worship

Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and Enacting God's Narrative
$14.99
This is a book that I wrestled with as I read through it.

I believe it's the final book in the "Ancient Future" series, but it's the first I've read by Webber. I didn't get the sense that you absolutely have to read these books in order as I immediately engaged with the subject-matter and the approach.

In this book, Webber made me grapple with how the Enlightment and modern thinking has impacted my understanding and approach to the Bible, prayer, worship, and the Eucharist. At numerous times, Webber made me uncomfortable (my modernist mind?!) to wrestle with the mysteries of God.

I'm sure this book is most often used by church leaders and pastors, but it shouldn't be exclusively read by that group. It's an important resource for the laity as well and will challenge you in how you read the Word, how you pray, and in the story of God's interaction with humanity across history.

Worship Matters: Leading Others to Encounter the Greatness of God
$17.99
This is the most incredible book on the true nature of worship. Bob Kauflin hits the nail on the head when it comes to the matter of real worship. While he does speak on the issue of music (after all he is a music leader) that is not the primary focus. Rather he gets back to the real stuff and deals a lot more of the theology of it all. Not just feel good music but music that has meat. He is right when he speaks of the difficulty of worship God in some abstract way, we need to focus on what he has done and how he has changed me.
Great read for anyone really wanting to move a church forward and have real disciples not just those seeking an emotional high.

WOW Worship: Aqua
$21.98
This is a wonderful album of Christian music. I'd purchased it for my 6-yr-old's b-day, for "Friend of God," by Phillips, Craig, and Dean, and we'd fallen in love with ALL the music on it. He promptly lost the particular disk with "his" song on it and this purchase was a replacement for the lost one. He loved and missed it enough to split the cost of the album with me!

It's truly inspiring and both my boys (now 8- & 4-yrs-old) love it, too. It's a favorite which we keep in the car for "traveling" music.

Emerging Worship: Creating Worship Gatherings for New Generations
$14.99
We used this book as the text for a workshoop on Emerging Worship and we all found it an excellent, easy to read and understand book. Being "beyond" the age of most Emerging Worship groups we still found the book to be inspiring and stimulating. We "conducted" a short (30 minute) service for the others attending other classes and they found our service to be extremely inspirational amd planned to take some of the ideas home to their own churches to try.