Through Scot McKnight, I found out Robert Webber’s last two books are out. I am a huge Webber fan. The first book is Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting Gods Narrative. From the back cover:
God has a story. Worship does God’s story. There is a crisis of worship today. The problem goes beyond matters of style–it is a crisis of content and of form. Worship in churches today is too often dead and dry, or busy and self-involved. Robert Webber attributes these problems to a loss of vision of God and of God’s narrative in past, present, and future history. As he examines worship practices of Old Testament Israel and the early church, Webber uncovers ancient principles and practices that can reinvigorate our worship today and into the future. The final volume in Webber’s acclaimed Ancient-Future series, Ancient-Future Worship is the culmination of a lifetime of study and reflection on Christian worship. Here is an urgent call to recover a vigorous, God-glorifying, transformative worship through the enactment and proclamation of God’s glorious story. The road to the future, argues Webber, runs through the past.
The second book is Who Gets to Narrate the World?: Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals. The amazon description is:
Who gets to narrate the world?
The late Robert Webber believed this question to be the most pressing issue of our time. Christianity in America, he preached, will not survive if Christians are not rooted in and informed by the uniquely Christian story that is the gospel of Jesus Christ.
This is the burden of Webber’s final book, Who Gets to Narrate the World? Contending for the Christian Story in an Age of Rivals. Convinced that American evangelicals are facing the demise of their entire way of life and faith, Webber challenges his readers to rise up and engage both the external and internal challenges confronting them today. This means that Christians must repent of their cultural accommodation and reclaim the unique story the Christian story that God has given them both to proclaim and to live.
McKnight says about this book:
This was Bob Webber’s last book; it puts together all of his thinking but there are two major distinctions of this small, readable book: first, he applies narrative theology to the world in which we live, the world in which the story of radical Islam poses a threat; second, this book traces how the “story” was understood in the early church, how it was lost, and how it needs to be regained.
I highly recommend this book, not only as a quick access to Webber’s seminal ideas, but as a study worth using in small groups.
The final news of the morning comes from the Out of Ur blog. Earlier this week I posted about Ed Young Jr’s Church Pirates video found on his blog. At Out of Ur, Ed posts about the motivation of why he did this. He says,
I did this video because pirating is something that I have seen happen to far too many churches…
My hope is that as light is shed on this controversial and often taboo topic we, as church leaders, can have some healthy discussion about the reality of planting versus pirating. And as the dialogue continues, I pray that we can all join together to support those leaders who are truly starting new churches the right way and finally keep the pirates at bay.
