rhythms

At dcf, we believe that church is more about participating than it is about simple consumption. When God’s people gather, we are entering an experience—coming together to speak to and hear from and bow before our Creator. These rhythms are important to us because we believe deeply in the power of the gospel and our invitation to participate in the story of God. We want faith to be a tactile experience that we can see and hear and wrestle with, and wonder about. These rhythms are expressions of that desire.

Throughout the gospels, we frequently see Jesus speaking peace. He calmed storms, spoke faith to doubters, offered hope to the oppressed, promised forgiveness to sinners, and calmed the hearts of the fearful. In all this, Jesus was giving peace. However, life in our world is often anti-peace, and to such a troubled world, Jesus continues to offer—through his words and his presence and then the words and presence of those who follow him—peace. So, when we gathered on Sundays, we recognize that Jesus is among us, offering peace to each of us through each of us, our voice and our touch the peace-giving voice and touch of Jesus.

Generosity has always been something the gospel calls us to (1 Timothy 6:18). We are called to give our life, our passions, our hearts, and yes, are crisp green bills. Part of the early church’s is weekly communal experience was the act of each one giving as they were able to support the mission God had called them to (1 Corinthians 16:1-4). Giving is no more a duty than participating in music as worship or communion as worship or prayer as worship. It is also no less important. The wisdom writers of Scripture—as well as our own experience—indicate that we use our financial resources for those things we value and believe in. Giving is a way of speaking against the consumerism and greed of our culture; and in its place signaling that we deeply value God and the community he has placed us in.

If you are a guest of DCF, we ask you not to give. We ask you to receive all that happens as a gift. However, if DCF is part of your life, your community, then we ask you to consider how the call of God and the call to worship would influence your use of your financial resources.

dcf practices the regular reading of the gospel, the story of Jesus. We read the story because it is our story. We need to be reminded that we are not asking God to enter our story, but rather God is asking us to enter his. The lectionary is a very old way the church has sought to regularly retail the Jesus narrative. Following a three-year cycle, we hear the high points of Jesus’ ministry on earth. As we hear these words, we are instructed by his ways and changed by his teaching.

Music is common in most every tradition of public worship. Music speaks the language of our soul. The Hebrew culture in which Jesus lived was a culture of poets and musicians. Perhaps the best-known book of the Bible, Psalms, is a collection of prayer books that God's people have used over the centuries to worship our God. The prayers were often spoken, but the prayers were also song. The music at dcf attempts to provide our heart a voice. Through music, we sing of God's character, we sing of our need, we repent, we ask God to move on our behalf, and we simply celebrate that God is...and that we are God's people.

We also incorporate other art forms (imagery, ambiance, and original works, to name a few) as expressions of God's creative work and our creative response. In at all, however, we hope to see God, not merely the art and the music.

The Scripture is God's gift to guide us into encountering the living Christ. It offers us instruction and mercy. It provides us with wisdom and correction. However, the Bible is not a textbook or manual. It is a place where the God-breathed words are breathed afresh into our soul (1 Timothy 3:16). At dcf, we place a high priority on sitting under the teaching of God. We wrestle with what God says. We seek to understand the implications of what God says. We wonder if we are correctly hearing what God says. Yet, in all this, we are acting in faith...that God has said. God has spoken. Our Sunday teaching hopes to faithfully engage and journey into the things God has spoken. We desire to let Scripture speak for itself, attempting to minimize the way we impose our presuppositions or worldview or politics or felt-needs onto God. We desire to let God speak. And we pray we will have the courage to obey.

Prayer is conversation, and conversing with God is central to the life of following Jesus. St. Benedict called prayer “the work of God,” reflecting the reality that God is the one first at work in prayer—we are merely joining the conversation, responding to God's invitation to engage in God-work. Prayer is often portrayed in Scripture as a communal act. The Psalms were the prayer book of the early church where, together, they would sing and speak their hopes and their repentance and their passions...to God. We pray together in many ways at dcf. We provide a prayer space with aids to prayer and a prayer journal. We often provide moments of silence for personal prayer. Most Sundays, we pray the Lord's Prayer and have a closing prayer available for our entire community to pray together. We believe God is present and God is listening. So, we pray.

For much of the history of the church, the gathering around the Lord’s Table (also known as the act of Holy Communion, the Lord's Supper, and the Eucharist) was a central moment in our public acts of worship. This practice reflects the picture in acts of the early church where gathering around the Lord’s Table as a community was held equally as important as acts of teaching Scripture, participating in prayer and sharing life with one another (Acts 2:42). Paul also seems to reflect the reality that “breaking of bread” was integral to the life of the earliest Christian communities (Acts 20:7-12; 1 Corinthians 11:18-20, 33), and he evokes imagery suggesting that sharing a meal at the table of God was core to the identity of God's people (1 Corinthians 10:17).