**Author:** [[3. Resources/Authors/Khalia J. Williams, Mark A. Lamport (eds.)|Khalia J. Williams, Mark A. Lamport (eds.)]] # Book Overview ![[Theological Foundations of Worship Visual.excalidraw]] ## About the Editors and Contributors Khalia J. Williams is a worship scholar and seminary administrator who leads the worship life of a theological institution. Mark A. Lamport is a co-editor of the Worship Foundations series. Together they assembled seventeen contributors from across the theological spectrum -- Orthodox, Catholic, Anglican, mainline Protestant, evangelical, and Pentecostal traditions. The contributor list reads like a directory of senior and emerging scholars in biblical studies, systematic theology, historical theology, and liturgical studies: Andrew E. Hill (Wheaton College), Pheme Perkins (Boston College), W. David O. Taylor (Fuller Seminary), Don E. Saliers (Emory), Bruce T. Morrill (Vanderbilt), Lizette Larson-Miller (Huron University College), Teresa Berger (Yale), and Peter C. Phan (Georgetown), among others. The book also features a series introduction by Nicholas Wolterstorff and an introduction by N. T. Wright. ## Central Thesis Christians tend to experience worship more than think about it. This book argues that the gap between worship practice and theological reflection is the central problem in contemporary Christian worship. Believers treasure comfort with familiar patterns, and clergy often plan worship without an intentional connection between what they profess to believe and what they actually do in corporate gathering. The editors identify three motivating concerns: (1) worship is experienced more than examined, (2) God is worthy of worship, and this task forms the church's identity, and (3) a prevailing misconception reduces worship to music. The book's response is to bridge the God studied by theologians and the God worshiped by churchgoers, offering a comprehensive treatment across biblical, systematic, historical, and practical theology. The organizing principle is that worship and theology exist in a dialectical relationship -- lex orandi, lex credendi -- where prayer shapes belief and belief shapes prayer, and this relationship must be intentionally maintained rather than left to drift. ## Why This Book Matters Most introductory worship textbooks organize around themes like prayer, music, sacraments, and the liturgical calendar. This structure makes sense for students from High Church traditions but leaves evangelical and free-church students approaching worship with different questions. This book takes a different approach: it organizes around theological doctrines (creation, Christology, pneumatology, eschatology, ecclesiology) and cultural realities (time, ecology, secularization, world religions), asking how each doctrine shapes and is shaped by worship practice. The result is a resource that's accessible across traditions while maintaining theological depth. Published in 2021, it addresses contemporary pressures -- the reduction of worship to entertainment, the drift toward individualism, the ecological crisis, secularization, and religious pluralism -- that most worship textbooks published before the 2010s don't fully engage. For worship leaders, pastors, and students, this book is a corrective to the tendency to plan worship pragmatically without theological grounding. --- # Chapter Summaries ## Preface (Khalia J. Williams and Mark A. Lamport) The preface frames the book around three motivating concepts. First, Christians experience worship more than think about it -- they resist contemplation of a coherent theology of worship. Second, God is worthy of worship, and this act induces the church's identity; as Schmemann puts it, worship is the public act that actualizes the nature of the church as the body of Christ. Third, a prevailing misconception equates worship with music. The editors trace this misconception through evangelical revival history: as conversion became less central and marketing gained control, music became the primary tool for drawing people to church. The preface introduces the Worship Foundations series as an attempt to reconcile the God studied by theologians with the God worshiped on Sunday, arguing that worship is one of the central functions of the church and demands renewed theological awareness. ## Series Introduction (Nicholas Wolterstorff) Wolterstorff frames worship as a form of mutual address between God and God's people. God speaks and listens; we speak and listen. This dialogical structure is not optional or incidental but constitutive of what Christian worship is. Wolterstorff worries that contemporary liturgies strip out essential elements -- confession, intercession, Scripture readings, a sense of God's majesty -- and argues that biblical and theological doctrines have been displaced by therapeutic, relational, or managerial knowledge drawn from popular culture rather than Scripture. ## Introduction (N. T. Wright) Wright grounds worship in the biblical narrative of creation, fall, Israel, and new creation. Worship isn't a separate religious activity but the proper human response to God's creative and redemptive work. Wright