Ancient-Future Worship (): Proclaiming and Enacting God's Narrative

by Robert E. Webber

First, these books speak to the longing to discover the roots of the faith in the biblical and classical tradition of the church.

Second, this series is committed to the current search for unity in the church.

the third issue faced by today’s church: How do you deliver the authentic faith and great wisdom of the past into the new cultural situation of the twenty-first century?

These three matters—roots, connection, and authenticity in a changing world—will help us to maintain continuity with historic Christianity as the church moves forward.

This reflection includes thinking that has accumulated and jelled over the past ten years. Consequently, it integrates Scripture, history, theology, culture, and missiology.

What makes Ancient-Future Worship different from any other book I have written on worship is the central theme of recovering God’s narrative.

The ancient understanding is that God joins the story of humanity to take us into his story.

In worship we remember God’s story in the past and anticipate God’s story in the future.

Worship proclaims, “There is a connection between God’s past saving events and the future of the world.”

Neither worship nor spirituality has a life outside of God’s narrative. God brings us into his story, his grace, his redeeming work in all of history. He does that in our worship. He does that in our spirituality.

If worship is truly doing God’s story and calling people to find their life and story by entering God’s story, then the style of worship is prayer.

the influence of Christian faith seems to be so individualized that it no longer makes an impact on culture.

Wherever there is life, it is always the work of the Spirit. What then is new? Two words capture what is new. New understanding and new empowerment.

The Bible is full of images, word pictures, stories, types, and analogies that proclaim the story. One way to tell this story is through four pictures: God and the Garden of Eden; God and the desert; God and the Garden of Gethsemane; God and the eternal garden.

The biblical and ancient definition of person is “a being in community.”

God creates humanity in his image, persons who dwell in community and are actually called by God to fellowship with the community of the Godhead from the inside.

Evil is not a mere absence of good or moral failure. Evil is a human refusal to carry out God’s purposes.

Reflection on the incarnation and its connection to every aspect of God’s story is the missing link in today’s theological reflection and worship. The link is found in these words: God does for us what we cannot do for ourselves.

The incarnation brings creation and redemption together. This emphasis is unique among all the religions of the world.

liberal Christians have a creation theology without an incarnation. Consequently, liberal Christianity ends up being a humanitarian social action (as opposed to a redemptive social witness). I find a similar kind of problem among conservative Christians. Conservatives have a redemption theology. But they focus almost entirely on the death of Jesus and therefore ignore the connection between creation, incarnation, and re-creation.

The church is all about the continuation of God’s narrative in this world. Now, finally, worship. What does it mean to say, “Worship does God’s story?” It is this: Worship proclaims, enacts, and sings God’s story. Worship is not a program. Nor is worship about me. Worship is a narrative—God’s narrative of the world from its beginning to its end. How will the world know its own story unless we do that story in public worship?

Fragmentation in worship is expressed in a worship that emphasizes one or another aspect of God’s story but neglects the story as a whole.

here is what biblical worship does: It remembers God’s work in the past, anticipates God’s rule over all creation, and actualizes both past and future in the present to transform persons, communities, and the world.

Biblical and ancient worship is never about me and my worship. Instead, biblical and ancient worship is always about remembering all of God’s saving acts in history.

five early Christian sermons in the book of Acts—every

the Great Paschal Vigil

ancient Christians called Sunday the eighth day.

The eschatological nature of worship is more than preaching a sermon on future events. The content of eschatological worship has to do with God’s rescue of the entire created order and the establishment of his rule over all heaven and earth. The eschatological nature of worship has to do with that place and time when God’s rule is being done on earth as it is in heaven.

If the creation liturgy expresses a divine design to the whole created order, what does that say about worship? It says that worship is not thrown together, but that it too, like the rest of creation, is ordered and reflects the divine design.

Doxology is our response to God’s story. It receives God’s story as God’s way of disclosing his intention for creation.

When worship remembers the past, it praises God for God’s work in history whereby he has already begun the restoration of the world. When worship anticipates the future, it looks for the culmination of all God’s works in the complete transformation of the world, the consummation of God’s work in Jesus Christ by the power of the Spirit, whereby worship witnesses to the victory of Christ over all the powers and principalities and proclaims he now rules over all creation as the Lord of the universe.

Apostolic Constitutions.

from the loss of attention to the whole Bible. A shift has taken place toward a focus on therapeutic or inspirational preaching and to the rise of entertainment or presentational worship.

When planning worship ask, “Does the service connect creation with God’s involvement in the history of Israel, with his incarnation, death, resurrection, ascension, eternal intercession, and coming again to establish his rule over all creation?” If you can answer “Yes” to that question, you are well on your way into worship that has the biblical content of remembrance and anticipation.

The Father creates; the Son becomes involved in creation through incarnation, death, resurrection, ascension, intercession, and coming again in glory to set up his kingdom forever. The Holy Spirit is involved in the whole rescue mission of God, assisting the saints, empowering the apostles and the church, and witnessing to the resurrection of the flesh, the forgiveness of sin, and the kingdom to come.

Carthage and Rome are the mother churches of the West and Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria are the root churches for the Eastern tradition.

A chief emphasis of the Eastern liturgies has always been mystery. The Eastern Church dwells on the mystery of the paradoxes in God’s story.

By the late medieval period the service of the Word with preaching was infrequent. The Mass was generally reduced to the eucharistic prayers.

Prior to the Reformation all who had been baptized were admitted to the Table. From here on into the twentieth century the emphasis is “come to the Table if you have had a conversion experience and you are living the transformed life.”

if there is a failing in seventeenth-century worship, it is that, like the Enlightenment, the worship tended to emphasize facts without adequate interpretation.

Wesley is the founder of the Methodist movement, which is known for its enthusiasm. Anglican worship is not an enthusiastic worship; it is done as prayer.

There has always been a liturgical Methodism that reflects John Wesley’s love of the Anglican liturgy, but for the most part, Methodism gravitated toward the more loose style of worship known as revival worship.

After the evangelist left town to preach somewhere else, the converted remained to begin their own church. The only model these new Christians had was the threefold model taught by the evangelist. Therefore they built churches and communities of faith based on the threefold model.

The contemporary chorus movement is not a theologically sensitive movement. If anything, it is atheological.

The movement was soon influenced by the culture of narcissism, however, and the songs became more and more about me and my worship of God.

Seeker-oriented contemporary churches argue that worship does not need to present the whole gospel. The purpose of worship, they say, is to get people in the door. Then, after they have gained a hearing, they present the gospel in small-group settings. This argument may be good marketing, but it fails to understand the biblical purpose of worship.

I have made a brief comparison of the major worship trends of each paradigm of history, and what I have concluded is this:

We now come to the me aspect of worship. Here we see that worship is not that which I do, but that which is done in me. That is, worship, which reveals Christ, forms me by making me aware that Jesus is my spirituality and that worship is to form my spiritual life into the pattern of living into the death and resurrection of Jesus.

So my worship, in union with Christ, is to be, as Justin states, an “imitation” of “these good things” (the disclosure of Christ in Word and Eucharist).

The Gnostics believed their faith came directly from a secret tradition held by the apostles and handed down to a few elite. The argument of the Orthodox, on the other hand, was that the Christian faith was not a secret but fully public for anyone who wished to know it.