This book outlines the story of how Christian worship developed since the days of the New Testament.  As a “social history,” this book pays particular attention to the way worship practices (liturgy) were influenced by the culture of the world around, or were a rejection or other sort of interaction with said culture.  It does present some theological background and explanation for some aspects of liturgy, but that is not its main purpose.  You don’t need to be a seminary student to understand this book.

What’s in this book?

To summarize the contents of the book, I’ll list the chapter titles and my brief summary of the content of each.

Chapter 1 – Socially speaking, what kind of group was the Christian assembly?  Pre-existing models for forming a local church include a Jewish Sect, a Household, a Club or Cultic Association, and a School.  But ecclesia (church) as a “Shadow Empire” really brings it all together: the local churches understood themselves as part of a larger universal body or whole.

Chapter 2 – Sacraments and Cult.  The “cultus” of Christianity, especially the Sacraments, have many Jewish and Greco-Roman counterparts to inform their development.

Chapter 3 – Apocalypse and Christian liturgy.  The book of Revelation is a reflection of the liturgy, and the apocalyptic culture of Early Christian worship continued into monasticism.

Chapter 4 – Times, Occasions, and the Communion of Saints. The Calendar and Hours arose for theological and practical reasons; never merely aping or replacing Pagan holidays.

Chapter 5 – Sacred places and Liturgical art in Late Antique Culture.  Sacred space developed in the sharp contrast to Pagan preference, and sacred art developed in sharp contrast to Jewish preference.

Chapter 6 – People and places for different liturgies.  The development of the Orders of Ministry and the standardization of liturgical rites and church architecture were all mutually influencing.

Chapter 7 – Church music through the Carolingian Renaissance.  Music and singing developed in such ways as to combat Paganism and heretics, expand beyond Jewish origins, as well as to beautify worship yet seeking new ways to include the lay people.

Chapter 8 – Vernacular elements in the Medieval Latin Mass.  Worship in local languages was frequently rediscovered through new hymns or carols or other resources.  Protestants only continued that practice; they didn’t invent it.

Chapter 9 – The Medieval liturgical calendar.  The liturgical calendar was developed with few pre-Christian influences remaining.

Chapter 10 – The Eucharistic Body and the Social Body in the Middle Ages.  Beliefs and practices surrounding Holy Communion impacted the social bonds of Medieval European society.

Chapter 11 – The dissolution of the Social Body in the Reformation Communion. The Eucharist lost its place of social centrality during the Reformation, especially to the State.

Chapter 12 – Death here and life hereafter in the Middle Ages and Reformation.  Medieval and Reformation doctrines and liturgies concerning death and burial were among the most radical changes of their day.

Chapter 13 – The ecclesiastical captivity of marriage.  Marriage long held a mixed secular and sacred position, and in the Reformation the Church and State were emphasized by different traditions.

Chapter 14 – Liturgy and confessional identity.  Liturgy, as the performance of theology through worship, was a critical tool for establishing the Reformation or Counter-Reformation.

Chapter 15 – Popular devotions, Pious communities, and Holy Communion.  Popular (or “paraliturgical”) devotions, hymn singing, Pietist meeting groups, and attitudes toward receiving Communion in the 17th-18th centuries revealed a growing sense of emotionalism and individualism.

Chapter 16 – Worship Awakening.  Revivalism in the USA, largely driven by culture, codified the emotional and individualist notion of worship and made it consumerist (what I get out of it, rather than what we put into it).

Chapter 17 – Liturgical Restoration.  The Enlightenment beginning in the mid-1700’s made the liturgy rationalistic and asserted more state control over the church.  Liturgical restoration has been slowly ongoing ever since.

Chapter 18 – Liturgical Renewal.  Liturgical renewal is a movement that has focused on the congregation’s participation in worship… often controversial but ecumenically successful.

