From cover to cover, this book is full of imaginative, read-to-use liturgies, prayers and service outlines for the Christian year from one of the most creative and poetic voices in the church today. This collection includes themed complete worship outlines for: - Pentecost: finding a language of love in a world of strangers and restoring community; - Trinity: knowing that we belong and are loved; - Ordinary Time: journeying in faith, venturing out, encountering storms, not losing heart, replenishing our resources; - Transfiguration: seeing heaven in the everyday; - Harvest: fruitfulness in unexpected places; - All Saints and All Souls: expressing our grief, joyful remembrance, finding light in the darkness.

The annual celebrations of Plough Sunday, Rogation and Harvest are hugely important for churches serving rural communities and are a key way for those churches to engage in mission, usually seeing congregations swell at such times. Ploughshares and First Fruits draws on the inspired work being done by one rural church to celebrate rural living throughout the year and thereby grow its congregation. As well as providing many fresh ideas for keeping the established festivals, it provides ready-to-use, participative liturgies that engage all the senses, appeal to all ages and give small churches a round-the-year resource. Included are creative liturgies for: * A pet service for the Feast of St Francis * Walking and pilgrimage * Lambing season * Riders' Sunday * Lammas * A Summer Festival (an instant jam-jar flower festival)

This work examines the theological relationship between creation and creativity in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. It does so by bringing together a synthesis of various disciplines and perspectives to the creativity of J.R.R. Tolkien. Hart and Khovacs provide a fresh reading of these important themes in Tolkien, and the result captures the multi-faceted nature of Tolkien's own vivid theology and literary imagination.

The SCM Studyguide to Anglicanism offers a comprehensive introduction to the many different facets of Anglicanism. Aimed at students preparing for ministry, it presumes no prior knowledge of the subject and offers helpful overviews of Anglican history, liturgy, theology, Canon Law, mission and global Anglicanism. As well as offering updated and improved lists of further reading, this second edition brings a greater emphasis on worldwide expressions of Anglicanism, with more examples taken from Asian and African contexts, and a brand new section which considers the rise of the global communion alongside issues of inculturation and indigenisation.

2020 Catholic Press Association honorable mention award for faith and science This collection of essays explores the rich and diverse intersections between the world of liturgy and the worlds of creation and the cosmos. The intersections highlighted here include biblical, historical, visual, and musical materials as well as contemporary theological and pastoral challenges for worship today. The essays gathered in this volume were first presented at the 2018 Yale Institute of Sacred Music Liturgy Conference and are here made available to a wider audience. These essays are responses to the unprecedented attention to ecological and cosmological concerns, which call for sustained engagement by scholars and practitioners of liturgy.

This book explores the liturgical experience of emotions in Byzantium through the hymns of Romanos the Melodist, Andrew of Crete and Kassia. It reimagines the performance of their hymns during Great Lent and Holy Week in Constantinople. In doing so, it understands compunction as a liturgical emotion, intertwined with paradisal nostalgia, a desire for repentance and a wellspring of tears. For the faithful, liturgical emotions were embodied experiences that were enacted through sacred song and mystagogy. The three hymnographers chosen for this study span a period of nearly four centuries and had an important connection to Constantinople, which forms the topographical and liturgical nexus of the study. Their work also covers three distinct genres of hymnography: kontakion, kanon and sticheron idiomelon. Through these lenses of period, place and genre this study examines the affective performativity hymns and the Byzantine experience of compunction.

At the heart of Clothed in Language lies a journal, but the writing, while personal, has been given a thematic structure. Seeing language as a vital medium through which the divine is made present to us, scholar and poet Pauline Matarasso explores the ways in which this God-given language, with its overcoat of metaphor and undertow of rhythm, serves to reflect the truth and, on occasion, mask it. This book also includes an essay that looks at certain features common to myth, fairy tale, lore, and Scripture.

A Time for Creation encourages us to praise God for his creation, take responsibility for our actions, repent of our misuse of natural resources and hear the voice of creation itself in our prayer. Drawing together texts from Common Worship with newly commissioned material, it offers liturgies for all times and occasions when there is a focus on creation - in daily prayer, services of the word, school assemblies, eucharistic celebrations and seasonal services to mark the agricultural year. It has been compiled by the Liturgical Commission of the Church of England and is designed to provide its parishes, schools and chaplaincies with a rich selection of resources for worship and prayer.

How Not to Say Mass looks first at general principles for liturgy, for understanding symbols, and for being a presider. Examining the Mass, section by section, using the approach of via negativa-focusing on what NOT to do-the author reminds presiders of the many obvious, but sometimes unconscious, violations of rubrics and liturgical principles which can be detrimental to the celebration of good effective liturgy.

This worship collection for Lent, Holy Week and Easter brims with unique liturgies, prayers and resources for the most important season of the Christian year. Chris Thorpe offers complete outlines for a variety of services, including: - Dust and Ashes: living mindfully on Ash Wednesday; - Who am I? Temptations for today; - Mothering God: being there no matter what; - Wilderness: desolation and consolation in the empty places; - Holy Week services on the call to follow Jesus; - Learning to see again: the world made new at Easter; - Into the Deep: daring to journey into the unknown. He also offers advice on using space, silence and lighting creatively to bring the central stories of the Christian faith to life.

Theology began with the appearances of the risen Jesus. That is, theology began when persons were confronted with a presence that could only be realized by the act of God. In The Eucharistic Faith, the first of a significant new systematic theology of the Eucharist, Ralph N. McMichael weaves liturgy and theology together to understand the ways in which theology and Christian faith are, at heart, about the receiving of the gift of Jesus' life in Communion.