Old Mariners’ Church, enriched by its spiritual association and historic traditions, welcomes you. Whatever your church, whatever your faith, whatever your nation, we welcome you to this Church which serves as a “House of Prayer for All People.”
Worshippers are encouraged to observe their personal Churchmanship practices; Mariners’ tradition is to stand to sing, sit to listen, and kneel to pray.
Ceremony is not essential to the Gospel, but it is a help in doing “all things decently and in order.”
In our formal worship, we use the beauty of the outward forms of ritual, music, language, vestments, symbols and ceremonial — parts of God’s creation — as well as the joyous sincerity of contrite and open hearts to receive the Word of God, to distribute the Sacraments, and to give Praise to God for our Salvation and all other blessings.
“There remains to the church only one unique and peculiar responsibility: the conduct of public worship. If the church does nothing other than to keep open a house, symbolic of the homeland of the soul, where in season and out women and men, girls and boys come to reenact the memory and vision of who they are, it will have rendered society and each of us a service of unmeasurable value. So long as the church bids us to participate in the liturgies of the Christian faith community it need not question its place, mission or influence in the world.” (John Westerhoff)