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The Webber Quote of the Week was established Thanksgiving 2007 in gratitude to God for the legacy of Robert E. Webber, and to extend the wisdom and inspiration that is stockpiled in his many books and writings to all who will read. The Webber Quote of the Week is a ministry of The Robert E. Webber Institute for Worship Studies. For information on the vision and work of Robert Webber go to the Robert Webber page on the Institute's Web site. September 29, 2008 Biblical remembering makes the power and the saving effect of the event present to the worshiping community. . . . God loves our worship when we remember his saving deeds in Jesus Christ. Our worship tells that old, old, story. That’s the story God gave the world, and that story is the content of worship. Through worship the world learns its own story. And how will others hear unless we do God’s story in worship, calling people to remember God’s story? . . . Forgetting brings death, but remembering brings life. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 43-44.
September 22, 2008 Here is what biblical worship does: It remembers God’s work in the past, anticipates God’s rule over all creation, and actualized both past and future in the present to transform persons, communities, and the world. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 43.
September 15, 2008 What does it mean to say, “Worship does God’s story?” It is this: Worship proclaims, enacts, and sings God’s story. Worship is not a program. Nor is worship about me. Worship is a narrative—God’s narrative of the world from its beginning to its end. How will the world know its own story unless we do that story in public worship? Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 39-40.
September 8, 2008 In the incarnation, God unites with our humanity in Jesus Christ. . . . Reflection on the incarnation and its connection to every aspect of God’s story is the missing link in today’s theological reflection and worship. The link is found in these words: God does for us what we cannot do for ourselves. . . . God himself, the incarnate Word, takes up residence (unites) with our fallen self so that he, God, now as a man, can reverse the human condition. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 35-36.
September 1, 2008 I am concerned over how worship has become a program, a show, and entertainment. Once again the problem is a self-centered and presentational approach to worship. If we think worship is about me, or if we are trying to sell people on worship and lure them to receive Jesus into their lives, then I can see the value of all entertaining programs. But once again, presentational worship turns true worship on its head. If worship is truly doing God’s story and calling people to find their life and story by entering God’s story, then the style of worship is prayer. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 25.
August 25, 2008 In worship we remember God’s story in the past and anticipate God’s story in the future. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 23.
August 18, 2008 A dominant error of some Christians is to say, “I must bring God into my story.” The ancient understanding is that God joins the story of humanity to take us unto his story. There is a world of difference. One is narcissistic; the other is God-oriented. It will change your entire spiritual life when you realize that your life is joined to God’s story. Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), 23.
August 11, 2008 What should be the content of Table worship? We remember the death (Lord’s Supper); we celebrate the Resurrection (breaking of bread); we enter into intimate relationship with the resurrected Christ at his Table (communion); and we give thanks for the work of Christ (Eucharist). Robert E. Webber, Planning Blended Worship: the Creative Mixture of Old and New. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998), 131.
August 4, 2008 One of the main requirements of the worshiper is to seek connections in God’s Word. . . . This will require attentiveness. . . . In order for the Word to take up residence within the person, it is furthermore necessary to hear with an intent or resolve. Resolve is the will by which we choose to let God inform and form our lives. When God speaks, we not only hear God, we also act on what we hear. Robert E. Webber, Planning Blended Worship: the Creative Mixture of Old and New. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998), 89.
July 28, 2008 Any church’s worship is only a formal, empty ritual if the worshipers do not respond with intentionality. Intention in worship is achieved when the heart knows its need and becomes open and vulnerable to God’s action through a virtual abandonment. An abandoned spirit listens for God’s Word to speak into the individual’s own life. Robert E. Webber, Planning Blended Worship: the Creative Mixture of Old and New. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998), 46.
July 21, 2008 Worship leaders need to be guided by three central questions as they consider the content of worship: 1) How does this worship speak to God’s glory in heaven and God’s saving actions on earth? 2) How does this worship help people identify their dislocation? 3) How does this worship lead people into a relocation with God? Robert E. Webber, Planning Blended Worship: the Creative Mixture of Old and New. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998), 42.