emphasizes that in the New Testament, worship is about the whole of life oriented toward God, not just what happens in a church building. He connects worship to the temple theology of the Hebrew Bible, arguing that the early Christians understood themselves as the new temple -- the place where heaven and earth overlap -- and that worship is the activity of people who inhabit that overlap. ## Chapter 1: Old Testament and Worship (Andrew E. Hill) Hill surveys worship in the Hebrew Bible across its major periods: patriarchal, Mosaic, monarchic, exilic, and postexilic. The chapter traces how Israel's worship developed from informal family altars to the centralized temple cult, showing that worship was always communal, embodied, and structured around encounter with a holy God. Key themes include the role of sacrifice, the significance of sacred space (tabernacle, temple), the liturgical calendar, and the tension between authentic and inauthentic worship that the prophets repeatedly address. Hill demonstrates that Old Testament worship was never purely interior or individual -- it involved the body, the community, and the material world. ## Chapter 2: New Testament and Worship (Pheme Perkins) Perkins examines worship in the New Testament, showing how early Christian communities adapted Jewish worship practices while developing distinctly Christian forms. The chapter covers Pauline worship (1 Corinthians, Romans), the Johannine tradition, and the worship scenes in Revelation. Perkins argues that New Testament worship is shaped by the conviction that the risen Christ is present in the community's gathering, and that worship is simultaneously an earthly and a heavenly activity. The chapter highlights the Lord's Supper, baptism, hymns, and prayer as central practices, while noting that early Christian worship was remarkably diverse in form even as it shared core theological convictions. ## Chapter 3: Creation and Worship (W. David O. Taylor) Taylor argues that creation is not merely the backdrop for worship but a participant in it. Drawing on Psalm 148 and other texts, he presents a vision of all creation praising God -- a cosmic choir in which human worshipers join. The chapter traces the theological connection between creation and worship: everything that exists does so because of God's creative energy, and the primary response of created things is worship. Taylor connects this to the incarnation -- God entering the created order in bodily form -- and argues that Christian worship is inherently material and embodied, not a flight from the physical world to the spiritual. ## Chapter 4: God and Worship (Don E. Saliers) Saliers, one of the most significant living theologians of worship, examines how the doctrine of God shapes and is shaped by worship practice. The chapter explores divine attributes -- holiness, transcendence, immanence, mercy -- as they're encountered through liturgical action rather than abstract theology. Saliers argues that in worship, people are given their fundamental orientation in the world. The chapter develops the idea that worship is the primary context in which believers come to know who God is, not through propositional statements but through the patterns and rhythms of communal prayer, praise, and sacrament. ## Chapter 5: Humanity and Worship (Ronald T. Michener) Michener examines theological anthropology through the lens of worship. What does it mean that humans are created in God's image, and how does worship express and form that image? The chapter covers the embodied nature of human worship -- we're not disembodied minds offering intellectual assent but whole persons whose bodies, emotions, and social relationships are all caught up in the act of worship. Michener argues that worship is formative: it doesn't just express who we already are but shapes who we're becoming. ## Chapter 6: Christology and Worship (Bruce T. Morrill) Morrill connects the doctrine of Christ to worship practice. The chapter examines how the person and work of Christ structure Christian liturgy -- from the shape of the liturgical year to the theology of the Eucharist. Morrill argues that worship is participation in the paschal mystery (Christ's life, death, and resurrection), not merely commemoration of past events. The chapter draws on both patristic and modern theology to show that Christology is not a doctrinal abstraction but a lived reality encountered through worship. ## Chapter 7: Pneumatology and Worship (Khalia J. Williams) Williams explores the Holy Spirit's role in worship, drawing on three sites of pneumatological discourse: Scripture, charismatic renewal movements, and ecumenical conversations between Western Christianity and Eastern Orthodoxy. The chapter traces how the Spirit empowers, guides, and inhabits worship -- not as an afterthought to Christology but as the active agent who makes Christ present in the community's gathering. Williams writes from personal experience as a worship leader who consistently seeks to identify how the Spirit is at work in communal worship, and she acknowledges the chapter can only scratch the surface of the Spirit's activity. ## Chapter 8: Eschatology