sundays
We gather for church-wide worship each Sunday at 10am. As Christians, getting together on a weekly basis to worship is an integral part of our lives. When we gather, we come in response to the invitation of God. It is here that we are reminded of our new lives under Jesus' covenant of grace. God had redeemed us, and we renew our commitment to Him in this incredible new covenant He has made with us. Our hope is to find an appropriate response to the action of God in our lives and church. Our Sunday service is part of that response.
Although corporate worship does have 'benefits' for us, we don't view church as being about us at all. It is about an awesome God who deserves worship from all His creation, including men and women. Every minute of our lives should honor God: the hour on Sunday mornings is the weekly celebration of the new life that He has given to each of us by His grace. So going to church is not a religious habit or a chore… we can't wait to get here on Sunday. And when we do get here, we are seeking to hear from God through Scripture and the preached Word and to respond to God in prayer, repentance, sacrament, giving, and song. So each week we ‘do’ the same things when we gather for worship. The key drama in worship, however, is not what we do, but what God has done for us in Christ.
Every church has a liturgy. Some churches think biblically about it. Some don't. We try to. Here is our liturgy and why we include these parts of our service.
CALLED AND FORGIVEN Call to Worship & Confession
READ THE WORD Scripture Reading
1000 GENERATIONS Kidsermon
JOYFUL GIVERS Offering & Friendship
THUNDER THE WORD Preaching
JESUS’ TABLE Sacrament
SING PRAISE Song Response
A SENT PEOPLE Benediction & Commission
Below is an explanation of each part of our worship if you are just a theological freak who wants to look under our theological hood.
CALL TO WORSHIP AND CONFESSION
We gather each week for corporate worship at the invitation of God. He calls us to assemble here before Him. We do not come on our own and ask Him to join us. We come to hear from Him through Word and sacrament, and to respond to Him in prayer, repentance, giving, and song. This is the Lord’s Day. Our hope in all that we do together is only to find an appropriate response to the action of God in our lives and our church.
This immediately rules out any us-centered focus in our worship. We are not here because we are good people seeking to please God by attending church. We are not here because we like religion. We are not here because it is family tradition. We are not here to get a good feeling or have our needs met. We are here because a great and gracious God has called us out of pitch black darkness into His marvelous light. We are here because God chose, called, justified, is sanctifying and will glorify us. God will. The whole of this Christian life is about God and His work and us just getting caught up in it.
We want our liturgy to reflect this truth. And so we begin with a call and move directly into a time of confession and repentance. As soon as we are reminded about how holy, sovereign, eternal, unchanging, righteous, just, benevolent and patient our God is, we are also reminded of how jacked up we are. To seek an entrance with Almighty God without humbly confessing sin and faithfully receiving forgiveness would be crazy. And so we are driven to confess our sin and desperate need for His mercy and forgiveness as we stand before Him to worship Him. And God graciously extends that forgiveness as He promises to do for His children.
And so we enter into worship called by God, forgiven by God, focused on God, longing to experience His presence and His grace and His truth. We do all of this by faith, believing that when we gather it is as if the roof was ripped of this place and we gather in joyful assembly with angels and saints before the throne of God.
SCRIPTURE READING
We serve a God who works through words. God created the heavens and the earth by saying the word. Jesus was the Word become flesh. The Scriptures are the inspired Word of God. Preaching (spoken words) is an instrument that God uses to convict our hearts and birth faith. And for thousands of years belivers have responded to God’s Word with words of their own... songs, chants, prayer, praise and more.
And so words are important to us at Seven Mile Road. Whether it is time spent reading and studying the words of the Bible, laboring over the words we will use in our sermons, or selecting the lyrics for the songs we employ in worship, out hope is to be shaped by the God who speaks and finds fitting word responses of our own.
This whole exercise in words begins with His Word, inspired and inerrant, captured on the pages of the Bible. At Seven Mile Road we are striving to build a church that stands on a biblically faithful theology. We cling to our Bibles and allow God’s revealed truth there to define right and wrong, good and bad, worthwhile and worthless for us. We long to sit under the text of Holy Scripture, allowing it to guide, correct, inspire, convict, shape and teach us.
