Worshipping “outside the box” best describes what Orangeburg’s Church of the Redeemer will do weekly beginning Sunday.<\/p>\n
The church will attempt to reach out to newcomers and parish members with a contemporary service that will incorporate prayer, scriptural readings and praise music to worship the Lord. The service, titled “Vesper Light: A Celebration of Praise, Prayer and Worship,” will take place at 6 p.m. every Sunday in the church’s Parish Hall.<\/p>\n
“Church of the Redeemer has always been a pretty traditional Episcopal church,” said the Rev. Dr. Frank Larisey, Church of the Redeemer’s rector. He said the church’s worship services resemble the strict liturgy of the Catholic Church while its theology is a combination of both Catholicism and Protestantism. “Our worship has always been traditional, old-fashioned, using Elizabethan, or Shakespearean, English.”<\/p>\n
Larisey, who has served at the church for three years, said the new alternative services will be based in traditions older than those influencing the church’s Sunday morning services. He said the basis for the evening services can be traced to early Christians and found on page 400 in the Episcopal Church’s “Book of Common Prayer,” under the entry titled “An Order for Celebrating the Holy Eucharist.”<\/p>\n
“They didn’t have anything that was written down,” Larisey said of the early church. “They had the Old Testament, the Psalms, old letters of Paul, the Gospel according to Matthew … and they probably didn’t have all of them — they had some of them. (But) they came together to praise God. They just praised him. They had songs, hymns and spiritual songs … reading from letters … preached, and then they prayed. … Then they shared the Last Supper … and before they left, they prayed for one another’s spiritual needs.<\/p>\n