Worship is at the heart of the Christian faith. This applies equally to all denominations. For that reason it is all the more important that the ordering of worship and its place in the life of the church is regularly rewritten and reinterpreted. This volume—based on the third, completely revised German edition from 2013 by two of the foremost liturgical scholars in Germany—offers a contemporary, comprehensive introduction to the foundations for the study of liturgy today, one from which scholars and students in the English-speaking world can also profit. Beyond appealing to students of liturgy and theology, this book reaches out to everyone who wants to know more about the liturgical essence and dimensions of the church.

The Catholic Apostolic Church combined liturgical worship, charismatic experience, ecumenical vision, and eschatological expectation. Philip Schaff commented that the claims made for its apostles, if true, commanded every Christian's attention. Historians and liturgists alike have been fascinated by the Church, but deterred from researching it because of the notorious difficulty of access to material. This account of the church's growth and decline draws on archival sources from several countries, many not hitherto used for research, and publications in German as well as English. Previous accounts in English have focused on the Church in the English-speaking world, but this book breaks fresh ground by covering the Church's development in every country where it was active. Surveying Catholic Apostolic history, polity, and ministry, it seeks to tell the story rather than using the Church as a test-case for a preconceived hypothesis. In so doing, it opens up a range of lines of inquiry for future researchers.

Wilhelm Loehe is one of the most significant nineteenth-century figures for North American church life and mission, whose influence continues into the present. Loehe is unique for joining together aspects of the Christian life often held to be antithetical: worship and mission, orthodoxy and pietism, evangelical proclamation and diakonia, and theological imagination and practical skill in administration. Already in the nineteenth century Loehe contributed a vital principle for advancing ecumenical understanding: the idea of “open questions.” When the church confesses core teachings as one, there does not need to be agreement on all secondary matters in order to live together in church fellowship. This book explores Loehe’s historical activity as a pastor, as a supporter of mission in North America, as an organizer (together with Friedrich Bauer) of theological education in North America, and as a founder of deaconess institutions in Neuendettelsau, Germany, that still exist today. The central themes represented by Loehe not only constitute a matrix that has significance for the church and its mission today but also constitute an agenda for the church of the future.