July 14, 2008 The underlying conviction of Christian worship is that we are all in a state of dislocation. We are dislocated from God, from self, from neighbor, and from nature. But God has entered into our history in Jesus Christ to bring relocation. . . . In true worship our relationship to God is established, maintained, repaired, and transformed. Robert E. Webber, Planning Blended Worship: the Creative Mixture of Old and New. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998), 41, 45.
July 7, 2008 Worship is the center of the hourglass, the key to forming the inner life of the Church. Everything the Church does moves toward public worship, and all its ministries proceed from worship. Robert E. Webber, Planning Blended Worship: the Creative Mixture of Old and New. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998), 29.
June 30, 2008 In contemporary society the heart is reached through participation, and all approaches to worship—traditional, contemporary, or blended—need to relearn how to achieve services characterized by immersed participation. Robert E. Webber, Planning Blended Worship: the Creative Mixture of Old and New. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998), 29.
June 23, 2008 Congregations . . . should recognize the difficulty of leading contemporary worship. One cannot simply pick up a guitar, assemble contemporary instruments, pick out the right songs, and expect it to go well. Worship leading requires certain skills, a good grasp of how to accomplish the transitions from one phase to another, an ability to make the right connecting comments between songs, a strong bond with the congregation, and a heart in tune with the Spirit. Robert E. Webber, Worship Old and New: A Biblical, Historical, and Practical Introduction, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing, 2004), 160.
June 16, 2008 Me-oriented worship is the result of a culturally driven worship. When worship is situated in the culture and not in the story of God, worship becomes focused on the self. It becomes narcissistic. . . . Much of our worship has shifted from a focus on God and God’s story to a focus on me and my story (231). Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 231.
June 9, 2008 The true love of God and the true experience of God are not found in the languages of experience. . . . We do not contemplate our own experience of God or the romantic feelings we may experience. We contemplate the wonder, the marvel, the mystery, the glory of God creating and becoming incarnate to re-create the whole world and bring it back to himself. Worship is not measured by the depth of my feelings but the deep wonder of the God whose story is so marvelous that it does in fact create feelings of love and gratitude. Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 95. June 2, 2008 In the early church the public worship of the church was a prayer of praise and thanksgiving directed not to the people but to God. Seeing worship as prayer is a paradigm shift from the current presentational notion of worship. . . . Worship as prayer shapes who we are. Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 234-235. May 26, 2008 There really is no such thing as an empty symbol or empty language. Language and symbols perform. They say, they do, they act, they communicate, they express the language of the heart. . . . Baptism says what it does, and it does what it says. It discloses our union with Jesus Christ, an embrace that establishes a new identity and opens the window on God’s vision for our life in God’s world. Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 155. May 19, 2008 The spiritual life is a passionate participation in God imitating the one and only human being fully united to God, Jesus. . . . Since God has already accepted us in Christ, who lifted our humanity up into his, and by the Spirit has done everything necessary to make us acceptable to God, the spiritual life is a freedom to participate in God, not a duty. In Jesus we are born again to become fully human, to be what God created us to be in the first place. So the spiritual life, this marriage we have with God, is an embodied union with God and with his vision for the world revealed to us in Jesus by the Spirit. Our spiritual life, then, is not just a feeling, an idea, or a spiritual romance. No! It is an embodiment of God’s vision for humanity clearly spoken in the words of Jesus and visualized in concrete ways in his action. Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 174-175. May 12, 2008 Worship does God’s story. It proclaims God’s story in the reading and preaching of the Word; in prayer, the church prays for the world God has reclaimed; in the Eucharist, the church ascends into the heavens and experiences the consummation of God’s story in the new heavens and the new earth. Robert Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 233. May 5, 2008 Biblical worship tells and enacts [God’s] story. Narcissistic worship, instead, names God as an object to whom we offer honor, praise, and homage. Narcissistic worship is situated in the worshiper, not in the action of God that the worshiper remembers through Word and table. Robert Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 232-233. April 28, 2008 If God is the object of worship, then worship must proceed from me, the subject, to God, who is the object. . . . If God is understood, however, as the personal God who acts as subject in the world and in worship rather that the remote God who sits in the heavens, then worship is understood not as the acts of adoration God demands of me but as the disclosure of Jesus, who has done for me what I cannot do for myself. In this way worship is the doing of God’s story within me so that I live in the pattern of Jesus’s death and resurrection. Robert Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 232. April 21, 2008 There is no story but God’s; no God but the Father, Son and Spirit; and no life but the baptized life. Robert Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 243.