Good points about the book

Whether you’re a Roman Catholic well-established in the Mass and the Hours and the Rosary, a Pentecostal who can’t imagine a legitimate worship service without speaking in tongues and prophetic utterances, or anywhere in between, there is a tendency to take one’s worship tradition for granted.  It’s not just about “why” we worship the way we do, there’s also the question of “how” our tradition ended up the way it did.  The Prayer Book I use wasn’t around in the 13th century.  The way your church baptizes people isn’t identical to how the Early Church baptized people.  This book traces the development of many aspects of worship – sacraments, ministry, music, calendar and seasons, and others – through the course of history.

This book’s 18 chapters are also organized by topic and arranged chronologically, so if there’s something in particular you want to read about, it’s pretty easy to dive in to the chapter(s) you need, and skip the rest.

Frank Senn wrote this book in an informal manner.  He doesn’t use more technical terms than he has to.  And when he does use them (especially Latin words like gradual or sanctus) he explains them right away.

Bad points about the book

However, once a technical term has been defined, Senn feels free to use that term without re-explanation through the rest of the book.  If you’re reading each chapter all the way through, this won’t be a problem, but if you come to this book aiming to study the Protestant and Revivalist worship culture of America, you may run up against a few references to material in earlier chapters without explanation or footnote.  Not that that’s a terrible thing, it just makes it harder for someone new to the subject to cherry-pick their way through this book.

My only disappointment with The People’s Work is the Epilogue.  There he briefly introduces the “emergent church” movement and offers a brief definition of the “liturgical retrieval” that they tend to practice.  And then, without much explanation or argumentation, he asserts his opinion that the future of Christianity in the Global South is going to be characterized by emergent liturgical retrieval.  It’s an oddly incongruous conclusion to draw after spending most of 18 chapters tracing a continuous development of worship practices for nearly 2,000 years.

The ratings in short:

Accessibility: 5/5
The book is very well organized, dealing in liturgical topics and historical periods with remarkable unity.

Devotional Usefulness: N/A
It’s more of a history than a liturgical-insight source.

Reference Value: 4/5
This is not explicitly Anglican, but its attention to all of Christian history is pretty helpful.

Overall Thoughts

If you’ve never thought much about worship practices before, this is a good first book to pick up on the subject.  If you think you know a lot about worship, but haven’t read many (or any) books on the subject, this is still a good first book to delve into.  The author is an attentive scholar, careful to keep his opinions out of the way (until the epilogue), giving a fair hearing to Roman Catholics, Revivalists, Presbyterians, Anglicans, and Pentecostals alike.

If you really want to dig into the subject of liturgy and worship, this is an excellent resource for giving you the scope of Christian worship without getting bogged down in too many technical details.  Pair this with a book that explores liturgy from a theological/spiritual perspective, such as Liturgical Theology by Simon Chan, and you’ll have yourself a fantastic start into understanding the basics of why worship takes place the way it does.

Welcome to Saturday Book Review time!  On most of the Saturdays this year we’re looking at a liturgy-related book noting (as applicable) its accessibility, devotional usefulness, and reference value.  Or, how easy it is to read, the prayer life it engenders, and how much it can teach you.

Worship Old & New by Robert E. Webber is, in some circles, a modern classic.  Webber (1933-2007) was a respected American theologian and known particularly for his work in the Convergence Movement, which is the ideology of combining catholic, evangelical, and charismatic spirituality together into a cohesive whole.  In short, he was a leading thinker behind the Three Streams model which was a huge fad in Anglican circles, though (I think?) is finally quieting down.  I was a fan of the Three Streams idea when I first heard of it – as most young people tend to be fans of the, exciting, promising trends, but as early as 2012 I started to have my doubts.  Now, seven years later, I’m comfortably opposed to the Three Streams model, and have even mentioned here briefly in the past that it smacks of broad church liberalism, and doesn’t ultimately produce the coherent discipleship one might have hoped for.

