Ronald J. Allen

Clark M. Williamson

This book offers an introduction to worship from the standpoint of process theology. It helps worship planners develop services of worship that are characterized by an intense vision of community with God, where depth of feeling surmounts verbal language and touch the believer in the most life-shaping ways. Process conceptuality allows the church to move toward genuinely contemporary worship while drawing from the past, explaining how worship is understood in this Christian tradition and moving to practical approaches such as conceiving the service, preparing the prayers, the liturgy, and the sermon; the sacraments, the wedding and the funeral, and the arts' role in worship. The ultimate goal is not only to show how process theology can inform each aspect of the service of worship, but to help the Christian community deepen its apprehension of God through services of worship.

A Guide to Worship from the Perspective of Process Theology

Adventures of the Spirit

The point of this book is simple: to make Christians aware of a story that they have not been told--the story of relations between Christians and Jews. This involves tracing the church's anti-Judaism to its source in the gospels and the Book of Acts and describing the development of the church's displacement-replacement theology according to which we new Gentiles, spiritual, universal, inclusive Christians replace the old, carnal, ethnocentric legalist and works-righteous Jews in the favor of God. The story also details the actions of the churches, specifically a long chain of canons (laws) governing relations between Jews and Christians, all the way from banning Christians for socializing or dining with Jews, marrying Jews, and asking rabbis for blessings, to requiring all Jews to live in ghettos. This history of actions comes down to the present and its consequences in the Holocaust in which all the killers were Christians and in the Nazi laws governing Jewish behavior. Each such law took its precedent from a canon law passed by a council of the church. The recent rash of bomb threats against Jewish Community Centers and synagogues reminds us of how deeply this bigotry is embedded in people. The point of making people aware of anti-Judaism is to prompt them not to shrug if off when scripture readings regularly teach contempt for Jews with the rhetoric of vilification. Words are important. Teaching contempt should be called out and rejected. This can be done pastorally and gently, but it should be done. Otherwise the church's language reinforces a deeply embedded bigotry. Most Christian pastors are unaware of this reality and prone to thinking that anti-Judaism is not a serious problem for the church. Hence most anti-Judaism in Christian preaching is unintentional. Awareness of the story of Christian anti-Judaism prods us to move from unintentional anti-Judaism to intentional teaching of respect for Jews and Judaism.

Clark M. Williamson

About

Books

Join the club