Not the style. The words. The lines people lean into at 10a on a Sunday morning in a charter school gym when life is hard and they showed up anyway.
There’s a woman in our church who told me she hadn’t been inside a church in eleven years before she walked through our doors. Not because she stopped believing. Because she stopped feeling like she belonged. The music felt foreign. The culture felt exclusive. She didn’t know the unspoken rules. So she stopped going.
She came back because a neighbor invited her. She stayed because of what she heard when we sang.
If you’ve been searching for a contemporary worship service in Arvada, CO, or a non-traditional church near Wheat Ridge, Westminster, or the Five Parks area, this is worth reading before you visit anywhere. Because how a church worships tells you more about what it actually believes than almost anything else.
What Is a Contemporary Worship Service?
The word “contemporary” gets thrown around a lot. Here’s what it actually means.
Contemporary worship is music written by artists in the last decade, arranged and produced with the sounds of this era. Keys, guitars, drums, bass. Vocals up front. Melodies that feel familiar, not like something from 1930. When you walk into a contemporary worship service in Arvada on a Sunday morning, you’re not walking into a museum. You’re walking into a room full of people singing songs that were written by people who are alive right now, processing the same world you are.
But it’s bigger than instrumentation. Every new worship song is evidence that the gospel is still working. The Psalmist said it over and over: sing a new song to the Lord. New songs mean God is still speaking. Still moving. Still inspiring people to write from an overflow of their own time with Him. If the church only sang songs from the past, you’d start to wonder if the faith was still alive.
Contemporary worship is how we know it is.
That said, contemporary is not a synonym for shallow. Some of the most theologically dense, doctrinally rich songs being written right now are coming out of the contemporary worship space. What we sing at Valor is not chosen because it sounds good, though we care about that. It’s chosen because the words are worth singing. Because you should be able to take what you sang on Sunday and carry it into Tuesday when things fall apart.
The Part Most Churches Get Wrong
Here’s something we believe at Valor that shapes everything we do.
Every practice comes from a conviction, which produces a commitment, which shows up as conduct. Conviction is the most important. Conduct is the least.
Contemporary worship is conduct. It’s the form, not the foundation.
Our conviction is that we exist to glorify God in everything we do. Our commitment is to sing songs of worship and praise, together as a church, every time we gather. Our conduct is contemporary worship. Another church might share the exact same conviction and commitment and express it through a choir and orchestra, or acoustic-only sets, or a cappella singing. That’s not wrong. That’s just a different conduct.
You choose a church over conviction and commitment. You hold loosely to conduct.
A lot of churches have split over this. People fought over the band or the hymnal, thinking they were defending something essential when they were actually arguing about the least important part of the framework. Worship wars, they call them. And they have done real damage to real churches and real people who were just trying to find a place to belong.
We want to be a church that’s clear on what actually matters. And what matters is not the instruments. It’s the God we’re singing to, and whether we actually believe what we’re singing when we sing it.
What to Expect at a Modern Worship Service at Valor
When you walk in on Sunday, here’s what you’ll find.
Three to four songs through the service, all of them Christ-centered and theologically grounded. Some you may have heard before. Some you won’t. The goal for every single one is that it leads you to actually sing, not watch. We pray every week that the manifest presence of God would fill that room, because if our worship doesn’t lead you to an experience with God, we’ve failed. Doesn’t matter how tight the band sounds.
We lead with excellence. But never to the point of performance. You came to worship, not to be performed at. That’s the commitment we make every Sunday.
We also pray together. There will be moments where the music drops to just a soft pad underneath and the room gets quiet. We believe that might be the only silence you’ve had all week. Most people in NW Arvada are running hard. Careers, kids, mortgages, schedules that never slow down. We don’t rush past the quiet. We lean into it. We also have people in the back who will pray with you personally if you want that.
What we’re trying to build is a room that feels full of the Spirit, not a room that feels like a show.
Valor is open to everyone. If you grew up in church and drifted, if you never felt at home in a traditional setting, if you’re somewhere in between and not even sure what you believe yet, you have a seat here. We’re not trying to impress you. We’re trying to introduce you to God, or reintroduce you, depending on where you’ve been.
Why the Songs We Choose Actually Matter
We don’t pick songs to fill time between announcements and the sermon. We pick songs because we believe corporate worship is one of the most formative things a church does together.
What you sing week after week shapes what you believe. The theology of a church lives in its music as much as it lives in its pulpit. And if you’re singing vague, feeling-driven, lyrically empty songs every Sunday, you will eventually have a vague, feeling-driven, lyrically empty faith. That is not what we’re building at Valor.
