Liturgies from Below: Praying with People at the End of the World

by Cláudio Carvalhaes

It’s been said that prayer is the vocabulary of faith. This book offers a wealth of resources from forgotten places to help us create a new vocabulary for worship and prayer, one that is located amidst the poor and the major issues of violence and destruction around the world today. It is a collection of prayers, songs, rituals, rites of healing, Eucharistic and baptismal prayers, meditations and art from four Asia-Pacific Islands, Africa, Americas, and Europe.

Liturgies from Below is the culmination of a project organized by the Council for World Mission (CWM) during 2018-2019. Approximately 100 people from four continents worked with CWM, collaborating to create indigenous prayers and liturgies expressing their own contexts, for sharing with their communities and the rest of the world. The project was called “Re-Imagining Worship as Acts of Defiance and Alternatives in the Context of Empire”.

The author and others spent weeks living in each of four communities for several weeks/months, getting to know the people, and then facilitating the people’s own creation of prayers and liturgies. The author, other scholars, pastors, artists, activists and students all came from radically different ethnicities, races, sexualities, churches and Christian theologies. The people in each location were poor, living in very challenging communities, living in oppressive and seemingly hopeless situations. After some time, they wrote prayers and stories of their experience trying to live the Christian faith in utterly abandoned places. What we have here is an immensely rich and varied collection of liturgical sources from various communities dealing with issues of violence, immigration/refugees, drugs, land grabbing, war on the poor, attack on women, militarization, climate change, and so on.

Genres: Christianity, Spirituality, Theology, Nonfiction

376 pages, Paperback

Published August 4, 2020

Reviews

[D.L. Mayfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

an absolute must for any church or Christian wanting to engage in spiritual practices and prayer from a non-dominant culture perspective. beautiful, gorgeous prayers.

[Aaron White · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book contains 462 liturgical acts of worship that help us to pray with "people at the ends of the world." It is the result of a massive project of collating prayers, poems, songs, traditions and orders of service from a number of vulnerable and resisting poor communities in different parts of the world. This resource can be used as is, though many of the acts of worship are very specific to the contexts they spring from (as they should be), and include local languages, reference murders or arrests and victims and places by name. So the other way this resource could be used is to inspire worshippers to create their own liturgies based upon the people in their neighbourhoods, in particular the people who are indigenous to the area and/or who have faced injustice and exclusion.

[Sandy H · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I had something different in mind when I bought this book as I found it somewhat disappointing, but I can't put my finger on exactly why. It is what it says it is--a collection of prayers from all over the world grouped by theme. Somehow, though, it didn't really grab me as I was reading through it. I will keep it on my shelf of worship resources and periodically check it for possible use as appropriate but nothing in it really stuck out to me that will make me remember it in the future and say, "Right--I have to use x or y prayer this week!" This probably isn't a useful review for others--I'm doing this more to remind myself in the future what I thought about this collection.

[Falon Barton · Rating 5 out of 5]

The introductory sections have some fantastic insights about prayer and worship, but the real gem of this book lies in the liturgical prayers that are collected in its pages from all over the globe. This is definitely a resource my church will be using.