The Apostles' Creed

Declaring what we believe in the words of a creed is an important part of many worship services. It helps us express our theology and ties us to believers around the world and across the ages. When we recite something often enough, though, the words simply roll off our tongues and we don’t think about what we’re saying.

So when we were given the opportunity to plan part of a worship service, we decided to try to express the Apostles’ Creed in a new way. We wanted the people in our church to hear it with fresh ears in a way that would help all of us think about what we were saying.

Because we wanted to use the members of our youth group to present the creed, we wrote a dramatic reading for eight people. You could easily reduce the number of readers by reassigning lines.

We wanted to add words of explanation to the creed, but rather than making them up we decided to draw them from reliable sources—after all, we’re still in high school and we wanted to get it right. So most of the words that are not directly from the Apostles’ Creed are adapted from the Belgic Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism.

Readers 1, 4, 5, 2, say “he rose” overlapping each-other, until finally