Worship Celebration Every Sunday @ 10:30am

The United Church of Christ at Valley Forge has a strong spirit of celebration that is evident in our Sunday worship service. Our worship service is a time for gathering as God’s family to celebrate God’s presence through scripture readings, expressive, heartfelt preaching, beautiful music, prayer, meditation, and the opportunity to share joys and concerns with each other.

We participate in our faith through reading scripture, lighting the Christ candle, serving communion, leading Children’s Sharing Time, and offering our singing voices and our musical instruments in praise.

We are currently holding a hybrid form of worship with celebrating both in person in the sanctuary (masks optional) and inviting viewers to join online either through Zoom (link sent each week via e-mail).

Our sanctuary, office, fellowship hall, and classrooms are wheelchair accessible.

Uplifting our voices to God

During worship, our music ministry provides a beautiful and spiritual backdrop to the scripture readings, sermons, and prayers. Opportunities for praise and reflection are found in the variety of traditional and contemporary hymns, varied instrumental accompaniments and adult choir.

The choir is always welcoming new members and new ideas of sharing musical gifts in worship. Please feel free to contact our church office if you are interested in joining our music ministry.

Over the decades our church has a tradition of a strong music ministry under the direction of wonderful musicians, from Elaine Langerhans, to Doug and Joan Johnson, to Adriana Samargia, who led us through a move to virtual services during the early days of the pandemic (with support from the amazing pianist Robert Prester!). We have been blessed to have Jo Ellen Hippenstiel serve as an interim director of music twice and we are now able to benefit from the talents and spirit-led direction of Gail Craven.

A worship service for everyone

One of the priorities our congregation has been working on in recent years is teaching children/youth about worship and offering them opportunities to worship. To move in this direction of helping our children and youth mature into adult disciples, the worship committee, all-ages worship team, and staff members have been looking at how our current worship service could be more welcoming of youth/children. Over the past years we have made some small changes to the weekly worship service (i.e. shaker instruments for children who may be too young to read song lyrics) and scheduled quarterly intergenerational services during our school year when children/youth joined us for the entire worship service (younger children, birth-K, were still welcomed in the Nursery).

Since 2018 we have incorporated a monthly All-Ages Worship service schedule. This will help us try more things, allow more people to experience this worship service, and solicit more feedback that will help us better live into our UCCVF priority.

These services are intended to be a “regular Sunday worship” that better include and integrate our young people. We have changed some elements, we have left other elements as they typically are. We have been and will continue to evaluate this experience and continue to pray and reflect about next steps to help us be a more fully inclusive community of adults, children, and youth so that we can better form disciples and grow as disciples of Christ who will multiply God’s healing life in the world.