Sunday Gatherings

Sunday gatherings are 10:00am
Upstairs, 146 Devonport Road (above Cash Convertors) 
Tauranga

Sunday Gathering

Our Sunday gathering at St Luke’s is championed as an important spiritual discipline in our journey as disciples of Christ - we gather together regularly as a local expression of the Church in the world.  Though important, we do keep our Sunday gathering pretty down-to-earth.  We're low-tech rather than high-tech, and participatory rather than performance orientated.  Our gathering is an hour-and-a-half with coffee and cake afterwards.  You don’t have to dress up and you don't have to dress down, whatever you feel comfortable wearing when you are hanging with friends or grabbing a coffee at a café works at St Luke's - jackets in winter and singlets in summer!  Sundays at St Luke's are about community, worship, Scripture, communion and mystery. 

Community
We see St Luke's as a community that you are a part of rather than an event that you attend.  Church is about relationships - with God and with one another.  While it can take time to feel comfortable and build friendships, we hope that at St Luke's you would feel warmly welcome from day one.  Appreciating the importance of relational connectivity in a church we don't always start on the microphone at 10:00am sharp.  We see church as a verb, an action word, and want to give plenty of time for people to 'church one another', i.e. love one another, care for one another, pray for one another, bear one another's burdens, and so forth.  As a healthy habit we encourage everyone to talk to one person new to them each Sunday.  

When it comes to community, we've also worked hard to ensure that we're about as family friendly as we can be.  If you have babies or children you’ll be pleased to know we’ve set things up to make our St Luke’s gatherings meaningful for the whole family.  We have space for parents with babies that are feeding or that are feeling a bit restless - including live video and audio of the main gathering.  We have a number of creche options available for little ones and a great kid's church happening too. You can find out more about creche, kid's church and intermediate aged youth here. 

Worship
In Paul's letter to the Christians of Rome he encourages them, in view of God's mercy, "to offer their bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God," noting that, "this is true and proper worship."  They are not to be conformed "to the patterns of the world but are to be transformed by the renewing of their minds."  This isn't always easy though, living sacrifices have a tendency to wander all over the place.  Further, what makes it hard is that faithfulness and fidelity to God, to the Way of Jesus, is an issue of the heart, an issue to do with the loves and the longings of our lives.  We live though, in a world where the loves and longings of our heart are constantly pulled in conflicting directions all at once. Advertising, social media, dreams of independence and financial freedom, special diets, the allure of far-flung holidays, magazine articles promising exotic sex - a thousand different voices seek to shape our loves and longings.  All of them with their own lyric and melody, catch phrases, jingles, smells & bells, bright lights, rewards and salvation promises.

In light of this, worship is one of the ways that we recalibrate the loves and longings of our heart towards God.  In worship we cultivate, order, steward, preserve, filter and train our loves.  It is an essential part of Christian discipleship.  In the life of St Luke's worship serves to interrupt the status quo of our lives.  Worship serves as an imagination station rightly shaping the loves and longings of our heart, calling us always deeper into the life of Christ as we worship and honour Jesus.  In worship we are restored, we are reformed and we are re-storied.  We experience an internal recalibration as we open our hearts to the heart of God.  Lyric and melody shapes and forms us.  Lyric engaging the mind and melody engaging the body with worship a fully embodied process of adoration and formation.  It's with this in mind that we engage in worship (in the sense of singing) at St Luke's. Three out of four Sundays we sing together allowing lyric and melody to shape our love towards Christ. It is one of the ways via which we experience transformation and the renewing of our minds.  Worshiping well isn't about singing well, it is about hearts that are wide open to God.  If you don’t know the songs you can just relax and enjoy what’s going on. About one gathering in four we keep the instruments packed away and use other mediums to reflect on what God’s doing in our lives or community.  These are most often interactive in some way or another.  Again you never have to participate more than you’re comfortable with and you are always welcome to just sit back and enjoy.

Scripture
In their book, "Who Needs Theology?", Stanley Grenz and Roger Olson note the danger of "Christianity becoming a mere 'folk religion,' relegated to realms of sheer subjectivity and emptied of public credibility, unless Christians and ministers catch a vision for an intellectually satisfying Christian belief system."  Rightly so, they deem 'folk theology' as an inadequate resting place for most Christians.  "It encourages gullibility, vicarious spirituality and simplistic answers to difficult questions that arise from being followers of Jesus Christ in a largely secular world. It stunts growth and blunts the influence of Christianity in the world."  We're mindful of this at St Luke's and are determined each time we gather that our engagement with Scripture will be life-giving, faith-stirring, heart-warming and intellectually satisfying.  This need not result in sermons that are dry, overly academic, and disconnected from every day life.  In fact, it should result in the opposite - lively explorations of God's word, faithful interpretations of Scripture, and a clear and compelling sense of the Bible's significance in our lives.  Good preaching will bring Scripture alive in a way that leaves hearts 'strangely stirred' as it focuses on the wonder of that which God was and is doing in Christ for the sake of the world. 

Communion
At St Luke’s we celebrate communion almost weekly.  This is the 'high-point' of our Sunday gatherings as it is at the Lord's Table that we receive the love, grace, mercy and forgiveness of Christ.  In the bread and wine of communion we remember Christ's body broken and blood shed on the cross in order that humanity might know the salvation of God.  Recognising the sacramental nature of communion, where divine grace is imparted, we also celebrate that it is the resurrected Christ who is present to us and hosts us at His table - every Sunday is a resurrection celebration and every communion a moment of grace. You can read more about communion at St Luke's here. 

Mystery
In the Gospel of Matthew we hear this declaration from Jesus; "For where two or three gather together as my followers, I am there among them." One of the mysteries inherent to our gathering together as a local church community is the conviction that when we do so, Christ is present to us.  We don't take this for granted and are deeply appreciative of this wonderful mystery.  It gives us great confidence that whether in the fellowship of community, the delight of worship, the preaching of Scripture, or the sacrament of communion, that Christ through the Holy Spirit is working in people's lives.  God is faithful to meet each of us exactly where we are at.  Some Sundays that may be in the preaching, while others in a cup of tea and a conversation.  On some occasions it may be in the bread and wine of communion, though the next Sunday it is perhaps in the worship that one encounters Christ in a mysterious and life-giving way.  This isn't to say that every Sunday is a guarantee of one's own personal epiphany, but it is to say that the discipline of gathering regularly in a local church context is transformative.  Being in church regularly will change your life, four out of five Sundays, forty in fifty-two - its a healthy habit and rule of life. 

We look forward to seeing you at one of our gatherings.