An Important Study on the Worship of the Early Church This introduction to the origins of Christian worship illuminates the importance of ancient liturgical patterns for contemporary Christian practice. Andrew McGowan takes a fresh approach to understanding how Christians came to worship in the distinctive forms still familiar today. Deftly and expertly processing the bewildering complexity of the ancient sources into lucid, fluent exposition, he sets aside common misperceptions to explore the roots of Christian ritual practices--including the Eucharist, baptism, communal prayer, preaching, Scripture reading, and music--in their earliest recoverable settings. Now in paper.

A 2000 year history of Christian worship in its social contexts around the globe combining sociological theory, social history and the latest developments in the study of liturgy. The focus of this book sets it apart from existing studies which tend to offer textual or theological approaches to worship.

In this book the 2000 year history of Christian worship is viewed from a sociological perspective. Martin Stringer develops the idea of discourse as a way of understanding the place of Christian worship within its many and diverse social contexts. Beginning with the Biblical material the author provides a broad survey of changes over 2000 years of the Christian church, together with a series of case studies that highlight particular elements of the worship, or specific theoretical applications. Stringer does not simply examine the mainstream traditions of Christian worship in Europe and Byzantium, but also gives space to lesser-known traditions in Armenia, India, Ethiopia and elsewhere. Offering a contribution to the ongoing debate that breaks away from a purely textual or theological study of Christian worship, this book provides a greater understanding of the place of worship in its social and cultural context.

"At the Origins of Christian Worship" can deepen readers' understanding of early Christian worship by setting it within the context of the Roman world in which it developed. Hurtado highlights the two central characteristics of earliest Christian worship: its exclusive rejection of the ancient-world gods and its inclusion of Christ with God as the focus of devotion.

"The Oxford History of Christian Worship is a comprehensive and authoritative history, lavishly illustrated, of the origins and development of Christian worship up to the present day. Following contemporary methods in scholarship, it attends to social and cultural contexts and examines the worship traditions from both Eastern and Western Christianity, ancient and modern. It offers a chronological account, while encompassing spatial and confessional variations, from Baptists in Britain to Roman Catholics in Mexico, from Orthodox in Ethiopia to Pentecostals in the United States, from Lutheran and Reformed in Europe to united churches in India and Australia. The material details of Christian worship, such as music, architecture, and the visual arts, are considered within specific cultural contexts throughout the volume as well as studied thematically in individual chapters."--BOOK JACKET.

The Eucharist is the central act of Christian worship. In this book Martin Stringer brings together some of the scholarship associated with the sociological analysis of biblical texts into conversation with liturgists and historians of the first century. He begins his analysis of the Eucharist and other early Christian meals from a detailed discussion of Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, the most studied text in the sociological tradition of biblical scholarship. He proposes that the meal portrayed in chapter 11 of that letter is more likely to have been an annual event rather than a weekly one. He considers other texts, both biblical and those from the first hundred and fifty years or so of Christian history and shows that the Eucharist, that is a ritual event consisting of the sharing of bread and wine, which are associated by the community with the body and blood of Jesus, is most likely to have been an invention of the Asian or Roman church in around 100-110 CE. Martin D. Stringer is Professor of Liturgical and Congregational Studies in the Department of Theology and Religion in Birmingham. His main book so far is A Sociological History of Christian Worship (CUP 2005).

This book samples the rich variety of worship practices in American history to show how worship can be a fruitful subject for historians to study and how past cases can enrich our understanding of worship today. By the Vision of Another World gathers highly regarded historians who usually are not read together because of the widely different subjects on which they typically work. Yet their essays all fit together here as they address how worship, work, and worldview converge and reinforce each other no matter what particular place, era, denomination, or ethnic/racial group is under consideration. The variety of methodologies and voices will appeal to a breadth of critical interests, while the consistently high quality of historical narrative will keep readers engaged.