We are building a church with resilient faith. Faith that holds when life gets hard. Faith that has something to say when the diagnosis comes back bad, when the marriage is in trouble, when the thing you were counting on falls through. The songs we choose are chosen because they have that kind of weight. They are declarations, not just feelings. Theology set to music.
That’s a longer way of saying: we take this seriously. And we think you should too.
What Are We Singing at Valor
Here’s what we’ve been singing this year, and why it keeps earning its place.
I Speak Jesus. “I speak the name of Jesus over fear.” We don’t do performance worship at Valor. We do declaration worship. There’s a difference. This song is a weapon and our people know how to use it.
Praise. “Praise is what I do when I’m going through.” That line was written for the person who drove to Excel Academy half-broken and still walked through the door. Praise is not what you do when things are good. It’s what you do when they’re not. This song reframes the whole thing.
Firm Foundation (He Won’t). We sang this one through a season when Valor’s future was genuinely unclear. Nineteen closed doors. No building. No certainty. It was not a nice sentiment. It was a declaration with our backs against the wall. That’s what this song is for.
King of Kings. Creation. Fall. Cross. Resurrection. The whole gospel in one song. We never get tired of the big story. This one tells it every time, and every time it lands.
You’ve Already Won. “Whatever I face, you’ve already won.” We have people in our room who are brand new to this. Still figuring out what faith looks like in real life. This song gives them somewhere to stand when the outcome is still unclear. That’s not a small thing.
Jehovah. The name is the declaration. That’s the whole song. We are not interested in a version of God that’s been made small and manageable. This one refuses to do that. It just keeps saying the name. And sometimes that’s enough.
Living Hope. “Hallelujah, praise the One who set me free.” I think about specific people when we sing this one. Marriages that got rebuilt. People who walked in with nothing and found something real. Sobriety anniversaries nobody outside this church knows about. This is their song.
Abide. Slower. More tender. “I am the vine, you are the branches.” In a neighborhood where everyone is busy and performing and proving something, this one calls you back to the simplest thing. Stay connected. That’s it. That’s the whole Christian life. This song preaches that without saying it.
Battle Belongs. “When I fight I’ll fight on my knees.” We are not a passive church. But we know where the real fight happens. This song reorients everything. It reminds you that the battle you’re in is not primarily a battle of strategy or effort. It’s a battle of posture.
Great Are You Lord. “It’s your breath in our lungs.” Gratitude for the most basic thing. That you woke up. That God put air in you this morning. Sometimes the simplest songs are the truest ones. This one never gets old.
These are not just songs we like. They are the theology we are building into the bones of this church. Declaration over fear. Praise as a choice, not a feeling. A firm foundation when everything shakes. Hope that does not depend on circumstances.
If you want to know what a church actually believes, listen to what it sings when nobody’s watching.
We’re Not Just a Contemporary Church. We’re a Church That’s Building Something.
Valor launched in February 2022. We meet in a charter school gym in NW Arvada. We don’t have a permanent building yet. We set up and tear down every single Sunday.
And honestly, that shapes the way we worship.
There’s something about a room you had to build before you could use it that keeps you from taking it for granted. Nobody drifts in on autopilot. Everyone who’s there chose to be there. And when those people sing together, it means something different than it would in a room where the chairs were already waiting.
We’re a contemporary church in Arvada for the people who are done drifting. For the families in Five Parks and Candelas who want something real for their kids. For the person who’s never tried church before and is tired of the version they’ve seen on TV. For the one who used to believe and lost the thread somewhere and wants to find it again.
That’s who we’re singing for on Sunday mornings.
Contemporary Sunday Worship Service in Arvada, Colorado
Valor Church holds its modern worship service every other Sunday at 10a at Excel Academy Charter School, 11500 W 84th Ave, Arvada, CO 80003. We’re in the Five Parks and Candelas area of NW Arvada, just minutes from Wheat Ridge and Westminster. Kids Ministry is available and you can check your kids in as soon as you walk in.
Plan Your First Visit
We’d love to have you this Sunday.
More than our service, we are a relational church. We are more concerned about your soul and how you are growing in your faith than your song preferences. A month from now, you won’t remember what we sang. You will remember how you felt when you walked in and when you left. You’ll remember if someone learned your name. You’ll remember if your kids came home with something real.
You’ll forget if the guitar was too loud or if we sang a song you don’t really care for. But you’ll remember that someone remembered your name. You’ll remember that it felt like something you’d been looking for.
That’s what we’re building in NW Arvada. Not a concert. A church.
Come find out what we’re about at valor.church.