The Africana Worship Book

Completing the series, The Africana Worship Book (Year C), offers the same diversity as the past two volumes with all new materials from new and experienced voices. The Africana Worship Book (Year C), contains new calls to worship, liturgies, prayers, litanies, offertory prayers, doxologies, choral readings, creeds, chants, and benedictions. The compilations are related to Year C of the Revised Common Lectionary. This volume invites the whole church to become open to the fresh movements of God in the midst of corporate worship. The book includes a bound-in CD, making it easy for congregations to reproduce the material for use in worship.

Worship is when "God shows up and shows out!" African-American worship affirms that an active God embodies human lives through companionship and communion. This volume of essays, interlacing worship pieces with reflections from prominent leaders and emerging thinkers in Africana life, is designed to help churches, professors, and students reflect more deeply on worship and practice. Building a bridge of understanding through collective experiences, the Companion to the Africana Worship Book shows the roots and fruits of rich worship. The series of worship books includes The Africana Worship Book (Year A | Volume 1) and The Africana Worship Book (Year B | Volume 2). Essays and contributors in the Companion include: "21 Questions Revisited" by Valerie Bridgeman Davis "Go Play with God: Reclaiming Liturgy for Spiritual Formation" by Valerie Bridgeman Davis "Liturgy as Subversive Activity" by Safiyah Fosua "To Serve This Present Age" by Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. "Africana Theology for the Black Church" by Safiyah Fosua "Worshipping Contextually: the Bassa People in the United Methodist Church in Liberia" by Pianapue Kept Early "Translatability as Belonging: Bassa United Methodist Christians in Liberia" by Pianapue Kept Early "The Creation of an Africana Worship Ritual: Baptism in the Shouters of Trinidad" by Gennifer Benjamin Brooks "The African-American Church and Sacraments: But Can We Still Get Our 'Circament?'" by William B. McClain "Death as Worship: Celebrating Dying as Part of Life" by Cheryl Kirk-Duggan "The African-American Funeral Sermon: Divine Re-Framing of Human Tragedy" by Frank A. Thomas "Music in Africana Worship" by Melinda Weekes "Doxology in Darkness" by Jessica Kendall Ingram "In the Spirit" by Lisa Allen "That Was Then, This Is NOW" by Otis Moss III "Emerging Possibilities for African-American Churches" by Douglas Powe "Technologies for Worship" by Elonda Clay "Lord, How Come We Here?" by William B. McClain "Spiritual Focus and Africana Worship" by Henry Mitchell "Worship: The Realm of the Spirit, the Realm of the Imagination, and Real Time" by Marilyn Thornton "Inclusive Language and Africana Worship" by Valerie Bridgeman Davis "Testify!" by Wilma Taylor "A Womanist Perspective on Spiritual Practices" by Linda Hollies

In this update to her 1993 classic, African American Christian Worship, Melva Wilson Costen, again delights her reader with a lively history and theology of the African American worship experience. Drawing upon careful scholarship and engaging stories, Dr. Costen details the global impact on African American worship by media, technology, and new musical styles. She expands her discussion of ritual practices in African communities and clarifies some of the ritual use of music in worship. In keeping with recent congregational practices, Dr. Costen will also provide general orders of worship suitable for a variety of denominational settings.

Be prepared at a moment’s notice This book equips the Methodist pastor, worship leader, or layperson to create meaningful worship moments for any group of people, any time, any place. It includes liturgies and prayers suitable for traditional settings such as worship services, funeral services, and administration of the sacraments. It includes words to use during hospital visits, retreats, church meetings, and other conventional settings. It provides words of blessing for departing members. It also provides language for other spaces and places, like home blessings, blessings for foster care families, words for times of transition, liturgies for fresh expressions of the church, prayers before the beginning of work, language for protests and vigils, ritual moments for difficult conversations, and prayers for interreligious and ecumenical events. It offers words of lament to use after violent events and natural disasters. From pulpits to pews, from altar tables to dinner tables, from sanctuaries to streets, the Compact Guide can be used by all ministers—clergy and laity—to employ worshipful words as the Spirit leads.

Worship sets an assembly in motion movement towards God in response to God's movement towards humans thus creating a resilient and caring community. Worship as Body Language brings the African community's experience of the body and its gestures together with the Christian liturgy, since worship and social action are closely related. The body language" or gestures of praise, adoration, contemplation, ritual dance, and care of the neighbor are meaningful to the ethnic group; African Christians tune into these body motions to express the one Christian faith. In Worship as Body Language, Father Uzukwu details how patterns of African ritual assemblies and sacred narratives have merged with Jewish, gospel, and early Church traditions to create living Christian communities and liturgies. Using a socio-historical method, this book sheds new light on liturgical action and theology, and suggests more transition rituals. It also provides samples of emergent African Christian liturgies that emphasize intense community participation with appropriate gestures. These local liturgies attest to the patristic principle that different customs actually confirm the unity of our faith in Christ. Scholars teaching and researching the foundations of the liturgy and liturgical inculturation, graduate students, and those organizing workshops on the regional, diocesan, or parish level will find Worship as Body Languagea ready handbook on the liturgy. It is also a useful textbook for introducing college students and seminarians to the anthropological, historical, and theological dimensions of the liturgy. Elochukwu E. Uzukwu, CSSp, ThD, lectures in liturgy and African theology in seminaries and Catholic universities in Nigeria, Congo, Zaire, and France. He is the author of Liturgy: Truly Christian, Truly African,and the editor of Bulletin of Ecumenical Theology. "

"Examines the history of worship in the Black Church in America, the enduring effects of white supremacy on its liturgical heritage, and proffers a new liturgical paradigm, using a womanist hermeneutic"--

Sacramental Life Volume 20.3 (Summer 2008) Founded in 1988, Sacramental Life is one of two journals published by the Order of Saint Luke (OSL Publications). It focuses on the emerging and historical practices of Christian worship. Print distribution is to the members of the Order globally, as well as to a number of theology departments and seminary libraries in the United States.