There are distinct times of Scripture Reading during our service, most notably after we have been called and confessed our sin. This reading will always be the text from which the sermon will have been prepared. But the words of Scripture should fill our service like air fills the room. They should be everywhere, giving life to everything that happens. And so we pray the Scripture, sing the Scripture, congregationally respond to the Scripture, preach the Scripture, and, of course, read the Scripture aloud.
Seven Mile Road is an exercise in being a people shaped by the Word. Come, Lord Jesus, and speak.
KIDSERMON
We are not waiting for a day when our children will become a part of the family of God; we know that they are a part of us now. We are convinced from the Scriptures that it is God’s intention to extend the same grace He has shown to us to our children. By faith we work hard to teach and model the Gospel to our kids in full assurance that as they grow up in age they will grow up in faith as well.
To that end, we want our homes and our church to shout Jesus to our kids. As a body, we are called to come alongside fathers and mothers in raising children here to the glory of God. And so we welcome our children to join us for the full worship service each Sunday as soon as they are old enough to do so.
Practically speaking this means:
- School age children are welcome to join us for the entire worship service. You’d be surprised how much they ‘get’ once they grow familiar with our liturgy and Gospel-centerdness. Parents are asked to prepare them for what it means to come before God in worship with reverence, respect and an anxiousness to learn.
- Children ages Birth through K can participate with us at the beginning of our service for the Call & Confession, Scripture Reading, and KidSermon. Parents can then take them to the Children’s Room (out the rear hall entrance to the left) during the preaching part of the service. After Communion, parents are encouraged to pick their children up and have them rejoin us for the Song Response that ends our service.
- Each week during worship we invite all our children down to the front for a KidSermon in which we teach them the heart of what the Scriptures teach us that day.
- Every Sunday morning at 9am we do ‘Sunday School’ for our younger children, focusing in on the themes, texts and songs we will engage in worship at 10.
OFFERING AND GREETING
We’ve been reminded a lot about the myriad of difficulties encountered when planting a church in the Boston area. Economics is one of the often cited concerns. The conversation goes something like “How can you make it work financially? Massachusetts people rank about last of the 50 states when it comes to charitable giving to churches. Who knows what you’ll have to pay your staff with the cost-of-living being so through the roof. And real estate! How will you ever be able to afford a place?”
Here’s how: by fostering a community that handles its money differently.
When it comes to money, there is something about our nature as faithless sinners that makes our hands ooze super glue: we don’t want to let it go. What if Seven Mile Road was a people that held their money with ‘kingdom’ hands? What if part of our forging a redeemed culture at our church was to be redeeming the way we give? What if ‘how much am I giving God?’ was the first question we asked when we got our paychecks, rather than the last? What if we lived like this life was the vapor that it is and, by faith, began storing up treasures for eternity in how we give?
These are the kinds of things we are hoping for when it comes to giving and spending at Seven Mile Road. Our goal is to give more money this month than last for the rest of our life as a church. We expect our members to be giving joyfully, faithfully and sacrificially with the tithe, the way the people of God have always given, as our benchmark. That doesn’t mean having a big calculator by the offering basket scans your check, multiplies by 10, and then asks if that’s how much you earned this week. It simply means being able to pull out our checkbooks, point to them, and see faith-marked obedience.
We are so convinced that giving is an act of worship that we have a time during our service where we come and place our gifts in a basket at the front of the church.
During this time we also greet one another with a holy kiss, or a holy high-five if your prefer. Remember, we are in this following-Christ thing together. We were all bought at a price, the precious blood of Christ. God has knit us together into one body. The warmth with which we welcome one another should reflect this reality.