In tribute to our
founder and friend, Bob Webber
Whatever thy hand findeth to do, April 14, 2008 The church needs to be realigned to the intent of Christ, but it does not need to be reinvented. Reinventing the church is what we do when we allow the culture to shape the church. . . . Obviously the church must speak to the culture. It only speaks authentically and with integrity, however, when speaking out of the story of God. The moment the church capitulates to the culture and speaks out of one or more of the culture’s stories and not out of the story of God, the church loses its nature and mission and ceases to be salt and light to the world. Robert Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 229. April 7, 2008 Christ is the embodied story of God, the one in whom God became human and showed us what humanity was intended to be. The faithful life is the life that seeks to live the Jesus way. [Such devotion] means you can count on me to be Jesus to you. And when I fail, which we all do, you can count on me to repent and return to my intent to be faithful to living in the pattern of death and resurrection. Robert Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 205. March 31, 2008 Consumers want programs. . . . But nowhere in the Epistles do you find the apostolic writers urging the church to develop programs. Instead all the teaching is about a way of life, and that way of life is taught and caught in the church as it sees itself as the continuation of God’s story in the world. For example, in the spirit of Paul calling us to be imitators of Christ daily, one might ask, “Who am I discipling? Who is discipling me? Am I a disciple of Jesus Christ?” Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 228. March 24, 2008 The biblical metaphor for Easter spirituality is found in baptism. The baptized life is a life that is lived in the pattern of death and resurrection. . . . The message of Easter is that the way of being in Jesus, the way of living the new resurrected life is through participation. . . . We participate in Christ by living the life of our baptism into his death and resurrection. This is a daily, existential, moment-by-moment experience as we choose in this or that situation to die to the sins for which Christ died and choose the life of the Spirit for which Christ was raised to a new life. Robert Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 146-147. March 17, 2008 Jesus Christ alone provides the solution for which the whole world groans. God defeats evil on the cross for us. He wins a great victory over evil for us. In his resurrection he conquered the results of sin—which is death—so that death is not the last word written over our life. “‘Death, has been swallowed up in victory.’ ‘Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?’ The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 15:54-57). Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 135-6. March 10, 2008 Here then is Christian spirituality: We are spiritual because of God’s divine embrace of humanity and all creation. By his own two hands—the incarnate Word and the Spirit—God’s divine embrace has restored our union with himself for us. He has done for us what we cannot do for ourselves—re-establish the connection with God that we ourselves broke in our rebellion. Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 142.
March 3, 2008 Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 221-222.
