Worship and Culture: Foreign Country or Homeland? ed. by Cláucia Vasconcelos Wilkey (review)

This book of thirty essays, written by both Lutheran and non-Lutheran scholars, grew out of the initiatives of a seven-year study for the Lutheran World Federation which was designed to deal with the complex, inescapable interface between worship and culture. Lutheran writers include the late S. Anita Stauffer, Norman Hjelm, Gordon Lathrop, Mark Bangert, Dirk Lange, and Melinda Quivik.

Summarizing the book’s agenda, Norman Hjelm notes that worship should be (1) transcultural, having the same substance for all people, but transcending given cultures, (2) contextual, expressing worship’s transcultural identity at the local level, (3) countercultural, challenging and transforming cultural patterns inconsistent with the gospel, and (4) cross-cultural, sharing faith across and between local cultures (7). Gordon Lathrop follows up by advocating the paradoxical wisdom of the ancient Epistle to Diognetus that while every foreign country is a “homeland” for Christians, every homeland is a “foreign country” (11). In other words, in their callings Christians serve people of various backgrounds and are to give no ultimate allegiance to their own nation or cultural identity. Ultimate allegiance is owed to God alone.

Numerous essays build on the work of the late Roman Catholic liturgical and cultural expert Anscar J. Chupungco, OSB, who, in Benjamin Stewart’s words, insisted that “the church as the body of Christ rightly honors each local culture in which it is incarnated by similarly assuming the givenness of local patterns, grounded in the scriptural memory that, in Christ, God comes to the world ‘deep in the flesh’ of local culture” (46). In that light, Dirk Lange notes that “worship does not exist as an ideal, in some platonic realm, that is then received into the local community” (163).

All in all, as Christianity becomes less Euro-centric and Christians increasingly live in a world made smaller through technology and social media, the essays here are highly relevant for worship leaders, evangelists, and missionaries.