Worship prayer does God’s history in this world using the language that is particular and peculiar to the Christian story. The language of prayer is the language of creation, fall, covenant, Passover, tabernacle, prophetic utterance, incarnation, death, resurrection, church, baptism, Eucharist, eschaton. These words . . . are not generic. They are the specific words...Read More
In the early church the public worship of the church was a prayer of praise and thanksgiving directed not to the people but to God. Seeing worship as prayer is a paradigm shift from the current presentational notion of worship. . . . Worship as prayer shapes who we are. -Robert E. Webber, The Divine...Read More
Many [people] think worship arises from inside themselves. Worship, like spirituality, springs forth from the story of God. Worship does God’s story. It proclaims God’s story in the reading and preaching of the Word; in prayer, the church prays for the world God has reclaimed; in the Eucharist, the church ascends into the heavens and...Read More
Worship needs both truth and passion. Truth without passion is dry. Passion without truth is empty. Where do we go to find both truth and passion? I suggest recovering worship as the proclamation and enactment of God’s story. -Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2006),...Read More
Biblical worship tells and enacts [God’s] story. Narcissistic worship, instead, names God as an object to whom we offer honor, praise, and homage. Narcissistic worship is situated in the worshiper, not in the action of God that the worshiper remembers through Word and table. -Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life...Read More
If God is the object of worship, then worship must proceed from me, the subject, to God, who is the object. . . . If God is understood, however, as the personal God who acts as subject in the world and in worship rather that the remote God who sits in the heavens, then worship...Read More
Me-oriented worship is the result of a culturally driven worship. When worship is situated in the culture and not in the story of God, worship becomes focused on the self. It becomes narcissistic. . . . Much of our worship has shifted from a focus on God and God’s story to a focus on me...Read More
The church needs to be realigned to the intent of Christ, but it does not need to be reinvented. Reinventing the church is what we do when we allow the culture to shape the church. . . . Obviously the church must speak to the culture. It only speaks authentically and with integrity, however, when...Read More
Consumers want programs. . . . But nowhere in the Epistles do you find the apostolic writers urging the church to develop programs. Instead all the teaching is about a way of life, and that way of life is taught and caught in the church as it sees itself as the continuation of God’s story...Read More
The church is to be a countercultural community. . . . God has raised up a people in a fallen culture to be a showcase of his desire for humanity—a people living in union with his purposes and in praise of his glory. . . . The church is to live out the new humanity...Read More
There is a need to rediscover the very nature of the church as the continuation of the presence of God in the world. Reclaiming the incarnate nature of the church will shift us away from the business model of the church and help us focus on the church as the continuation of God’s vision for...Read More
I urge us all to stop looking at ourselves for the nourishment of our own spirituality and turn to the church and its worship to disclose God’s embrace and thus nourish our spirituality. The church, by its very existence, is the life of God’s embrace, and worship, when properly understood, is the continual experience of...Read More
