New in paperback! Cyril of Jerusalem wrote about "holy things." He thereby reflected the communion invitation used in his fourth-century liturgy to call people to "taste and see that the Lord is good" (Mystagogical Catecheses). The present times call for strong and healthy symbols that hold people into hope. The Christian communities need a reintroduction into the ways in which liturgical symbols respond to human need. Indeed, Lathrop argues, Christian communities continually need to reconsider the meaning of their liturgies and reform those liturgies toward authentic clarity. In its three parts, this book (1) proposes that an ecumenical pattern or ordo of worship can be discerned which is also a pattern of meaning, (2) discusses the ways in which meaning occurs in the meeting for worship itself, and (3) draws practical conclusions about the organization of that meeting and its importance to current human need. Throughout, Lathrop undertakes to do theology, that is, to say what the liturgy actually says about God.

Holy Things: A Liturgical Theology

Religion & Spirituality

Lathrop, Gordon W.

Christian Books & Bibles

Fortress Press

How does the character of Christian worship affect the shape of Christian community? How should it? In Holy People: Lathrop has again tapped the ancient wells of Christian liturgical practice to enable the renewal of contemporary congregational life and deeper engagement with contemporary cultures.

Holy People: A Liturgical Ecclesiology

This latest work from leading liturgical theologian Gordon Lathrop explores the extent to which the central symbols and interactions of Christian liturgy yield, for their participants, a new proposal for their understanding and experience of the world. In the process, it considers various kinds of world-making, the diverse maps, and the differing senses of "cosmology" in which we all live. Finally, the book examines how certain liturgical reforms can contribute to a refreshed sense of ecological ethics-to a Christian sense of the holiness of the earth itself.

Holy Ground: A Liturgical Cosmology

What is "church"? What makes the church one? While these questions may seem innocuous, church has become conflicted territory recently, with internal factions, external pressures, and ecumenical turmoil all calling for a more positive, studier, more resilient notion of Christian community. Wengert approaches the questions as a Reformation historian. He shows how the New Testament notion of "marks" of the church was taken up by Luther and developed by Melanchthon not as descriptive tag but as a criterion for authenticity in Christian community. Lathrop, the liturgical theologian, shows concretely how those marks can stamp the worship life of a congregation as well as the evaluative work of congregations with their pastors, bishops, superintendents, and conference ministers. Only with a sturdy sense of their own identity--as a holy people, grounded in common practices and commitments--can Christian assemblies truly engage and even transform today's cultural context. This volume originated as six lectures jointly presented to the Academy of Bishops of the ELCA in 2001.

Christian Assembly: Marks of the Church in a Pluralistic Age

History

Wengert, Timothy J.

World

Renowned liturgical theologian Gordon Lathrop has composed a rich, meditative, and explicitly ecumenical spirituality for working pastors – whatever and wherever they are called: preachers, priests, elders, ministers, seminarians. 
In Part One Lathrop urges pastors to become lifelong students of the Lord's Prayer, the Apostle's Creed, and the Commandments, continually inhabiting the questions, reversals and paradoxes of Christian life. 
In Part Two he elaborates on the pastor's chief activities – presiding at the holy table, preaching, collecting for the poor – "as the center and focus for pastoral identity and spirituality." Lathrop invites pastors to recenter their busy lives on God and fuel their ministry through prayer.

The Pastor: A Spirituality

Advent/Christmas (Aids for Interpreting the Lessons of the Church Year: Proclamation 4, Series B)

Keyed to the Revised Common Lectionary, Book of Common Prayer, and Roman Catholic Lectionary for Mass, this book provides historical background, textual exegesis, and guidance for preaching on forty-six festivals and solemnities of the church year, including specifically Roman Catholic solemnities, as well as guidance for preaching on national occasions and special congregational focus days where services and occasion- appropriate sermons are often offered.

New Proclamation Commentary on Feasts, Holy Days, and Other Celebrations

Meyers, Ruth A.

Brosend, William F., II

Doggett, Bill

What Are the Essentials of Christian Worship (Open Questions in Worship)

Augsburg Fortress Pub

A revised and expanded edition of the 1994 classic. In the 10 years since this book was first published, the ELCA has been engaged in the multi-year Renewing Worship initiative. Lathrop's text has been revised to encompass new developments and directions suggested by this churchwide initiative and its provisional phase of development towards a new core worship resource.

Central Things: Worship in Word and Sacrament (Worship Matters)

AUGSBURG FORTRESS

The Protestant Reformation emphasized the centrality of scripture to Christian life; the twentieth-century liturgical movement emphasized the Bible's place at the heart of liturgy. But we have not yet explored the place of the Bible as the subject of critical exegesis in contemporary liturgy, argues Gordon W. Lathrop. He seeks to remedy that lack because it is critical historical scholarship that has shown us the grounding of the text in the life of the assembly and the role of intertextuality in its creation. "Saving" and revitalizing images of the past are at the heart of scripture and are the work of the gathered community. Lathrop finds patterns in biblical narratives that suggest revising our models of the "shape" of liturgy (Dix and Schmemann) and our understanding of baptism, preaching, Eucharist, and congregational prayer. He lifts up the visual imagery at the Dura Europos house church and elsewhere as a corrective to the supersessionist impulse in much Christian typology. He identifies the liturgical imperative as seriousness about the present rather than an effort to dwell in an imagined past. Saving Images is a call for a new, reconceived biblical-liturgical movement that takes seriously both biblical scholarship and the mystery at the heart of worship.

Saving Images: The Presence of the Bible in Christian Liturgy

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