Plan Your Visit

Episcopal worship services are congregational. In the pews, you will find the Book of Common Prayer and a hymnal. The service bulletin will be your guide to the service.

Our greeters will be happy to point you in the right direction when you arrive.

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As you enter the church, you will notice an atmosphere of quiet reverence in the few minutes prior to the beginning of worship. Most of our worshippers cherish that quiet moment to make a transition from the world outside into the spirit of God’s house. The architecture of Trinity carries your eye to the altar and then to the cross, taking our thoughts at once to Christ whom we hope to encounter, and to God, whose house this is.

On and alongside the altar are candles to remind us that Christ is the “Light of the world.” [John 8:11]

Except during the penitential season of Lent, flowers at the altar beautify God’s house and recall the resurrection of Jesus.

All worship at Trinity is drawn from The 1979 Book of Common Prayer. Sometimes, people wonder at the wisdom of this approach—it seems like rote repetition to them. Yet the reality is that it is very freeing. Because we are thoroughly familiar with the words, we are freed spiritually to go where the words take us—whether it is to a place of penitence for our sins, of deep searching for God in prayer, or of joy in the incredibly generous gift of Christ’s life for us. Like icons and sacraments, the Prayer Book is a window into another world—God’s world—through which we see our own world and lives differently. Granted, it takes a little getting used to…but once the Prayer Book becomes familiar it is a springboard, not a brick wall. Current and historical versions of the Prayer Book are available online.

The central service of worship at Trinity is the Holy Eucharist, the remembrance of Christ’s death and resurrection made concrete in the bread and wine. Each week, we begin by listening to scripture and reflecting on its meaning for life, and then move through prayer, confession and forgiveness to becoming the family of God gathered around the table of God, living ever so briefly the life of heaven before we return again to the world, transformed and renewed.

Service Language

• At the 8:00 am service, Rite I, we use traditional language.
• The 10:30 am service alternates between Rite I (traditional language) and Rite II (contemporary language).
• Our 12:30 pm service is adapted from the New Zealand Book of Common Prayer, which we call Rite III.

To add to the beauty and festivity of the services, the clergy and other ministers wear vestments. Lay leaders often wear a black robe, called a cassock, and a white vestment, called a surplice. Acolytes, young people and occasionally adults who assist with worship, wear a muslin alb, a white tunic with sleeves that covers the body from neck to ankles.

The priest wears an alb as well. Over it, the priest wears a stole, a narrow band of colored fabric in the color of the season of the church year.

At the Holy Eucharist, the second part of the Sunday service, the priest who presides at the altar wears a chasuble, a circular garment that envelops the body, over the alb. Like the stole, this garment is in the color of season of the church year.

The wearing of vestments signifies that what happens in a church service is unusual and godly, something different from the world of ordinary experience. However, some lay leaders, including those who read scripture and prayers, wear ordinary clothes and sit in the pews with the congregation. These people remind us that everything we do must simultaneously be connected with the world we live in on a daily basis. While the consciousness of heaven is meant to lift us out of this world, it is not escapism, but renewal for the life God has given us to lead.

The Episcopal Church observes the traditional Christian calendar in which we move through the life of Christ in the course of a year. The church year begins with Advent, the season where we prepare for the birth of Christ, begins on the Sunday closest to November 30. Christmas itself lasts 12 days, after which we celebrate the Epiphany (January 6) in which the light of Christ breaks out into the world.

Lent, the forty days of penitential preparation for Easter, begins on Ash Wednesday. The most deeply spiritual services of the year take place during the week before Easter, Holy Week, in which we commemorate the last days of the life of Christ culminating in his resurrection on Easter Sunday. During the Easter season, we focus particularly on the experiences of the risen Christ in the early Church, culminating in Pentecost, 50 days after Easter, when the disciples are filled by the Holy Spirit and sent into the world.

During all of these seasons, the Bible readings are selected from the Revised Common Lectionary for their relevance to the events being commemorated. During the rest of the year in the long season after Pentecost, the New Testament is read sequentially from Sunday to Sunday so the congregation can experience the total teaching and experience of Christ and of the apostle Paul and other authors of New Testament letters. Old Testament lessons are selected to correspond with the theme of the day’s Gospel.