At This Time, in This Place: The Spirit Embodied in the Local Assembly

by Michael Warren

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1563382512
• ISBN13: 9781563382512
• Release Date: January 1998
• Publisher: Trinity Press International
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.4" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Thoughtful, wide-ranging critique of shallow church culture

Michael Warren draws on a wide range of philosophers, sociologists and psychologists to present the case that normal church practices do not challenge American churchgoers to be anything but thoughtless consumers. Going to church is not transforming people, Warren says. Christians today are shallow, greedy and stylish. Where are the people who actually act like Jesus? It is not enough to have the right beliefs. Pastors and priests need to wake up and realize what is happening. The real work of God is deep. For that work to happen, people need to be taught to compare their daily lives to the practices of Jesus. How can we lure people into rigorous Christian reflection? In some ways, Warren takes on more issues than he can possibly handle: the media, consumerism, and style. But on the other hand, his critique helpfully shows the range of issues that contribute to the problems of the American church. Though a Roman Catholic, Warren's critique intentionally applies to Protestant churches as well. Warren's perspective is somewhat rooted in liberation theology. I read this book in "Th.D Seminar: Explorations in Practical Theology" at Duke Divinity School. It is not a fast read. The writing is cumbersome. But I would recommend it as an excellent overview on a scholarly level of the issues that face American churches. Wipf and Stock are now reprinting this book.

Ten Quotes from Michael Warren, At This Time In This Place

1. This book is written to foster the aliveness and responsibleness of the local church, and through it I want to celebrate the possibilities of the local church as a living sacrament of the gospel. (p. 3). 2. The significant sacramentality of the community's wider life is less easily overlooked when shown to be a condition of the sacramentality of bread and wine and of the Lord's presence in worship. (p. 4). 3. Whenever and wherever theology loses its moorings in actual local communities of practice and ceases to be attentive to what people are actually living, it drifts off into an intellectual void. (p. 7). 4. Can ritual in certain situations function as a kind of camouflage keeping hidden and out of sight the radical questions a ritual should contain? Can the "worship event" camouflage a radical attempt to avoid the encounter with God? (p. 9). 5. The simulated character of much contemporary life poses a special challenge able to be met by religious groups, whose sacred texts and traditions face their adherents with forceful questions about the nature of reality and the nature of falseness. (p. 43). 6. When what we say in our ritual prayer does not engage our imagination and deeper convictions, those ritual words are inert. But when these words have implications vital to us in our approach to the world, they have their proper active, even turbulent, character. (p. 46). 7. In this book, I am seeking neither the "perfect church" nor fully realized, "finished" discipleship. As far as I am concerned, there is no such thing. Discipleship is not a static reality; it exists only in its never-ending struggle for fidelity. (p. 53). 8. In the early 1960s, when I tried for several years to teach ecclesiology to skeptical teens, I found their unavoidable stumbling block to be, not the claims of the church, but the lack of coherence between those claims and actual concrete life practice of the local parish. The way did not square with the say. (p. 55). 9. When practices, for example, those of consumerist greed, are ignored, they tend to generate their own false theory of Christian living, a theory that supposed gospel fidelity to be unconnected to the use of money. (p. 57). 10. How does it happen that adults who can master the speech necessary for dealing competently with the fairly complex matters of nutrition, household and person finance, child rearing, basic health, cuisine, and so forth--and can give intelligible accounts of these areas to their children--come to be unable to speak of their faith to their own children? (p. 76).