“God works through life, through people, and through physical, tangible, and material reality to communicate his healing presence in our lives.”
“For years, the church has emphasized evangelism, teaching, fellowship, missions, and service to society to the neglect of the very source of its power--worship.”
“We must learn, then, not to HAVE a spirituality, something we turn on at a particular place or time, but to BE spiritual, as a habit of life, a continuous state of being. It is to this end that we seek after God in the stillness and hubbub of life, but always and everywhere in and through the church, where Christ is made present to us and, through us, to the world.”
“The faith engaged with Platonism in the ancient world, with Aristotle in the medieval world, with nominalism in the Reformation era, and with rationalism in the modern world. Now the church must engage with the emergence of a postmodern, post- Christian, neo-pagan world.”
“There is something explainable about what man has accomplished in God's creation, while the creation itself remains a mystery.”
“I find when most people are honest about their spiritual pilgrimage, they admit to the difficulty of maintaining the habit of a spiritual discipline. What attracks me most about the Anglican spiritual tradition is that it provides purposeful spiritual direction in the life of Christ.”
“In the Episcopal Church I find a healthy sense of unity and diversity. In this tradition we recognize that that which holds the church together is more important than that which divides the church.”
“The church has unfolded in many forms, and no one single external form stands alone as the CORRECT visible expression. As the church settled in various geographical areas and as it penetrated through a variety of cultures, it found expression in multifaceted forms. Thus, the insistence that the church must exist in a single form is a denial not only of the richness of creation, but also of the complexities of the human response.”
“Because God is the subject who acts upon me in worship, my participation is not reduced to verbal responses or to singing, but it is living in the pattern of the one who is revealed in worship.”
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Robert E. 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. Webber began teaching theology at Wheaton College in 1968. Existentialism was the primary focus of Webber's research and lectures during his first years at Wheaton. However, he soon shifted his focus to the early church. In 1978 he wrote Common Roots, a book that examined the impact of 2nd-century Christianity on the modern church.In 1985 Webber wrote Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail: Why Evangelicals Are Attracted to the Liturgical Church, in which he described the reasons behind his own gradual shift away from his fundamentalist/evangelical background toward the Anglican tradition. Webber faced an enormous amount of criticism from evangelicals in response to this book. Nevertheless, his work was highly influential, and his ideas grew in popularity in evangelical circles. 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 Worship, Ancient-Future Faith, Ancient-Future Time, Ancient-Future Evangelism, The Younger Evangelicals, and The Divine Embrace.