Robert E. Webber > Quotes

“For years, the church has emphasized evangelism, teaching, fellowship, missions, and service to society to the neglect of the very source of its power--worship.”
― Robert E. Webber

“To summarize, Easter Sunday is the most important Sunday. It is the Sunday of all Sundays. It is the day of the new beginning of the entire cosmos, the day of resurrection.

In our worship we must be careful not to reduce our message to the Easter fact only. The Easter fact must include the message this fact proclaims: God makes all things new. It must also include the message that we have been raised with Christ. Calling God's people to die to sin and rise to the new life is central not only to Easter day but to the Easter season.”
― Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year

“Because God is the subject who acts upon me in worship, my participation is not reduced to verbal responses or to singing, but it is living in the pattern of the one who is revealed in worship.”
― Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship (Ancient-Future): Proclaiming and Enacting God's Narrative

“God works through life, through people, and through physical, tangible, and material reality to communicate his healing presence in our lives.”
― Robert Webber

“In the Episcopal Church I find a healthy sense of unity and diversity. In this tradition we recognize that that which holds the church together is more important than that which divides the church.”
― Robert Webber

“What underlies this [Benedictine] rule is the assumption that God is experienced most clearly in a well-ordered day. God is the God of order, not chaos. A chaotic day in which there is no purpose and intention leads to a troubled and dislocated life, irritated by the events of the day because they control and run one's life. The structure of the day gives purpose, intent, and meaning as God is encountered in the events of daily life. When the day is ordered, serendipitous events may change he course of he day, but God's presence in these events more readily is seen because the day has been ordered, and the eyes and the heart have been watching.”
― Robert E. Webber

“We must learn, then, not to HAVE a spirituality, something we turn on at a particular place or time, but to BE spiritual, as a habit of life, a continuous state of being. It is to this end that we seek after God in the stillness and hubbub of life, but always and everywhere in and through the church, where Christ is made present to us and, through us, to the world.”
― Robert Webber, Common Roots: The Original Call to an Ancient-Future Faith

“There is something explainable about what man has accomplished in God's creation, while the creation itself remains a mystery.”
― Robert Webber, The Biblical Foundations of Christian Worship

“In participation we first reach out and take the whole world into our hands. We lift the Alpha and Omega to our mouth. We take God’s whole story into our stomach, let it run through our bloodstream, let it then energize our entire living—our relationships, our work, our pleasure—all of life is to be lived now as Jesus lived his life for us, and for our sake, dying for us, rising for us, showing us how to live in the pattern of his dying and rising. As he took into himself the suffering of all humanity, so we are to take into ourselves the suffering of the world and do something about it. As he rose above all that is evil in the world through his resurrection, so we, too, are to rise to the new life by the Spirit of God. All our death to sin and rising to life finds its true and ultimate meaning in him who lives in us, living in our sufferings, living in our struggles with evil, living in our resurrections to new life.”
― Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace (Ancient-Future): Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life

“We are spiritual not because we practice the disciplines or use pious words but because we are united to Jesus who has restored our union with God.”
― Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace (Ancient-Future): Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life

“The church has unfolded in many forms, and no one single external form stands alone as the CORRECT visible expression. As the church settled in various geographical areas and as it penetrated through a variety of cultures, it found expression in multifaceted forms. Thus, the insistence that the church must exist in a single form is a denial not only of the richness of creation, but also of the complexities of the human response.”
― Robert Webber, COMMON ROOTS: A CALL TO EVANGELICAL MATURITY

“I find when most people are honest about their spiritual pilgrimage, they admit to the difficulty of maintaining the habit of a spiritual discipline. What attracks me most about the Anglican spiritual tradition is that it provides purposeful spiritual direction in the life of Christ.”
― Robert Webber, Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail: Why Evangelicals Are Attracted to the Liturgical Church - Revised Edition

“Beneath the privatization of worship is the ever-present individualism of our culture.”
― Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship (Ancient-Future): Proclaiming and Enacting God's Narrative

“The faith engaged with Platonism in the ancient world, with Aristotle in the medieval world, with nominalism in the Reformation era, and with rationalism in the modern world. Now the church must engage with the emergence of a postmodern, post- Christian, neo-pagan world.”
― Robert E. Webber, Listening to the Beliefs of Emerging Churches: Five Perspectives

“how we pray shapes who we are.”
― Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship (Ancient-Future): Proclaiming and Enacting God's Narrative

“But in the postmodern world, the way of knowing has changed. We now live in a world in which people have lost interest in argument and have taken to story, imagination, mystery, ambiguity, and vision—and it was Christianity as story that compelled my dinner guests to listen with interest.”
― Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace (Ancient-Future): Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life

“Worship and preaching that follow a particular book of the Bible is called Lectio Continua.”
― Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time (Ancient-Future): Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year

“Finally, the Reformers also agreed that worship should be in the vernacular and that the twofold structure of Word and sacrament be maintained. Zwingli was the only Reformer who disagreed with the desire to return to the ancient structure of Word and sacrament. His emphasis was on the Word only. Zwingli’s position remained the most influential in the circles of Calvinism, and, to the distress of John Calvin, quarterly communion, rather than weekly communion, became standard in the churches most influenced by Calvinism. This influence extended through the English Puritans to the Baptists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and independents and spread through them to most of American Protestant Christianity.”
― Robert E. Webber, Worship Old and New

“What I longed for was something that went deeper than pious ideas on morality or intellectually stimulating thoughts about the meaning of human existence, as good as these were. I wanted something that actualized the pattern of being in Christ. I wanted something that worked in my life, something that brought a realistic spirituality into being. I wanted something that ordered my life into the pattern of Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and coming again.”
― Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time (Ancient-Future): Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year

“This theme of God’s rescue of us all—not inspirational topics, motivational speakers, or massive therapy sermons—needs to be recovered as the central message of our church.”
― Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Worship (Ancient-Future): Proclaiming and Enacting God's Narrative

“If we can speak so emphatically of the intrinsic value of the liturgical year, it is because we celebrate it together with Christ himself. The special nature of the church year is entirely due to the fact that the Lord himself presides over it and that he celebrates his mysteries with the church for the glory of the Father. Adrian Nocent”
― Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time (Ancient-Future): Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year