Worship Weblog
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Larry Sibley on Robert Webber
After reading our post on Robert Webber, Larry Sibley sent us his tribute and allowed us to share it here:
Some of us who worked at Eternity Magazine and who knew Bob were reminiscing and here’s what I wrote to them:
1. Bob was a promoter of participation in worship; a clear break with spectator worship. His Worship is a Verb book, for instance. Anyone in his workshops got that message, not only by what he said, but by being dragged into participation in the culminating worship service.
2. His formulation of the four-fold shape of worship, a reaffirmation of the ancient/historic shape of the liturgy, is a great gift to the shapeless worship of revivalism/free-church folks (and most Presbyterian churches, I fear). He was relentless about this. It provides a portable frame for any type of worship, the essential skeleton that can be fleshed out/clothed (contextualized) anywhere. The demonstration of this came in the workshops, where the culminating service/demonstration of his teaching had the classic shape, but didn’t need the Book of Common Prayer or any of the high liturgies. It was done with many of the liturgical tools any evangelical church would have available.
3. Along with the classic shape was the necessity of weekly Lord’s Supper; again, the practice of the early church that the Reformation churches lost and were recovering in the 20th century. Word and Table, always together.
4. He never stopped learning, researching and digging. Every time I saw him or picked up his latest publication, he was into a new topic in the field of worship. One time, it was a translation he had just completed of a medieval text (The Prymer/The Little Book of Hours). The last time, in 2003 when he was the resource person for a day at a Calvin College seminar where I was a participant, it was his research on the younger evangelicals (and a book on that). He had been saying, ahead of the curve, that mega-church worship (boomer worship) would pass with that generation and was already dead/history. So, on to the next generation and their thoughts on worship.
Participation, the classic four-fold shape (always with the meal), and knowing the generations. Not bad.
Earlier
Remembering Robert Webber
Related Articles by Larry Sibley
The Legacy of the Geneva Liturgy
Baptizing the Nations
Baird’s ‘Eutaxia; or, The Presbyterian Liturgies: Historical Sketches’
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