The views expressed in this article are of the author only and do not necessarily represent those of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
Ancient-Future Evangelism: Making Your Church a Faith-Forming Community
Robert E. Webber
Baker (2003)
Ancient-Future Faith: Rethinking Evangelicalism for a Postmodern World
Robert E. Webber
Baker (1999)
Ancient-Future Time: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative
Robert E. Webber
Baker (2008)
The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life
Robert E. Webber
Baker (2006)
While worship has finally been recognized as worthy of robust pastoral theology, one pastor theologian developed this topic for more than 30 years before his untimely death in 2007, and his fingerprints are all over what is often called the “worship renewal” movement. Any pastor who wants to get a broad and solid foundation in all of the issues related to a church’s worship would do very well to get to know this wonderful author, Robert Webber. Webber wrote more than forty books, and I propose his final series, the Ancient-Future titles, as an adequate summary of his major contentions. A companion document, “A Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future,” co-authored with Philip Kenyon in 2006, is readily available online and offers a brief summary of his goals.
One review is not long enough to summarize and critique five books, so instead I will take this space to give Webber’s background, explaining why his perspective is so compelling and useful, a very brief overview of each title, and some positives and negatives about Webber’s contributions. Webber was born in 1934 to fundamentalist Baptist missionaries in the Belgian Congo. They returned to the States at the beginning of the War, and Webber went on to earn degrees from Bob Jones University, Reformed Episcopal Seminary, Covenant Theological Seminary, and Concordia Theological Seminary. He joined the faculty of Wheaton College in 1968 and experienced a turning point when preparing for the Reformation Day sermon in 1972. He decided that the Reformation was a “tragedy” in that it led to the separation and isolation of most of the world’s Christians, and soon after he officially joined the Evangelical Episcopal Church. In 1999, Webber founded the first school devoted entirely to the study of worship, the Institute for Worship Studies, and the following year took over the M.A. in Worship and Spirituality at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Webber’s books can be grouped into three “eras.” His books in the 1970s and 80s focused on the relationship between evangelicalism and the wider Christian church, highlighted by Common Roots: A Call to Evangelical Maturity and Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail: Why Evangelicals Are Attracted to the Liturgical Church. The 90s saw his focus shift specifically to worship and recorded his most well-known works, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God’s Mighty Deeds of Salvation; Worship Old and New: A Biblical, Historical, and Practical Introduction; Blended Worship: Achieving Substance and Relevance in Worship; and his award-winning The Complete Library of Christian Worship. Finally, the founding of his institute marked the third stage of his works, including the five books in focus of this review. During this time, Webber also became an editor and regular contributor to Worship Leader magazine, through which many worship leaders (including me) became familiar with his ideas. If you want to read someone who has been on the forefront of this movement for a very long time from an evangelical perspective, Webber is your author.
In my article in this journal, I summarized Webber’s priority, which is to encourage renewal in modern churches through a recovery of the ancient beliefs and practices of worship and discipleship. Rejecting the model of the church based on rationalism and individualism, Webber proposes an ecclesiology of community and counterculture, seeing the church as the continuing incarnation of Christ in the world. In the ancient church, discipleship was “immersed participation,” namely rehearsing and experiencing the entire gospel story every meeting, rather than didactic. He argues there is no place for considerations of the church as business or entertainment, as a watchdog or chaplain. The church is the body of Christ in and to the world. That disciple-building, which works itself out in the world, takes place in corporate worship.
Consequently for Webber, “worship renewal” has very little to do with drums and environmental projection and everything to do with a complete reevaluation of the church’s identity and vision. He develops that evaluation under five primary categories: belief system, evangelism and discipleship, the Christian year, spirituality, and worship. I will briefly summarize those topics in chronological order of publication.
Ancient-Future Faith. According to Webber, the primary critique of most evangelical churches is their rootlessness, a faith and practice that they seem to make up as they go along. In corrective, Webber argues, “Our calling is not the reinvent the Christian faith, but, in keeping with the past, to carry forward what the church has affirmed from the beginning” (p. 17), namely a faith in a Person, not a book. He maintains, “Christianity is not an I-It relationship but an I-thou personal relationship with the center of the universe” (p. 46). The early church did not build their faith on worship, Scripture, theology, education, or social action, but the knowledge that “Christ became one of us in order to destroy the power of evil and restore us and the world to God” (p. 66). He downplays the rational, pragmatic, and individualistic view of modern Christianity for the metaphysical and communal approach of the early church, which he describes throughout the book, because a faith based on moralism and factualism will never lead to spiritual transformation on the level expected by God. In summary, Webber believes that true renewal will happen when we reconsider the ancient rule of faith contained in the ecumenical creeds and ancient liturgies.
Ancient-Future Evangelism. According to Webber, a second major critique of evangelicalism is its tendency to compartmentalize the Christian life, having separate movements that emphasize evangelism, discipleship, spirituality, revival, and social action. In contrast, the early church approached the Christian life holistically in community, believing, “Conversion is not merely embracing an intellectual idea; it is taking one’s place within the body of people who confess Christ and seek to live out the kingdom of Jesus” (p. 39). That body was and should be today shaped by “a tradition of worship, discipleship, Christian formation, and vocation that is rooted in the teaching and practices that go all the way back to Jesus and his disciples. New Christians do not enter into a community that reinvents the Christian faith for every generation” (p. 63). Evangelism should be seen as integration into community, and its primary purpose “is to train the new Christian in the practice of living in the pattern of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ” (p. 89), basing his approach on the belief that the church “is not a mere collection of individuals, a human entity, but in a mystical way it is a real and actual experience that connects with the Son and the Spirit” (p. 155). That union is manifest most clearly when a church gathers for worship.