and Worship (Maurice Lee) Lee examines how the doctrine of last things shapes worship. The chapter argues that Christian worship is inherently eschatological -- it's oriented toward God's future even as it remembers God's past acts. Lee develops the concept of "inaugurated eschatology," where worship is the space in which the future kingdom breaks into the present. The Eucharist is particularly significant here: it's a foretaste of the heavenly banquet, a remembrance of Christ's death, and an anticipation of Christ's return, all collapsed into a single act. Eastern eucharistic prayers that "remember" Christ's second coming -- a future event -- illustrate this temporal compression. ## Chapter 9: Ecclesiology and Worship (Rhodora E. Beaton) Beaton explores the relationship between the doctrine of the church and worship practice. The chapter argues that the church doesn't just do worship -- worship constitutes the church. As von Allmen puts it, by its worship the church becomes itself. Beaton examines how different ecclesiologies (Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox) produce different worship forms while sharing the conviction that the gathered community at worship is the body of Christ. The chapter addresses the tension between worship as a gathered community's act and the individualistic tendencies of contemporary Western Christianity. ## Chapter 10: Mission and Worship (Eugene R. Schlesinger) Schlesinger argues that worship and mission aren't separate activities but two expressions of the same reality. The chapter challenges the common assumption that worship is what happens inside the church building and mission is what happens outside. Instead, Schlesinger develops the idea that worship sends the community into mission, and mission brings the community back to worship. The dismissal rite -- "Go in peace to love and serve the Lord" -- isn't an ending but a commissioning. The chapter connects this to the broader missio Dei theology: God's mission in the world is the context in which both worship and the church's outward activity make sense. ## Chapter 11: Mystery and Worship (Ivana Noble) Noble examines the role of mystery in Christian worship, arguing against both the rationalist tendency to explain everything and the sentimentalist tendency to reduce mystery to feeling. The chapter draws on Eastern Orthodox theology (particularly the apophatic tradition) to develop a concept of mystery as genuine encounter with the incomprehensible God. Noble argues that worship's use of symbol, ritual, and silence creates space for this encounter in ways that discursive theology cannot. The chapter challenges worship practices that prioritize clarity and explanation over the experience of the holy. ## Chapter 12: Sanctification and Worship (Lizette Larson-Miller) Larson-Miller connects sanctification to worship through the concept of theosis -- the Eastern Christian idea that humans are called to participate in the divine nature. The chapter traces this theology from the early church fathers through Aquinas and into the twentieth century. Larson-Miller distinguishes between worship as a specific liturgical event and worship as an all-encompassing life posture before God. The chapter develops the lex orandi, lex credendi dialectic -- the law of prayer establishes the law of belief -- and argues that liturgy, Scripture, and ethics form an inseparable triad. Baptism is treated at length as the paradigmatic act that is simultaneously worship and sanctification, transforming both the individual and the community. The chapter closes with pastoral challenges: countering the subjectification of reality, addressing the assumption that everything is entertainment, and reconnecting liturgy with ethics. ## Chapter 13: Time and Worship (Anne McGowan) McGowan examines how Christians inhabit time through worship. The chapter develops the idea that Christian worship fuses past, present, and future -- it remembers God's saving acts, experiences them as present reality, and anticipates their fulfillment. This isn't merely psychological recall but an ontological participation: in worship, the fullness of future salvific reality is already present. McGowan covers the theology of Sunday (the eighth day, oriented toward eschatological expectation rather than merely commemorating the resurrection), the liturgical year (Easter as a "very big Sunday"), and daily prayer. The chapter addresses cultural challenges: the encroachment of work into weekends, the reduction of worship to one more calendar item, and the disconnect between liturgical time and lived time. ## Chapter 14: Ecology and Worship (Teresa Berger) Berger asks what Christian worship has to do with ecology and argues that the connection is deeper than adding creation-themed prayers or celebrating a Season of Creation. The chapter develops five theological building blocks: creation is brought into existence by God's creative energy, being created is gift with flourishing as its purpose, creation is God-sustained, God entered creation in the incarnation, and everything created is on a journey to fulfillment in God. Berger introduces the concept of "deep