Church Basics

What is church? It may be that you have never or rarely attend a church service, or you are looking for a new church and want to know what happens at Living Word Church during a meeting. This guide is to help explain various elements with the service that you may experience.

Put simply, church is a group of people who believe in Jesus as God, and who seek to live their lives according to His teaching. We gather together regularly for a number of reasons.

Worship

When we gather together we do so to worship Jesus as a community. Our worship style may be different from what you have experienced in a traditional church. When we gather we start with a set of musically led worship. During this time we encourage everyone to sing along, raise their hands, dance and worship God. 

Spiritual Growth

When we gather we want to assist spritual growth by teaching from the Bible. The Bible is important to us because it contains the words of Jesus, the early apostles, and eye witnesses as well as many prophets who came before Jesus. We teach from the Bible and seek to apply what it says to our family, work, social and church life, to help us become more like Jesus.

Community

When we gather we want people to get to know one another. To help this we have coffee and refreshments at the end of the service. This provides an opportunity to chat to people and start to form relationships. We encourage people to ask for prayer when they have needs. We also have 4 church family meals a year, as well as other activities such as a BBQ, where people can spend more time together. There are also ladies meetings and men's breakfasts to help us build community.

Personal Prayer

We believe that Jesus still heals, does miracles and answers prayer today. So when we gather we want to give opportunity for people to be prayed for personally. When we do this we often ask people to come to the front as a response to God, where an authorised person will pray for them. We do this by placing a hand on the person's head, shoulder or hold their hands. During prayer some people may cry, laugh with joy, shake, speak aloud, or very little on the outside may happen. However, these are the person's reaction and the important part of petrsonal prayer is that they are encountering God, and He is working in them or answering their prayer.

Assignment

Jesus gave the church an assignment to go into the world to tell others about Him and God's love for humanity. When we gather we seek to reaffirm this and send people back into their world, their family and social lives with a renewed sense of assigment to bring God's love to the world. How?  By loving those around us and sharing the good news about Jesus. While we love being church gathered together, this is church scattered. You may hear us talk about our mission during our time gathered together, and this is what we are referring to.