February 25, 2008 Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 151. February 18, 2008 "Lent is the time to identify a power working against us and crucify it with Christ and bury it in the tomb, never to be raised again. . . . [Fasting] controls the passion for food in order to deal with a passion of another sort that holds us in its grip. The purpose of the ascetical fast is to liberate us from the power that flesh holds over the spirit. . . . For example, a person may fast as a means to experience victory over jealousy, envy, anger, lust, lack of integrity. . . . The ascetical fast that deals with an issue of character development requires choice and intention on our part. We have to exercise the power of our own will over against the powers of evil that continually draw us into habits of life that are contrary to the gospel." Robert Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 114-115. February 11, 2008 “We are not spiritual because we practice the disciplines or use pious words but because we are united to Jesus who has restored our union with God. 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. Look at [the] disciplines . . . not as sources of spirituality but as disciplines that help us fulfill the spiritual life to which we have been called in Christ." Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 207. February 4, 2008 “Lent . . . calls us back to God, back to basics, back to the spiritual realities of life. It calls on us to put to death the sin and the indifference we have in our hearts toward God and our fellow persons. And it beckons us to enter once again into the joy of the Lord—the joy of a new life born out of a death to the old life. This is what Ash Wednesday is all about—the fundamental change of life required of those who would die with Jesus and be raised to a new life in him.” Robert Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 99-100. January 28, 2008 “Christian spirituality is not a journey into self as if spirituality is found in the deep recesses of our nature, hidden inside of us, waiting for release. No, true Christian spirituality is the embrace of Jesus, who, united to God, restores our union with God that we lost because of sin. This is how the ancient church understood God’s embrace.” Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 127. January 21, 2008 When someone asks me the question, “Do you have a personal relationship with God?” I always answer, “You’re asking the wrong question. What is important here is not that I in and of myself achieve or create a personal relationship with God, but that God has a personal relationship with me through Jesus Christ, which I affirm and nourish.” Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 89. January 14, 2008 “We are the disciples whom Jesus has called . . . to turn away from self-love and self-service, to abandon a life lived for self-gratification or self-glory, and to serve God as an epiphany of the self-giving service of Jesus. True spirituality longs for, seeks for, and wills this abandonment of self so that Christ may become present through our work, our lives, and our relationships, manifesting his power. Robert Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 88. January 7, 2008 “Between the wedding feast in Cana and the impending death of Jesus, a progressive unveiling of his glory will appear. The season of Epiphany . . . celebrates this progressive unveiling of God’s glory manifest in Jesus and invites us to order our spiritual journey around the Christ manifest in history, manifest in us. . . . Spirituality is Christ living his life in us and through us. The manifestation of the glory of God made present in Jesus is to continue in his followers.” Robert Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 85-86. December 31, 2007 Bob recounts attending his first Epiphany service: “I realized that an epiphany was occurring for me right there in the service of worship. I was seeing the glory of God in Christ face-to-face. This manifestation, this epiphany, was not to be a thing of the past, something that happened two thousand years ago, but was to be an appearance now in the body of Christ assembled, an epiphany in me. I had been called from light to darkness, and now I was to be a manifestation of Christ. My part was to respond, to say yes to the calling, to commit my life to be a center through which the Epiphany could be extended beyond the crib to the world of my everyday experience." Robert Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 79. December 24, 2007 “The incarnation is the starting point for our spirituality. . . . God united himself with humans in order for men and women to be united with God. The incarnation is not something unrelated to us; it has everything to do with our spirituality—for the incarnation not only brings God to human nature but brings human nature to God." Robert Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 62. December 17, 2007 “Advent is the time when God breaks in on us with new surprises and touches us with a renewing and restoring power. . . . We should use the Advent season as a period to identify the matters from which we need to be redeemed. Identify whatever it is that seems to be holding you in its power. . . . Commit it to the one who comes to set the prisoners free, turn it over to Christ in prayer, and ask the one who has come into your life to take this problem up into himself." Robert Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 38, 51. December 10, 2007 “God’s story is the brief interpretation of everything. It is . . . a true picture of the world and our place in it. And through this picture we hear the voice of God who says . . . “I opened the way for you to live in my embrace of you and the world. Through my Son Jesus and by my Spirit I have embraced you so that now, united with me, you may embrace me as a child learns to embrace a mother because the mother first embraced the child. Now go and live the spiritual life, embrace me and my purpose in creating you and putting you in this world to be the priests of my creation. Make your life and this world the theater of my glory” Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 142. December 3, 2007 "Experience in worship is not my immediate pleasure or even my immediate response. The focus of experience is not on my experience of God but on how God as the subject of worship forms me through word and sacrament and thereby changes my life. I have been in one too many worship services where the focus was cheerleading for Jesus. . . . Worshipers are not a cheering section for God. The problem with this kind of worship is not only that it is an accommodation to culture but that it is also a severe example of self-situated spirituality." Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 94-95. November 26, 2007 “The heart of biblical and ancient Christian spirituality is our mystical union with God accomplished by Jesus Christ through the Spirit. God unites with humanity in his saving incarnation, death, and resurrection. We unite with God as we receive his new life within us." Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 16. ___________________________________ |
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The Robert E. Webber
Institute for Worship Studies
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