incarnation" (Gregersen) -- God becoming part of the entire material cosmos -- and argues that worship should be understood as a posture shared with all creation, not just a human activity within a building. The chapter engages the ecological emergency directly, arguing that if createdness is a basic feature of human existence, worship must grapple with the crisis threatening all created life. ## Chapter 15: Individualism and Community (E. Byron Anderson) Anderson addresses the tension between individual and communal dimensions of worship. The chapter argues that Western Christianity, particularly in American contexts, has drifted toward individually negotiated worship experiences that prize "my relationship with God" over "our shared relationship together." Anderson traces this drift through cultural individualism, consumer mentality, and the therapeutic turn in religion. The chapter makes the case that worship is constitutively communal -- it's the act of the body of Christ, not an aggregation of individual spiritual experiences happening in the same room. ## Chapter 16: Secularization and Worship (James K. Wellman Jr.) Wellman examines worship in the context of secularization, with particular attention to megachurches. He argues that megachurch worship is designed to address six human desires: welcome, a "wow" moment, a charismatic figure, invitation to deliverance, invitation to purpose, and small-group community. This maps onto Durkheim's social dualism of personal fulfillment and social connection. The chapter explores what happens to worship when the surrounding culture no longer assumes a religious framework and when worship must compete with secular sources of meaning, community, and transcendence. ## Chapter 17: Christian Worship and Other World Religions (Peter C. Phan) Phan examines Christian worship in the context of religious pluralism. The chapter asks how Christians should think about worship when they live alongside practitioners of other religious traditions and when elements from those traditions influence Christian practice. Phan explores the history of liturgical inculturation and the theological principles that guide it, arguing that Christian worship has always been shaped by its cultural and religious context while maintaining its distinctive character. ## Epilogue: Pursuing a Theology of Worship (Martyn Percy) Percy synthesizes the book's themes and offers a framework for readers to develop their own theology of worship. The epilogue functions as a practical guide for mapping personal theological commitments to worship practice, drawing together the threads from all seventeen chapters into a coherent methodology for theological reflection on worship. --- # Key Themes and Highlights ## Worship as Theology's Primary Context The book's most consistent argument is that worship isn't the application of theology -- it's one of the primary contexts in which theology happens. The lex orandi, lex credendi principle runs through nearly every chapter: the law of prayer establishes the law of belief, and the relationship is dialectical. Worship shapes theology as much as theology shapes worship. Saliers puts this directly: in worship, people are given their fundamental orientation in the world. This challenges the common assumption that theology is worked out in the academy and then applied in the sanctuary. ## Embodied and Material Worship Multiple chapters argue against the spiritualization of worship. Taylor insists that creation participates in worship, not just humans. Michener argues that we worship as whole persons -- bodies, emotions, social relationships. Larson-Miller traces how baptism involves water, oil, and physical immersion. Berger develops "deep incarnation" to show that God entered the material cosmos, not just the human soul. The cumulative effect is a vision of worship that's thoroughly material and embodied, pushing back against any tendency to treat worship as primarily a mental or emotional activity. ## Worship Forms the Church (Not Just Expresses It) The ecclesiology chapter makes this explicit, but the idea runs throughout the book. Worship doesn't just express pre-existing beliefs or community identity -- it constitutes them. The church becomes itself through worship. Schmemann's formula appears repeatedly: worship is the public act that actualizes the nature of the church as the body of Christ. This has practical implications: if worship forms the church, then what happens (or doesn't happen) in worship shapes what the church becomes. ## Inaugurated Eschatology in Worship Several chapters develop the idea that worship operates in a compressed temporality where past, present, and future converge. Lee's eschatology chapter argues that worship is where the future kingdom breaks into the present. McGowan develops this further: Christian worship "remembers the future" as something already present. Eastern eucharistic prayers that "remember" Christ's second coming illustrate the point. This isn't metaphorical -- the claim is that in worship, the fullness of salvific reality is genuinely present, not just symbolically invoked. ## The Critique of Worship as Entertainment