I open with that rabbit trail because what you read in Worship Old & New is exactly the mindset behind the Convergence Movement and Three Streams ecclesiology.  Citing Hippolytus and leaning heavily on the now-controversial work of Gregory Dix, Webber argues for a “shape” to the liturgy (primarily the Communion service) which provides structure for all, and walks through various traditions across historical and traditional lines.  He is explicitly critical of medieval liturgy, denigrating the use (or abuse!) of symbol and sign during that period of history, and argue that it was increasingly twisted from its proper meaning.  While there is much to be said about medieval excesses, his hostility to that period is not adequately backed up because:

1. Lutheran and Prayer Book liturgies are very much informed by their medieval forebears.  Yes, some Reformers went all-out in rewriting the liturgy, but many of us only required gentle trimmings of the fat, rather than wholesale revolution.
2. He begins the “medieval” excesses at Constantine, which is patently ridiculous when in the world of dogmatics and creedal theology we look at the 4th and 5th centuries as a veritable golden age of sound normative teaching!  Consider Webber’s own words:

Gradually, however, beginning with the Constantinian era, worship changed by the increasing addition of ceremony and the subtle influence of the mystery religions.  These new emphases became more extreme in the medieval period.  Although the basic structure and content of worship remained continuous with the past, the meaning of worship for both the clergy and the laity underwent some major changes.  Worship became a “mystery” in which God was made present (an epiphany).  This was accomplished through and allegorical view of the Mass and the doctrine of the bodily presence of Jesus in the bread and wine.  In this way the Mass assumed a character of a sacrifice and was celebrated for the benefit of both the living and the dead (creating a multiplicity of Masses and other abuses).

To be fair, this is not the lynchpin of the entire book.  But if this is the kind of scholarship he’s doing, and he’s willing to paint over history with so broad a brush stroke that (for example) even the Lutherans don’t count as reformers, I’m going to have to hesitate to trust his analysis of other periods of history and interpretation of the liturgy.  He looks too closely at two Early Church documents (by Hippolytus and Justin Martyr) and the late-20th-century milieu of change, and seems to re-shape everything in the middle according to the agenda he derives from the two extremes, rather than tracing the actual history and development along the way, and I think that causes him to miss out on a great deal of clarity and correction.

Another irksome feature of this book is that when it references “The Book of Common Prayer” it only means the American 1979 book.  He is either ignorant of prayer book tradition before the radical changes of the 1970’s, or he is oversimplifying things for his readers.  In either case, that makes this book significantly less helpful for an Anglican reader.

It’s not all bad, though.  His sections on biblical backgrounds of worship are quite refreshing for those brought up in non-denominational settings where worship is never really considered, just “done”.  It may also be refreshing for those who grew up in dry liturgical settings and similarly took worship for granted and never connected the dots.  Webber won’t make anyone an Anglican with this book, but he can engender liturgical awareness.

The ratings in short:

Accessibility: 4/5
The book is very well organized, complete with introduction and summary paragraphs bookending each chapter, making a quick synopsis of its contents very easy to ascertain.  The only reason this isn’t a 5 is because it can be so dry at times.

Devotional Usefulness: N/A
The insights of this book are a mixed bag and might not necessarily improve your engagement with the liturgy.

Reference Value: 3/5
In terms of liturgical formation, this book stands more in a “pre-Anglican” state, more useful for showing non-liturgical evangelicals how they could think about worship differently.  If you’re committed to Anglicanism, the perspective and information are too generic to be of much help growing within our tradition.

Recommendation?  Don’t buy this for an Anglican, it will only water down their understanding of liturgy.  But if you know someone in the free church tradition who wants or needs an eye-opener into what they’re missing, this book is a fine option for that.  Its strength for them is also its weakness for us: it won’t ruffle very many feathers because it never gets specific enough to make hard stances on anything.  Worship Old & New exists to transform chaotic generic evangelicalism into orderly generic evangelicalism.  Actual specific traditions or denominations need not apply.