Why Study Worship Worldwide?

The topic of the book Christian Worship Worldwide: Expanding Horizons, Deepening Practices (Eerdmans, 2007) is endlessly interesting, profoundly instructive, and unmanageably large. The scope is nothing short of the worship practices of the world's two billion Christians. In that single sentence description, there are two boundlessly expansive terms. First, there is “worship.” For our purposes, we will focus on one sense of this term, worship as a public ritual event, an assembly usually conceived as an occasion for a kind of divine-human gift exchange of sung and spoken prayers, scriptural preaching, and sacraments or other ceremonies.

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