The book returns repeatedly to the pressure of entertainment culture on worship. Wellman analyzes megachurch worship through Durkheim's lens. Larson-Miller warns about the assumption that everything is entertainment and the "subjectification of reality" where there's no greater reality than "me." Anderson traces the drift toward individually negotiated worship experiences. Wolterstorff laments the stripping of liturgical elements -- confession, intercession, Scripture readings, divine majesty -- in contemporary services. The editors trace how the marketing of Christianity turned music into a sales tool. --- # Analytical Reading ## Main Arguments 1. Christians experience worship more than think about it, and this gap between practice and theological reflection is the central problem in contemporary worship. 2. Worship and theology exist in a dialectical relationship (lex orandi, lex credendi) that must be intentionally maintained. 3. Worship is constitutive of the church, not merely an activity the church performs. 4. Christian worship is inherently material, embodied, and communal -- not a flight from the physical to the spiritual. 5. Worship operates in a compressed temporality where past, present, and future salvific reality converge. 6. The reduction of worship to music, entertainment, or individual experience represents a theological failure, not just a stylistic preference. 7. Every major Christian doctrine -- creation, Christology, pneumatology, eschatology, ecclesiology, mission -- directly shapes and is shaped by worship practice. 8. Worship sends the community into mission, and mission brings the community back to worship; the two aren't separate activities. 9. The ecological crisis, secularization, and religious pluralism are not peripheral concerns but directly challenge how Christians understand and practice worship. ## Methodology This is an edited academic volume, not a single-author argument. Each chapter is written by a specialist in the relevant theological sub-discipline. The methodology varies by chapter: Hill and Perkins use biblical scholarship, Saliers and Taylor use systematic theology, Larson-Miller uses liturgical theology and historical analysis, Wellman uses sociology of religion, and Berger uses ecotheology. The overall organizing principle is doctrinal -- each chapter takes a theological topic and explores its relationship to worship. This produces comprehensive coverage but uneven depth, and the chapters don't always speak to each other directly. The book includes "For Further Reading" sections at the end of each chapter rather than a unified bibliography. ## Strengths The doctrinal organization is the book's most distinctive contribution. By asking "how does the doctrine of creation (or Christology, or eschatology) relate to worship?" rather than "what does worship look like in these traditions?", the book forces connections that thematic organization misses. The ecumenical range is genuinely broad -- Orthodox, Catholic, Anglican, evangelical, and Pentecostal perspectives appear without any single tradition dominating. The caliber of contributors is high: Saliers, Wolterstorff, Wright, Berger, and Phan are major figures in their fields. The book's treatment of topics usually absent from worship textbooks -- ecology, secularization, world religions, mission -- gives it contemporary relevance that most competitors lack. ## Limitations As with most edited volumes, the chapters vary in quality, accessibility, and depth. Some chapters are dense academic theology; others are more introductory surveys. The connecting tissue between chapters is thin -- readers have to do the synthesis work themselves. The book is organized around Western academic theological categories, which may not map neatly onto how worship is experienced in non-Western contexts, despite the editors' stated ecumenical intentions. The African American, Asian, Latin American, and indigenous worship traditions get relatively little sustained attention compared to European and North American traditions. The book is better at diagnosing problems (worship reduced to entertainment, individualism eroding community) than prescribing concrete solutions for practitioners. Some chapters lean heavily on Catholic and Orthodox liturgical theology in ways that may feel distant to evangelical readers, despite the editors' intention to be accessible to that audience. --- # Personal Reflection ## Key Takeaways The most valuable idea is that every major Christian doctrine has direct implications for worship, and vice versa. This sounds obvious, but in practice most worship planning operates on pragmatic and aesthetic criteria rather than theological ones. The book's doctrinal organization forces the question: what does our Christology actually imply about how we structure the Eucharist? What does our ecclesiology say about whether worship should be designed for individual consumption? What does our eschatology mean for how we experience time in worship? The concept of worship as constitutive of the church -- not just something the church does but how the church becomes itself -- reframes the stakes of worship planning