Since news of Chung Hyun Kyung's lecture at the World Council of Churches in Canberra spread through the English-speaking world, theologians from this world have been wrestling with their Janus-like responses to her inclusion of elements of Korean ritual (such as ancestor invocation) in her presentation. On the looking-forward face we say, “Yes! At last! The non-western world speaks! We stand in solidarity with you! You are heard and beloved. You show us a new way of being Christian!” and on the face that knows the past, we say, “Huh, is this heresy? If people do this, or develop this further, will we be losing something essential about what it means to be a Christian in this or any other time?”
Christian Worship Worldwide offers observation of, and theological reflection upon, some of the lived forms of Christianity as they have developed through the world in the past generation. Like the commonplace reaction to Chung seventeen years ago, this broad-ranging twenty-first-century volume delights in and celebrates and learns from the non-western rites that it describes while at the same time many of its authors pause to question the parameters of faith as it spreads, the dynamics of syncretism, and issues of ecclesial unity and authority. Such are in fact just a few among a huge number of questions proposed in this volume—the sheer number and variety of questions raised approaches the overwhelming at times.
Organized in three parts, the book is grounded in a lively and compelling exegesis of Ephesians by Andrew Walls, continued in the presentation of seven case studies of worship in non-western societies, and concluded in five essays of theological reflection on the sorts of questions presented by the case studies. The case studies are from Zimbabwe, India, South Korea, Latin America, Samoa, and Papua (Indonesia), and most of them afford insights into worship practices about which we in the west previously knew very little. Numerous additional non-western as well as western worship forms are also referred to in the analytical essays.
The fact that worship changes as it encounters different places is not news. As Bryan Spinks says after reviewing a host of historical liturgies: “the fact of inculturation in worship … is not something new arising out of world Christianity; it is the very nature of worship” (240). What is of principal interest then is, firstly, all those questions. Infuriating as they may be (because there is not the space—and perhaps not yet the resources—to answer them in this volume), they make connections between practices across the world, challenging us to join the dots between a vast array of topics from globalized economics to etiquette to doctrine.
The questions also, often, make explicit what is implicit in much of the rest of the book: the fact that differences in practices suggest differences in belief, and the fact that this presents problems to western theological commentators. Several of the authors refer to the Nairobi Statement (which, with its fourfold view of Christian worship as transcultural, contextual, countercultural, and cross-cultural, is included as an appendix) to help make sense of the difficulties of interpretation thus raised. Other authors seem less self-aware about such difficulties, and the reader is intermittently jarred by pronouncements that come from an author's cultural preferences even as he or she critiques those of others. Such moments are only occasional but nonetheless surprising in a book which otherwise fosters the argument that there is no such thing as pre-syncretized or non-inculturated Christianity, and therefore no objective or pure form that can be appealed to: Christianity is ineluctably saturated with cultures.
The second principal thing the book both asserts and provides is, as John Witvleit says in his brilliant preface: “A worldwide purview [that] serves to discipline and chasten us when we make assertions about ‘what Christians believe’ or ‘how the church is changing’” (xv). Such a purview has far-reaching consequences for western Christians, and these are explored in several of the essays, but perhaps most practically in Michael Hawn's, “Praying Globally.” There he tackles the question: “Can Western worship incorporate the rites, rituals, and symbolic expressions of other cultures in such a way that neither stereotypes nor denigrates the sending cultures?” (205). He thus goes several steps beyond the simple—and important in its own right—goal of the book as a sort of conscience-awakening project (waking the western Christian up to the realities of worship worldwide) to actually constructing some helpful guidelines for multicultural worship.
Hawn's questions will become part of my repertoire in planning worship, I will re-read Witvleit's preface many times as a reminder why the work of learning about all people of faith should ground my studies, and I will recommend this book widely. It contains some excellent essays in contemporary liturgical studies and will be a useful resource for those studying ecumenics, theology, and missiology as well as worship; yet while it is an intellectually challenging compendium, it is also a warm-hearted one, full of eschatological hope. However, a key feature of Christianity as it is practiced and studied worldwide is the place of women in its leadership, and this volume has only one woman as a co-author of one article. As more descriptions of worldwide worship emerge and more questions are asked of it, it will be essential to hear from more women.
