Beside Still Waters Ministries

Well, I don’t have a clue how to do a review, and while I might say something about what I learned and what I think about the book at the end I’m mostly going to summarize it for my own benefit. I read this book originally for Seminary, though I think I skimmed most of it and I don’t remember much, so I thought this would be a way that I can read it more indepth, interact with it and what I have read elsewhere, and hopefully remember what it says better. This’ll be in several parts so that no one post is super long, and I will probably be quoting a lot because I don’t feel like being in school again and having to try to figure out how to say the same thing in different words when I think how he puts it is pretty clear already.

Chapter 1: What Do We Mean By “Christian Worship”?

Dr. White chooses to mainly approach defining Christian Worship by describing what Christians do when they come together for worship, and he will be describing “the devlopment, theology, and use of actual structures or services.” (pg. 22) Secondly he will also explore definitions of greater abstraction, and thirdly he will “examine some of the key words Christians choose most often to express what they experience as worship.” These things are consistent aspects of Christian worship throughout the history of the Church, despite many changes in world culture and how the Christian Church functions in it.

When describing what happens in Christian Worship, it is helpful to look at structures and services to describe the forms in which Christians operate. Structures are things like the calendar which organizes a year’s worship, which begins in the New Testament with a sense of having a weekly structure of time, and then annual calendars commemorating events that are important to the Christian community (Christmas, Easter, etc.), and there have also been daily schedules of public and private prayer developed in some communities. Dr. White will be looking at these more closely in Chapter 2, and in Chapter 3 he will be looking at the structures which shelter and enable Christian worship (things such as buildings, furnishings, etc.).

Services, then, are the actual gatherings of believers, and these take place daily (chap. 4) and weekly “service of the word” (chap. 5). Then there are other occasional services – baptism (and confirmation) to mark the “initiation” of outsiders becoming a believer (chap. 7), the Eucharist or Lord’s Supper (chap. 8), and then a variety of pastoral rites which mark life’s journey, such as services for healing and weddings, (chap. 9).