Ancient-Future Time - Robert E. Webber
Robert Eugene Webber (1933 – 2007) was an American theologian known for his work on worship and the early church. He played a key role in the Convergence Movement, a move among evangelical and charismatic churches in the United States to blend charismatic worship with liturgies from the Book of Common Prayer and other liturgical sources.
During the latter half of his life, Webber took a special interest in Christian worship practices. He wrote more than 40 books on the topic of worship, focusing on how the worship practices of the ancient church have value for the church in the 21st century postmodern era. Among his books are Ancient-Future Faith, Ancient-Future Time, Ancient-Future Evangelism, The Younger Evangelicals, and The Divine Embrace. Webber also served as editor of The Complete Library of Christian Worship (1995), an eight-volume series created to serve as a comprehensive reference for professors, students, pastors, and worship leaders. The series draws on several thousand texts and publications and covers topics like Old and New Testament worship and contemporary applications for music and the arts.
Webber founded the Institute for Worship Studies in Jacksonville, Florida in 1993, which offered doctor of worship studies and master’s of worship studies degree programs. It was the only institute in the country to focus exclusively on worship education. He remained president of the Institute until his death.
In 2006, he organized and edited the Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future, a document intended “to restore the priority of the divinely inspired biblical story of God’s acts in history”.
Webber died of pancreatic cancer on April 27, 2007 at his home in Sawyer, Michigan, aged 73.
Ancient-Future Time - Forming Spirituality Through The Christian Year
Discover ancient rhythms for a new spiritual awakening.
God’s people have always celebrated his work by retelling the stories of his mighty deeds of salvation. In a time when the church’s memory sometimes seems short, many are rediscovering the value of using the Christian year to pattern our celebrations around the essential truths of the faith.
Millions of Christians worldwide follow the liturgical Christian calendar in their worship services and in their own personal devotions. The seasons of the Christian year connect believers of diverse backgrounds and offer the sense of unity Jesus desired. Robert Webber believes that we can get even more out of the Christian calendar. He contends that through its rich theological meanings the Christian year can become a cycle for evangelism and spiritual formation. He offers pastors, church leaders, and those of the “younger evangelical” mind-set practical steps to help achieve this end, including preaching texts and worship themes for Lent, Easter, Pentecost, Advent, and Christmas.
In ANCIENT-FUTURE TIME, Robert Webber draws from this church tradition by introducing and exploring biblical themes and liturgical traditions for each season of the Christian calendar. Helpful charts, prayers, reflection questions, and resource lists are provided for those planning church worship or seeking old, yet new, paths to spiritual growth through a deeper understanding of the Christian year.
Roger’s comment:
This book was a breath of fresh air. I was always concerned that Robert Webber seemed to be claimed by the Emergent lot and therefore I viewed his work with a certain amount of suspicion. I was certainly underwhelmed by the audio I had heard of the 2007 Call To An Ancient Evangelical Future Conference put on by Robert E. Webber Center For An Ancient Evangelical Future. What I heard was pretty woolly and insipid. But I did enjoy Ancient-Future Faith when I read it a couple of years ago, despite not agreeing with all of Webber’s assertions about the relationship of the Christian faith and postmodernism. This book, however, is packed full of solid biblical support for Webber’s suggestions and assertions. I couldn’t fault him in this book and felt completely comfortable with his expressed theology.
Ancient-Future Time was really enjoyable and held my attention to the last page (that’s saying something - my home library is littered with books that I started but put down after a couple of chapters - I’m a good starter, but not such a good finisher). As a protestant evangelical Christian who has attended Baptist and Church of Christ churches during my adult life, I have felt somewhat starved of reverant Christian ceremony and tradition. Most modern evangelical churches (including ones I currently attend or I have attended) seem so obsessed with distancing themselves from liturgical tradition and ceremony, that they happily acknowledge secular festivals like Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and ANZAC Day while completely ignoring important traditional Christian observances such as Advent, Lent and Palm Sunday. This irritates me. I think this is obviously a hangover of the church-growth and seeker-sensitive experiments, where this kind of Christian ceremony is erroneously thought to be a turn-off to seekers and young Christians. Unfortunately, I think that unhooking ourselves from the observances of the traditional historic Christian faith puts the Church at grave risk of false teaching, cultural compromise and cultural irrelevance.
With theologians like Brian McLaren making a big deal recently about celebrating Ramadan with Muslims, I think this book is a timely reminder to evangelical Christians of the importance and the potential rewards of taking a fresh look at the traditional Christian observances, that were developed in the early Church for well-thought out purposes and objectives. Modern evangelical Christian teaching, discipleship and spiritual formation practices (if they happen at all) can tend to be random, unguided (or at least self-guided) and inconsistent. What Webber reminds the reader is that we need not re-invent the wheel, so to speak. Committed and devout Christians over the Church’s history have deliberately developed the Christian calendar, with observances such as Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter and Pentecost with clear teaching, worship, discipleship and spiritual formation objectives in mind. Why should these Christian traditions be the territory of Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Episcopalians, etc and we evangelical protestants miss out? Why indeed I asked myself. Done with the right intention in mind (in particular being careful to avoid a mindless, works-righteousness manner) these traditional Christian observances seem to be a perfectly logical and effective way to solid biblical spiritual formation and maturity.
So, I have decided to give this a go, starting with an observance of Advent from November 29th and continuing through all of the Christian observances throughour 2010. I will be blogging about my experiences in a new post category I’m calling “Spiritual Formation”. Hope you will watch with interest and even join me on this spiritual formation experiment.