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Kimberly Bracken Long, by focusing on what presiders do with their bodies, eyes, ears, lips, hands, feet, and heart, describes an attitude and style of worship leadership that is both firmly rooted and blessedly free. A wonderful offering for all worship presiders, seminarians, commissioned lay pastors, new pastors, and experienced pastors, The Worshiping Body is essential reading for anyone interested in how their presence and movement during worship make a difference.
Kimberly Bracken Long, by focusing on what presiders do with their bodies, eyes, ears, lips, hands, feet, and heart, describes an attitude and style of worship leadership that is both firmly rooted and blessedly free. A wonderful offering for all worship presiders, seminarians, commissioned lay pastors, new pastors, and experienced pastors, The Worshiping Body is essential reading for anyone interested in how their presence and movement during worship make a difference.
Bodies of Worship explores how the ecclesial, ritual, individual, and cultural bodies engaged in the Church's worship contribute to the theory and practice of both liturgical theology and pastoral ministry. The authors bring solid historical and theoretical scholarship to bear on the practice and experience of the liturgy and spirituality of the Church.
Worship sets an assembly in motion movement towards God in response to God's movement towards humans thus creating a resilient and caring community. Worship as Body Language brings the African community's experience of the body and its gestures together with the Christian liturgy, since worship and social action are closely related. The body language" or gestures of praise, adoration, contemplation, ritual dance, and care of the neighbor are meaningful to the ethnic group; African Christians tune into these body motions to express the one Christian faith. In Worship as Body Language, Father Uzukwu details how patterns of African ritual assemblies and sacred narratives have merged with Jewish, gospel, and early Church traditions to create living Christian communities and liturgies. Using a socio-historical method, this book sheds new light on liturgical action and theology, and suggests more transition rituals. It also provides samples of emergent African Christian liturgies that emphasize intense community participation with appropriate gestures. These local liturgies attest to the patristic principle that different customs actually confirm the unity of our faith in Christ. Scholars teaching and researching the foundations of the liturgy and liturgical inculturation, graduate students, and those organizing workshops on the regional, diocesan, or parish level will find Worship as Body Languagea ready handbook on the liturgy. It is also a useful textbook for introducing college students and seminarians to the anthropological, historical, and theological dimensions of the liturgy. Elochukwu E. Uzukwu, CSSp, ThD, lectures in liturgy and African theology in seminaries and Catholic universities in Nigeria, Congo, Zaire, and France. He is the author of Liturgy: Truly Christian, Truly African,and the editor of Bulletin of Ecumenical Theology. "
Do our physical bodies really matter in corporate worship? Isn't our soul the most important part of us? Aren't our bodies, at best, negligible to worship and, at worst, a hindrance? The answer to this last question is categorically no, as Christians have attested throughout history and across the global church. The purpose of the body instead is to offer to God in worship what only it can offer--and what must be offered to God. By drawing on the wisdom of the Bible, church history, and theology, and by taking advantage of the unique insights of the arts and sciences, ethics, and spiritual formation, a respected theologian and pastor argues in this book that there is something for our physical bodies to do that decisively forms Christlikeness in us within the context of corporate worship. What we do with our postures, gestures, and movements in worship matters. How our senses of sight, scent, sound, taste, and touch are involved in worship matters. How our spontaneous and prescriptive activities form us in worship matters. All of it matters to faithful and fulsome worship for the sake of a body that is fully alive in the praise of God.
"With humorous prose and wry wit, Kenny makes a convincing case for all Christians to do more to meet access needs and embrace disabilities as part of God's kingdom. . . . Inclusivity-minded Christians will cheer the lessons laid out here."--Publishers Weekly Much of the church has forgotten that we worship a disabled God whose wounds survived resurrection, says Amy Kenny. It is time for the church to start treating disabled people as full members of the body of Christ who have much more to offer than a miraculous cure narrative and to learn from their embodied experiences. Written by a disabled Christian, this book shows that the church is missing out on the prophetic witness and blessing of disability. Kenny reflects on her experiences inside the church to expose unintentional ableism and cast a new vision for Christian communities to engage disability justice. She shows that until we cultivate church spaces where people with disabilities can fully belong, flourish, and lead, we are not valuing the diverse members of the body of Christ. Offering a unique blend of personal storytelling, fresh and compelling writing, biblical exegesis, and practical application, this book invites readers to participate in disability justice and create a more inclusive community in church and parachurch spaces. Engaging content such as reflection questions and top-ten lists are included.
As a troubadour for global music and an instigator of cross-cultural worship for more than 15 years in a variety of denominational settings, including congregational, national, and international venues, Michael Hawn has observed many faithful people who find that a taste of Pentecost in worship is refreshing and invigorating. In One Bread, One Body: Exploring Cultural Diversity in Worship, Hawn seeks to help bridge the gap between the human tendency to prefer ethnic and cultural homogeneity in worship and the church's mandate to offer a more diverse and inclusive experience. He offers a rainbow vision of the universal church where young and old joyfully and thoughtfully respond to the movement of God's Spirit in multicultural worship. Hawn and four colleagues from Perkins School of Theology in Dallas formed a diverse team in ethnicity, gender, academic field of study, and denominational affiliation to study four United Methodist congregations in the Dallas area that are grappling with cross-cultural ministry. Their four case studies illustrate both the pain and the possibilities encountered in capturing the Spirit of Pentecost in worship. Hawn also offers a concise and practical theological framework as well as numerous strategies and an extensive bibliography for implementing "culturally conscious worship." This book is invaluable for congregations that want to undertake the hard work of cross-cultural worship.
God is unbounded. God became flesh. While these two assertions are equally viable parts of Western Christian religious heritage, they stand in tension with one another. Fearful of reducing God's majesty with shallow anthropomorphisms, philosophy and religion affirm that God, as an eternal being, stands wholly apart from creation. Yet the legacy of the incarnation complicates this view of the incorporeal divine, affirming a very different image of God in physical embodiment. While for many today the idea of an embodied God seems simplistic--even pedestrian--Christoph Markschies reveals that in antiquity, the educated and uneducated alike subscribed to this very idea. More surprisingly, the idea that God had a body was held by both polytheists and monotheists. Platonic misgivings about divine corporeality entered the church early on, but it was only with the advent of medieval scholasticism that the idea that God has a body became scandalous, an idea still lingering today. In God's Body Markschies traces the shape of the divine form in late antiquity. This exploration follows the development of ideas of God's corporeality in Jewish and Greco-Roman traditions. In antiquity, gods were often like humans, which proved to be important for philosophical reflection and for worship. Markschies considers how a cultic environment nurtured, and transformed, Jewish and Christian descriptions of the divine, as well as how philosophical debates over the connection of body and soul in humanity provided a conceptual framework for imagining God. Markschies probes the connections between this lively culture of religious practice and philosophical speculation and the christological formulations of the church to discover how the dichotomy of an incarnate God and a fleshless God came to be. By studying the religious and cultural past, Markschies reveals a Jewish and Christian heritage alien to modern sensibilities, as well as a God who is less alien to the human experience than much of Western thought has imagined. Since the almighty God who made all creation has also lived in that creation, the biblical idea of humankind as image of God should be taken seriously and not restricted to the conceptual world but rather applied to the whole person.