entirely. If worship forms the church, then every choice about what to include or exclude in a service is a choice about what kind of church you're building. The temporal compression idea -- worship as the space where past, present, and future converge -- is intellectually compelling and practically challenging. It means worship isn't primarily about remembering historical events or anticipating future ones. It's about participating in a reality that transcends conventional time. ## Questions Raised - How do practitioners translate the book's theological arguments into actual worship planning decisions? The gap between "worship is constitutive of the church" and "what should we do next Sunday?" is significant. - The book critiques individualism in worship but doesn't adequately address how communal worship can be recovered in cultures where individualism is the water everyone swims in. What does that recovery look like concretely? - Several chapters rely heavily on sacramental theology that assumes weekly Eucharist. How do these arguments translate to traditions where the Lord's Supper is observed monthly or quarterly? - The ecology chapter opens a fascinating line of thinking about worship as something all creation does, not just humans. How far can this be pushed before it stops being recognizably Christian worship? - The book assumes a gathered community in a physical space. How does the theology of worship change when significant portions of the church's worship moved online during and after the pandemic? ## Connections to Other Works - [[For the Life of the World]] by Alexander Schmemann -- Schmemann's vision of worship as the life of the church appears throughout this volume. His work is the hidden backbone of several chapters, particularly on ecclesiology and sanctification. - [[Desiring the Kingdom]] by James K. A. Smith -- Smith's argument that worship is formative (it shapes our loves and desires) connects directly to this book's insistence that worship constitutes the church and forms believers. - [[Worship, Community, and the Triune God of Grace]] by James B. Torrance -- Torrance's trinitarian theology of worship, particularly the idea that worship is participation in Christ's self-offering to the Father through the Spirit, underlies several chapters. - [[Real Presences]] by George Steiner -- Steiner's argument about the "real presence" of meaning in art and language connects to the book's treatment of mystery, symbol, and the material dimension of worship. - [[Laudato Si']] by Pope Francis -- The encyclical's treatment of creation care and ecological theology directly informs Berger's chapter on ecology and worship. - [[Liturgy of the Ordinary]] by Tish Harrison Warren -- Warren's accessible treatment of how daily practices form faith offers a practical counterpart to the more academic theology in this volume. --- # Reading Notes - The three motivating concepts in the preface are sharp: experience over reflection, God's worthiness inducing church identity, and the music-equals-worship misconception. These frame the entire project. - Wolterstorff's worry about contemporary liturgies stripping out confession, intercession, Scripture readings, and divine majesty is blunt and warranted. It names what many observe but few say publicly. - Wright's temple theology is the best short introduction to how early Christians understood themselves as the place where heaven and earth overlap. It reframes worship from "activity we do" to "reality we inhabit." - The lex orandi, lex credendi dialectic gets the most sustained treatment in Larson-Miller's sanctification chapter. Her point that liturgy and theology are in a circular, mutually influencing relationship is the book's methodological foundation. - Larson-Miller's distinction between worship as a specific liturgical event and worship as an all-encompassing life posture is the most pastorally useful framework in the book. - The "deep incarnation" concept from Berger's ecology chapter -- God becoming part of the material cosmos at the level of stars, iron, and biology -- is theologically striking and has implications far beyond ecology. - McGowan's argument that Easter is a "very big Sunday" (rather than Sunday being a "little Easter") reorients the relationship between weekly and annual worship cycles. - The megachurch analysis through Durkheim's framework is the most sociologically rigorous chapter. Wellman's six desires (welcome, wow, charisma, deliverance, purpose, community) map contemporary worship dynamics precisely. - The editors' tracing of how evangelical revivalism led to worship-as-entertainment is historically illuminating: conversion became less important, marketing gained control, and music became the primary sales tool for Christianity. - Williams's pneumatology chapter is honest about its limitations -- she can only "scratch the surface" -- but this honesty models the kind of theological humility the book advocates. - The "congregational roll call" in Berger's ecology chapter -- naming owls, ferns, pines, mud, and a lone human priest -- is the most provocative image in the book and pushes the boundaries of what "congregation" means.