New Creation: Elements of a Liturgical Worldview

Although the twentieth century has witnessed a thorough liturgical revival and renewal, the last ten years have exploded in diverse and conflicting styles, settings, and even media of corporate worship: traditional high-church liturgies, alternative worship for small communities, women church services, seeker services at megachurches, and more. Does this innovation portend a brave new liturgical world, or is it just dumbing down? For example, do megachurch services simply revive the old frontier revival and, in an effort to reach out, accommodate Christianity to the reigning consumer culture? One of today's most knowledgeable liturgical theologians and historians contemplates the future shape of liturgy. He believes that ritual systems--liturgy--express and inculcate a worldview, an implicit theology; and, he fears lest the community of faith gain the whole world and lose its soul. New Creation proposes the lines of a Christian culture or worldview, or way of life, that can inform liturgical renewal. Twelve erudite and earnest chapters further specify this counter-cultural matrix as it pertains to God, Christ, church, creation, world, worship, hospitality, culture, evangelism, prayer, and life itself.