I have been deeply influenced by Robert Webber’s thought as it trickled into my own thought through third parties and articles concerning Robert Webber and the Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future. Yet I had never read one of his books in its entirety, so over the summer I read Ancient-Future Worship, the final volume in Webber’s Ancient-Future series.
Ancient-Future Worship is written on the following premise: the Evangelical worship service is not modeled around recreating, and thus reentering God’s story. Instead, the Evangelical worship service has been used to elicit an emotional response and to dispense information to the congregation. In the typical Evangelical worship service the congregation is passive: sitting or standing as a band, pastor, and PowerPoint dictate their spiritual response.
Webber yearns for the worship service to be about the retelling and re-enactment of God’s story, because God’s narrative is truth, and we should worship in spirit and in truth. The worship service should not be modeled around emotional or ecstatic responses to God. Webber counters with a more liturgical and purposeful definition of worship as action: “worship does God’s story.” This is a direct call to the Evangelical church to create worship services that do God’s story.What then is God’s story? It is the remembrance of the past and a hopeful look toward the future. It is entering into the mystery of God’s work in this world from the Scriptures, from the saints, and from our own lives. It is re-entering God’s story through baptism and communion. It is using prayer as a corporate entrance into God’s story. As Webber writes,
The first and, I believe, most fundamental reason why worship is not seen as prayer is the failure to grasp that corporate prayer arises from the story of God. We think of corporate prayer as arising within ourselves. Yet the story of God…is the story of the world and of human existence. Worship prays this story…. A second reason why worship is not seen as the prayer of God’s people for the world is because worship has been turned into a program….Consequently, the nature or worship has shifted from corporate prayer to a platform of presentational performance. Worship, instead of being a rehearsal of God’s saving actions in the world and for the world, is exchanged for making people feel comfortable, happy, and affirmed. Worship, no longer the public prayer of God’s people, becomes a private and individual experience. (150-1)
This paradigm of worship permeates Webber’s book and makes it a thrilling, and deeply convicting read.
Ancient-Future Worship
by Robert Webber
BakerBooks
$10.19 (Amazon)