From the Christian Nonduality Blog:
…our desires are formed, shaped and reinforced by the liturgies of the mall, sports stadia and the marketplace as well as by our worship and fellowship. So, an approach that best articulates our faith (including propositions), best celebrates our hopes and best reinforces our love will, in my view, help us move more swiftly and with less hindrance along our ongoing journeys of transformation, enjoying a life of superabundance.
Read the rest here.
Categories: liturgy
Tagged: Benevolence, God, Jesus, liturgy, mission, religion
More good stuff from David Fitch, this time from his (along with Matt Tibbe) 4/23/09 post 
“Missional Church and Liturgy?”
As I have traveled and led discussions on missional church, I usually get the most resistance when I talk about the liturgical gathering as a place of formation for mission. Often people will say, “What does liturgy have to do with incarnational forms of church.” My contention is that missional people do not fall out of trees. They must be formed into relationship to God, the Story we are being invited to participate in, the Missio Dei which always precedes us, yet we must have our vision (imaginations) shaped in order to see it – i.e. God at work in the world. If we are ever to be missional, our desires, our vision, our very selves must be reordered out of the ways we have been trained in consumerist America into the Missio dei. To me, good liturgy does this! Liturgy that is Scriptural, historical, theological, accessible and organic (part of everyday life) does some of the work of forming people into Missio Dei.
Read the rest here.
Categories: liturgy
Tagged: Benevolence, God, Jesus, liturgy, mission, religion
HT: iMonk
Categories: liturgy
Tagged: God, Jesus, liturgy, mission, religion
Dennis Bratcher and Robin Stephenson-Bratcher:
…as many of those same evangelicals mature in their Faith they are attracted to the aspects of worship that are lacking in their own traditional worship experiences. These include the elements of mystery in liturgical worship, the sacraments, the communal dimension of worship, the longing to move out of sectarianism and be part of the larger Church, the focus on Scripture and prayer, even things like incense and making the sign of the cross as a testimony to their own Faith.
Read the rest here.
Categories: liturgy
Tagged: Benevolence, God, Jesus, liturgy, mission, religion
Scot McKnight:
A genuine Third Way will get beyond the Sunday morning sermon as the primary form of spiritual formation and education in a local church, and neither Belcher nor Pagitt seem to approach preaching through the lens of a larger formational program with clearly defined outcomes. A genuine Third Way will form a well-rounded and adaptable formation program that guides all sermons, all teaching, and all activities in the church. Sermons will be seen as one part of the formational ministry of the church. In other words, Third Way preaching is rooted in the overall outcomes of the church.
Read the rest here.
Categories: liturgy
Tagged: God, Jesus, liturgy, mission, religion
“I am especially impressed with how a small child and an 80 year old man are functioning within the same world of thought, ritual and understanding. Within evangelicalism, we have communities with strong elements of tradition that bind generations together, but overall, we have compromised this to the core, allowing the quest to make the faith acceptable to teenagers to define the style and substance of everything. Where has evangelicalism gone in the last 60 years? Toward maturity and the core of the faith, or toward the latest efforts to be relevant to the young? The old among us are often those who manage to hang on amidst a hurricane of changes.”
This reminded me of a quote from Peter Leithart in Against Christianity:
“Far from yearing for a golden, changeless past, ‘ritualists’ are the most progressive of men, fearlessly facing the unknown future so long as they can take along their prayer books and water, their wafers and their wine.”
Categories: liturgy
Tagged: God, Jesus, liturgy, mission, religion
Mark Galli:
This is one reason I thank God for the liturgy. The liturgy does not target any age or cultural subgroup. It does not even target this century. (It does not imagine, as we moderns and postmoderns are tempted to do, that this is the best of all possible ages, the most significant era of history.) Instead, the liturgy draws us into worship that transcends our time and place. Its earliest forms took shape in ancient Israel, and its subsequent development occurred in a variety of cultures and subcultures—Greco-Roman, North African, German, Frankish, Anglo-Saxon, and so on. It has been prayed meaningfully by bakers, housewives, tailors, teachers, philosophers, priests, monks, kings, and slaves. As such, it has not been shaped to meet a particular group’s needs. It seeks only to enable people—people in general—to see God.
Read the rest here.
Categories: liturgy
Tagged: God, Jesus, liturgy, mission, religion
More good stuff from Grace Lutheran in Tulsa.
You can also read more about their liturgy at Dancing at Grace.
Categories: liturgy
Tagged: God, Jesus, liturgy, mission, religion
“One reason why we Christians argue so much about which hymn to sing, which liturgy to follow, which way to worship is that the commandments teach us to believe that bad liturgy eventually leads to bad ethics. You begin by singing some sappy, sentimental hymn, then you pray some pointless prayer, and the next thing you know you have murdered your best friend.”
– Stanley Hauerwas
Categories: liturgy
Tagged: Benevolence, God, Jesus, liturgy, mission, religion
Categories: liturgy
Tagged: God, Jesus, liturgy, mission, religion