PREACHING
Every Sunday at Seven Mile Road, one of our elders stands before us and preaches the Word. We are not ashamed of it, we don’t hide it, we don’t apologize for it, and there’s nothing fancy to it. Matt or Ajay just stands there and talks, from the Scriptures. And the church sits there and listens. And God shows up. He doesn’t walk in the back door or float in through the wall. His Spirit comes and works a hearing miracle in our souls when we hear the Word preached. Faith happens when we hear the preached Word of God.
God does get things done through the preaching of His Word. He instructs us, convicts us, corrects us, encourages us, loves us, breaks us and mends us. Rather than folowing new suit ways of doing church that relegate the sermon to 18 minutes of talk-show banter, we want our pastors to stand before us, open the Bible, and preach at us for as long as it takes.
And so we have a vision of a church where the preaching is soaked in prayer and preparation and is biblically faithful and culturally relevant. We fight hard to not back down from speaking truth in an unbelieving culture regardless of the persecution that may come. God’s Word is a hammer, and so we want our elders to be smashing stuff every Sunday, breaking hard hearts. God’s Word is a sword, and so we want our elders swinging it with precision to cut away the junk in our lives. God’s Word is a lamp, and so we want our elders blazing a path before us that we can run down, following Christ.
As a church we are committed to aiding the preaching here however we can. That includes providing more time for our pastors to study, equipping them with the resources they need to prepare to teach and preach, and challenging them to continue to prepare months ahead of time so that sermons are richer and thorough preaching guides are printed.
For the most part, we preach expository sermons. This means we preach from the beginning to the end of a specific book of the Bible, seeking to understand the big picture as well as the glorious details. We will also preach topical sermons centered around a theme, in which we will mine various Scriptures and preach the thread of truth that emerges from each of them.
The responsibility of the church during the time of the preaching is to listen intently and with humility, allowing God to accomplish in us what He wants through the proclamation of His Word.
SACRAMENT
God has calls the church together not just to worship Him, but to eat with Him. On the Lord’s Day, God invites us to His house for a meal. That meal is the One that Jesus shared with His disciples on the night he was betrayed, the one He transformed forever into the beautiful sacrament we know as Communion or the Lord’s Supper. It is here that Christ strengthens us with bread and wine for service in His kingdom. We sit down and eat with Jesus, receiving from Him by faith His own life-giving flesh and blood.
The common elements of bread and wine remind us of a very uncommon salvation: God becoming man, dying in our place. The sacrament is a sign of this New Covenant that God has forged with His people, a covenant enacted through Jesus’ shed blood on a cross.
And so there a distinct tension when we come. On the one hand, we are quiet and reflective. The bread and cup remind us of the horrific ordeal that Jesus went through for us, naked, shamed, beaten, abandoned, mocked, nailed to a cross and left to die. We take this sacrament with reverance and sorrow that it was our sins that held Him there.
And yet we also take the sacrament with great hope and inexpressible joy. Here, in the death of Christ, we live! We truly are the blood-bought saints of God. Unbelief sees us sharing communion and placing our hope in a crucified Saviour and shouts “Foolishness!” But we shout right back “Wisdom and Power!” On the cross Jesus paid our debt, forgave our sins, bore God’s wrath, cleansed our filth, justified us before God, ransomed our souls, freed us from the curse and made us sons and daughters of God.
Taking communion is so much more than just another opportunity to exercise personal, private devotions at church. It is a ‘we’ thing, all of us, together, sharing a meal with Christ, a meal that serves as a memorial for all that Christ has accomplished for us. In the same way that the Passover meal reminded the people of God of His redeeming them from their slavery in Egypt, coming to Jesus’ table reminds us of the redemption that has been given us through the death and resurrection of Christ.
God never specified directly how often we should share this sacrament together. Here at Seven Mile Road, we eat the bread and drink the cup just about every week. We warmly invite to Jesus’ table all those who are followers of Christ and their children. By eating the bread and drinking the cup with us, you are acknowledging that you are a sinner, without hope except in the sovereign mercy of God, and that you are trusting in Jesus Christ alone for salvation.
