To Those of the Liturgical Diaspora

Theologisches Lehr- und Studienmaterial, 2023

This study seeks to show that a carefully planned, solemn service with the inclusion of classical texts and with several recurring elements in addition to the sermon, as it has been practiced by the majority of the church for almost two thousand years, does not represent spiritual rigidity. Rather, it is in harmony with biblical revelation and is a great spiritual help. To show this, we will discuss in detail which elements, based on biblical testimony, are indispensable to regular worship. The goal here is not to urge Christians to change churches or to impose a completely different worship service on congregations. I believe that many elements of this book can be incorporated into any worship tradition, and the book contains many suggestions for all Christians, regardless of whether they are used to a much ‘freer’ or a much more ‘liturgical’ worship service than I propose in this book.

2004

The article (from 2007) concentrates on the problem of intercommunion. It presents current official Roman Catholic and Orthodox positions and brings them into conversation with the sacramental and liturgical theologies of these churches. It points out possibilities of theological grounding of a responsible sacramental communication beyond one’s own confession, provided there is a bond of common faith and solidarity with the confessions, in whose life those who practice intercommunion participate.

The Ecumenical Review, 1999

The assassinations of John E Kennedy in 1963 and his brother Robert in 1968 riveted people in the United States to their television sets. The funeral of John Kennedya Latin requiem masswas televised as the ecclesial counterpart to the civil liturgies that preceded and followed it. In the four-and-a-half years between that funeral and the one for Robert Kennedy, the Roman liturgy, under the influence of the Second Vatican Council, was becoming vernacular; and thousands of non-Roman Catholics in the US witnessed a mass in their own language for the first time. Suddenly the common bonds of worship between Roman Catholics and many Protestants were experienced; and Robert Kennedy's funeral became a grassroots ecumenical event of primary importance. In 1995, the first meeting in Finland of the fourth phase of international Lutheran-Roman Catholic dialogue began with a eucharist celebrated according to the Lutheran Book of Worship. It is the practice in this dialogue to begin each day with the eucharist, alternating between Roman Catholic and Lutheran rites, though there can be no sharing of the bread and cup. As people were leaving that opening service, the Catholic bishop who co-chairs the meetings was heard to remark, "So what is the difference between us?" These two vignettes link together liturgy and ecumenism. In what follows I shall take that connection for granted. If liturgy or worship can be called the embodiment of prayer, and if ecumenism (up to now at least) has been about reconciling theological traditions, then we are dealing with the ancient concepts of lex orundi (the law or rule of prayer) and lex credendi (the law or rule of belief). Both terms here refer to public or corporate prayer and belief. A favourite indoor sport of liturgiologists has been to debate the precise form and origin of lex orundi, lex credendi and to insist on the generative nature of lex orundi. While that may well have been true in the early days of the church, the relationship now is surely much more complex; and it could be argued that at present the terms should be reversed: that our belief determines our liturgy. My presentation has three parts: (1) the ecumenical movement and the liturgical movement; (2) reception; and (3) a baptismal vision of unity. Throughout the paper I 0 Eugene L. Brand (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) was assistant general secretary for ecurnenical affairs in the Lutheran World Federation, Geneva. He is now retired and lives in New York City. This article is based on a plenary presentation at the National Workshop on Christian Unity,

Religions, 2022

This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY

Cascade Books, 2018

This book connects the living realms of the church, the self, the neighbor and the world. It envisions our daily local and global life from liturgical spaces, places where Christians worship God. Through these relations, we can connect worship with economy, preaching with raising a village, baptism with forms of citizenship, ecology and the market, Easter with immigration, liturgical knees with colonization, spirituality with minority voices, all uttering prayers that name racism, poverty and a liberation theology of glory. In these pages Cláudio Carvalhaes issues a call to the churches to move from captive and colonized spaces into where the Spirit lives: among the poor, the needy, the forgotten. With a variety of relations between the Christian faith and our cultural ways of living, Carvalhaes offers new liturgical and theological imaginings to be engaged with the most vulnerable in our societies and the earth. A creative liturgical theology of liberation that makes sense of God between the world and the table/altar, between the pulpit and local communities, the worship space and our multiple lived experiences. For liturgy is an endless song of liberation. This book is a call to life!

Matthew Darby, 2023

Here I present a theological manual for worship. In this work, I seek to explain a theological foundation for a right praxis of worship. Or to put it another way, in this work, I seek to theologically ground a liturgical expression of Sunday worship.

2001