Lay participation is encouraged in most services with lay people reading the Scripture, leading prayers, welcoming, distributing the communion elements, collecting the offering, and singing or playing in music groups and choirs. Most churches make an effort to include children with a childrens talk early in the service, childrens choirs, and special places for families to sit in the church with carpet and a place to play. Many churches have Sunday School during church, but a growing number of churches are making efforts to include children in the whole service rather than have them in Sunday School. The Uniting Church contains a wide variety of different spiritualities and encourages flexibility in its worship style. Services of worship in the Uniting Church range from a formal, traditional style of services to very relaxed and informal.
Most services are somewhere in between.
Uniting in Worship , the worship resource book of the Uniting Church, offers a basic structure for services, as well as a variety of resources, and within that structure churches are encouraged to develop services to reflect the needs of their local community. So people in rural areas will use images and structures that reflect the rural environment they worship in, while city dwellers do likewise. The use of Uniting in Worship is not compulsory. Multicultural congregations use their own language as well as music and symbols from their country of origin in worship thus transforming the Anglo-Celtic service that most Uniting Churches are familiar with. The reading of Scripture is an important of the public and private piety of many members of the Uniting Church and reflects our reformed and evangelical heritage.