SONG RESPONSE
Music is important at Seven Mile Road, but worship here is not a show. Every Sunday our church gathers to lift its collective voice to an audience of one: our God.
Our most sustained time of corporate singing comes after we have heard the Word and taken the sacrament. It is at this time in the service that our souls should be exploding with wonder and thanksgiving at the Gospel that has been announced to us. It is in response to God and His Gospel that we sing. This understanding of our words as secondary to His Word is what gives any life and meaning to our words at all.
We strive for the the worship at Seven Mile Road to Gospel-centered, Trinitarian, and biblical.
Gospel-centered means focused in more on what God has done than on what we will do. And so we sing lyrics like “Our God so loved us, He sent His Son die” or “Christ alone humbly left His throne, crucified to pay my price” more often than “I am going to love you more tommorrow than I did today”. This doesn’t mean we never say “I” but that the “I’s” are never the focus and are always the response to the action of our God.
Trinitarian means that we intentionally embrace the reality, beauty and mystery that our God is a Triune God, existant that way from before time. We sing to and about Father, Son and Spirit. We reflect on the ways that the three persons of the Godhead cooperate in creation and salvation and everything in between. Jesus is God, the Father is God, the Spirit is God. We affirm these truths by weaving Trinitarian references into much of our worship.
Biblical means that we long for the lyrics that we employ in worship be informed by the lyrics God has given us in His Word. Often the lines that we sing are directly pulled from the pages of Scripture. The images and themes and tone of our songs should all reflect the biblical witness of Gospel and of worship. We sing with the saints of old, and as such allow their words to inform ours.
And our song response is also passionate. When you begin to get what it is that God has done for you you want to shout about it. Worship at Seven Mile Road is not a ‘stand there and watch John’ endeavor. It is a communal, congregational response to the grace of God. Sometimes we cry, sometimes, we lift our hands, sometimes we kneel, and sometimes we just stand and sing with a stupified grin at the blessings we didn’t deserve but have received.
BENEDICTION
We end every corporate worship gathering at Seven Mile Road with an acapella singing of the Doxology, a fitting conclusion to our time together. “Praise God from whom all blessing flow. Praise Him all creatures here below. Praise Him above all heavenly host. Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost.”
Of course, walking out the back doors of the church is not an ending, but a beginning. As a missional church, we see ourselves not only as a gathered people, but as a sent people, sent into the world to bear well the image of God, to carry our worship of Him into every moment of our lives, and to announce to our culture the good news of the Gospel. If you are a part of Seven Mile Road, you are a missionary, on mission with Jesus to see His kingdom break in on the kingdoms of this world. The entire tenor of your life should witness to the graceful redemption God has worked in your heart, from the way you work to the way you parent to the way you study to the way you recreate to the way you spend to the way you speak to the way you drive to the way you have sex to the way you consider the poor to the way... well, you get it.
And we are not only missionaries for Christ, but for Seven Mile Road. This doesn’t primarily mean that you have to invite every person you ever talk to to church; but it does mean that you should be living a Gospel-drenched life and having people be aware that it is a great God and a worn-out Bible and a good church that form the foundation of that life. Over the years our church is going to build a reputation in the community, and we want it to be one that attracts people to find out just what it is that has transformed our hearts and lives.
We refer to ourselves as a missional community. This just means that we’ve woken up to the idea that a church exists not only for its members to have a place to worship God, but as an instrument which God uses to redeem the culture that church is a part of. This truth jumps off the pages of the New Testament book of Acts: these churches were strong as gathered communities, but were also incessantly engaging the people, cities, and cultures around them with the Gospel message. We walk in their footsteps, called to an engaging love and concern for the time and place God has placed us in. We long to see church not as a place where religious stuff happens, but as a people who are chosen by God, gathered in community and sent on mission... together.
And so, no, walking out the doors is not the end of our weekly check-in with God. It is the beginning of a week in which we will pursue His glory in every way possible. And in doing so we will find incomprehensible joy as we begin to experience life as it was meant to be lived.
