Worship with us for Epiphany

Our Epiphany liturgy will be held online on Saturday 6th January 2024, starting at 7:00pm Melbourne time. The Feast of the Epiphany is the close of the Christmas Season, and is a joyous liturgy with carol singing, scripture readings, and the celebration of the Lord’s Table. BYO festive food and bubbly beverages for the social time afterwards!

We are serious about our online liturgies being fully participatory worship in genuine community gatherings. If what you are looking for online is a polished, professional, high-tech presentation of other people worshipping that you can watch at your leisure like a television show, you will have to look elsewhere. But if what you are looking for is the experience of being part of an intimate community who gather online to offer a gift of worship to God that is truly communal and participatory, as well as steeped in the rich spiritual traditions of Christian liturgy and sacraments, then you have probably come to the right place.

A few things to know before you enter the Cyber Chapel

The Epiphany Liturgy of Word and Table is celebrated in a style we call bapto-catholic, or ancient-future worship, but you don’t have to know what that means to enjoy it! It includes spoken and sung prayers, Bible readings, Christmas carols, preaching, prayerful silence, and a celebration of the Lord’s Table. We believe that the risen Jesus offers himself freely to everyone in the bread and wine that we share at his Table, so if you are ready to receive him in that way, please come prepared with a piece of bread, and a cup or glass of wine or water. It is also perfectly okay to abstain.

You will see that most of the regular participants have parts of the liturgy that they lead, but this is not expected of visitors or first-timers (unless previously arranged), so no need to try to work out when it is supposed to be your turn!

We are committed to doing everything we can to ensure that our Cyber Chapel is a safe environment for everyone present, and for that reason, visitors who are not yet known to us will have their microphones muted during the liturgy and will not be able send private chat messages to other individual participants.

At the end of the liturgy, we do a few rounds of breaking into small groups for chat. Many will probably partake of some festive food and bubbly beverages as they chat (BYO of course). If you are able to stay and chat, that would be great. If you are not yet known to us, the first round will place you with someone (possibly the pastor) who is able to welcome you properly, and answer any questions you might have.

Please watch the following short video for our guidelines and recommendations on the best simple settings and screen layout options to use for a full experience of the liturgy. If you are joining from a phone or a tablet device, some of these options will not be available to you, but we are sure you will still find it to be a rich experience.

The next video is a recording of our last Epiphany liturgy, in case you want to see a bit more of what goes on before deciding whether to visit. Of course, watching the recording is not like participating in the real thing. Since it is no longer live, it is now reduced to clunky amateurish TV worship. If you want to experience the real thing, you’ll have to join us in the Cyber Chapel in real time. In the recording, the times of silence have been trimmed considerably, and we’ve edited out a part where, after the declaration of forgiveness, the assurance of forgiveness is declared personally to each attendee in turn (special when you’re there, but a bit tedious on replay!), but everything else is as it happened.

If you have any questions about our online liturgies, or about anything else, please use the contact form below and we’ll respond as soon as we can. Don’t forget to hit the “Send” button after typing your message.