we can have salvation on our terms ( a mere intellectual assent to salvation by grace) without the serious striving for obedience which the New Testament indicates is the only real proof of the reality of being saved by grace.
We believe that current experimentation in contemporary styles of services (mostly off the cuff, unprepared) are usually devoid of balanced biblical content and are in serious danger of conveying theological error, both in our understanding of God and salvation.
It is because we believe that our Anglican Liturgy provides us with such a feast of biblical truth in its public worship of God, that we invite you to shun modern trends, and to “contend for (preserving) the faith once for all committed to the saints - God’s people. (Jude 3)