Times and Seasons: Creating Transformative Worship throughout the Year

The outstanding gift that Richard Giles has brought to the church is his ability to link how church buildings look and what happens during services to theology. Churches that look like museums and have static worship, where a passive audience sits in pews, is as about as far removed as you can get from the biblical concept of the church as the pilgrim people of God, forever journeying and "seeking a country that is to come". When liturgy begins to embody this fundamental awareness, the effect is dramatic and worship becomes a transformative encounter in which all the senses are engaged.

Richard's previous book, Creating Uncommon Worship (Canterbury Press), gave a step-by-step guide to how the Eucharist might be celebrated with this perspective in mind. Now in this companion Times and Seasons volume he suggests many practical ways of creating elements of worship that reflect the varied moods of the liturgical year--what Archbishop Rowan Williams calls "that map of the soul's seasons."