We tend to be serious about God, but casual in style. The majority of people at Westchester Chapel feel most comfortable dressed casually but there are some who dress up as well. All are welcome!
We would probably be considered a multi-cultual congregation. We have people from Wisconsin...India and Ireland, from Upstate New York to the Caribbean, from Scarsdale to the Bronx. At one point we had people who had lived in about 20 different nations.The people at Westchester Chapel work in banking and at coffee shops, in the theatre industry and at bakeries, some run businesses and some are just very busy making ends meet. They are nurses, social workers, and stay-at-home-mothers...basically, they look like the people we see in the Metro New York Area every day!
Absolutely! It's a bit over a mile to walk from the Metro-North train station, but there's always a long line of cabs. Click here for directions by train followed by walking.
Sure! Every Sunday from 9:30am (for those in the Morning Bible Study: check the home page for our schedule) until 12:30pm we offer a loving environment of teaching and nurture designed to point your child to God's loving grace!
It is very important to us! We want it to remain special, so we focus on it once a month: on the last Sunday. One of our Pastors leads us with scripture, a teaching and the taking of elements that represent the body and blood of Jesus.
Music
is really big in this church, but not in the way you might expect. The
musical portion of our worship service is not intended as a performance.
Rather, we seek to create an environment through which God can move and
we can perceive His presence. That's why we invite the full
participation of everybody present, why we draw our repertoire from a
wide variety of musical traditions, why we link songs together into
medleys, and why we sometimes sing songs over and over again. We're
aiming to get beyond the surface of the music to meet with God.
Unlike
the church experiences many of us grew up with, Westchester Chapel
views worship as participatory. It wasn't intended by God to bore us,
but just the opposite, to refresh and bring us new life. It is not just
for the Pastor or leadership either. Worship is to be experienced by
everyone. People at our worship services, are given the opportunity to
clap, kneel and sing, but there is never any pressure to conform to any
specific expression of worship. Sometimes silence is the best way to
experience God's presence, sometimes kneeling, sometimes expressing
great joy.
God loves variety, so our worship
services also include the use of the arts as found in popular culture.
To help people better connect with the day's teaching, we sometimes
feature an evocative art piece from various media, such as movies and
video, popular and classic music, literature, the visual arts, live
dance and theatre. Although our worship usually has a contemporary feel,
the use of music and the arts in worship at Westchester Chapel is
deliberately eclectic to reflect the God who is described in the Bible
as one who dwells in the midst of worshipers from every culture, every
language and every time in history.
The
sermon is always taken directly from the Bible and great effort goes
into communicating God's message in a down-to-earth way that will have
relevance on Monday morning. Our goal is to make the Bible come alive
and to be understood so clearly that it can impact our lives as God
intended.