Ancient-Future Time. Webber argues that the rootlessness of evangelicalism is also caused by its calendar; most evangelical churches are shaped far more by a secular calendar than anything of Christ. But Webber expects something more; “I wanted something that ordered by life into the pattern of Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and coming again” (p. 23). Webber finds such a pattern in the traditional church year: Advent, a time to pray for God to break into our lives; Christmas, a time to celebrate the Incarnation; Epiphany, a time to pursue union with Christ; Lent, a time to identify with the death of Christ; Holy Week, a time to celebrate victory; Pentecost, a time to be open to the Holy Spirit; and Ordinary Time, a time to be the church in the world. He exhorts church leaders to let this annual cycle of the life of Christ drive each church’s schedule, not the empty holidays promoted by the secular culture. Webber argues that this is the answer for those Christians who are discouraged by “a church shaped more by culture than by the biblical and early church principles of God’s community” (p. 150).
The Divine Embrace (Ancient-Future Spirituality). According to Webber, a third major critique of evangelicalism is its rationalism and loss of mystery. Christians do not want an intellectual relationship with God but a spiritual union that transforms lives. He finds that in Jesus Christ: “The exercise of Jesus’ will to always do the will of the Father is the key to our participation in God. Like Jesus, we participate in God by submitting our will to the purposes of God perfectly modeled for us and even already accomplished for us by Jesus” (p. 41). Webber walks through a history of spirituality, ultimately rejecting intellectualism, experientialism, and legalism for a life-affirming contemplation of and participation in the mystery that is Christ in us. For many evangelicals today, their spirituality is something they do (quiet times, Bible studies, and discipleship programs); Webber counters that true spirituality is found in a relationship that God has created with us through Jesus Christ. This has always been intended by God to be experienced in the community of each church, baptized into mystical union with God, sharing an embodied spiritual life. Webber exhorts, “So our goal is never to become spiritual but to live out the spirituality we have in Jesus through the choices that spring forth from continually living in God’s embrace affirmed in baptism” (p. 207). God intends that to be shaped and guided by the community of faith in its gatherings for worship.
Ancient-Future Worship. In this, the culmination of his desires for the church, Webber proposes a full program for the corporate worship gathering. He argues that worship must do God’s story by remembering the past and anticipating the future. As in other books, he traces how worship services have devolved into their current didactic or enthusiastic forms, appealing that the way to recover the fullness of worship is to return to the forms of the ancient church: “We remember God’s saving deeds and anticipate his vision, his final rule over all creation” (p. 109). He proposes a four-fold pattern of worship focusing on the service of the Word and the service of the Table, buffered from the dislocations of life by a call to worship and a commissioning. In that pattern, the emphasis is on God who mysteriously communicates to us “through visible and tangible signs such as gatherings of people, the words of Scripture, and the material reality of water, bread, and wine” (p. 135). Read in conjunction with his other books, Webber’s proposal for a church’s worship addresses each of the major critiques he has observed of evangelicalism.
Let me be clear that I wholeheartedly endorse this series to pastors, worship leaders, and all church members who have any interest in worship renewal. Webber’s writing style is easily engaged at a popular level; he approaches each work with the assumption that his audience does not have a background in worship studies, church history, patristics, or comparative theology. Every section you read leaves you more knowledgeable about the church, more in love with God, and more hopeful for the future. They require a willingness to learn—Webber introduces a lot of names and concepts—but anyone interested in this topic likely does not expect the solution to be simple!
Webber’s enthusiasm and optimism, a characteristic that has always endeared him to me, creates a few technical problems that may bother some readers. So eager to explain and broadcast his proposals, Webber tends to oversimplify and overstate complex historical developments, making bold proclamations about matters that are in fact still under debate among experts in those fields. Reviews of Webber tend to complain about his reliance on secondary sources and his cherry-picking of just those works that support his contentions. I am more than willing to forgive that significant concern because these aren’t intended to be seminary texts, and Webber’s primary points are accurate. Many evangelical churches have abandoned the riches of church tradition for reliance on pragmatism and rationalism, and that has led to some very peculiar and unfulfilling models of worship.
My primary concern with Webber’s works has to do with his underlying proposal: that a church must embrace the ancient traditions in order to be renewed in its worship and discipleship. That is simply untrue. Where Webber’s proposals are irreplaceably useful is where he points out their connection with the biblical witness. The ancient traditions are rich with biblical meaning and steeped in a biblical worldview, and that makes it an invaluable mirror for modern evangelicals to use. But eternal, cross-cultural value is found in the Bible, not tradition; there are plenty of extrabiblical elements in those traditions, and where they are in conflict with Scripture they must be discarded. As a result, a church does not have to go down the Ancient-Future road in order to experience the renewal that every church desires; the resources we need are the Word and Spirit. That is very important to me speaking from the Free Church tradition, as my earlier article reflects. Being a Free Church is not mutually exclusive from experiencing worship renewal! Nonetheless, every reader will find in these books a wide range of challenges that his or her church carefully consider, starting with Webber’s primary thesis that a church’s corporate worship should be their primary driver of spiritual formation. As long as a reader can critically engage Webber’s sources and arguments without uncritically embracing his conclusions, these books offer a wonderful introduction to a critical and timely matter of pastoral theology.
Matt Ward (PhD, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary) is the Associate Pastor at First Baptist Church of Thompson, GA. He is a member of the St. John Fellowship of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
