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We affirm that our worship should offer a distinct form of life-giving spirituality inspired by experiences of worship in the harrowing rupture of life amidst the hopelessness and death-dealing catastrophes of Empire. More than just a set of religious actions carried out within the context of the gathered community worship, at its very core worship speaks to a lifestyle involving every facet of daily living. Indigenous civilizations have continued to rival dualistic forms of spirituality and devotedness to God and offer us gifts that inspire our cost of discipleship, embodied in our whole lives together with creation as life-affirming worship and praise to the God of life. Council for World Mission’s commitment to mutually challenge, encourage, and equip churches to share in God’s mission beckons us to look again at the worship life of our churches and our obedience to the mandate given by Christ.

We must ask, in breaking the seals of Empire (Rev 5) does our worship life subvert Empire? Our worship should underscore the idea that all religions are dangerous, including the religion of revelation within Christianity. The history of religion in the whole world is disappointing, Christianity included. Yet religious consciousness in human beings is something we deny at our own peril. The body has its parts, the mind has its parts, and the soul has its parts too. The religion of Empire targets the soul of humanity and colonizes faith as the currency for its religious outlook. Empire engineers spirituality and harnesses our sources of spirituality to subject humanity and creation to its worship. The violent usurpation of God from God’s throne and the defilement of God’s holiness by the ideology propagated with clichés (such as “there is no alternative”) by the current economic system requires not only devotional surrender of humanity, creation, and cosmos to Empire but also coercive and blind devotion to its antics against the good news of the gospel.

In engaging the priority of developing our congregations, we urge a reexamination of worship within our members. Christianity as a global faith is in perpetual danger of associating itself with forms of worship, surrender, and discipleship that bend to the religiosity of neoliberal economics and power. By constantly unveiling the distortions of worship in our gathered communities, we undertake to liberate Sunday from cultic forms of worship and prosperity, and develop material that will reenergize our worship to reclaim our spiritual resources from the temples of Empire. We affirm the symbolic and sacramental knowledge of indigenous peoples of the world in our quest for alternative life-affirming spiritualities.

This book will enable members of our local congregations to worship relevantly in their own context. It will help them to imagine and write worship resources from their daily experiences of pain and struggle. In that process, God will not remain a distant deity but a co-sufferer in their daily life.

We understand from all the participants that this enriching process transformed their view on worship. They mentioned that they won’t be able to continue teaching in their class on worship in the same old way. We hope and pray that a new movement of liturgy from the margins will emerge and grow and this book will initiate that process.

This book is an invitation to resist the temptation to be co-opted by the Empire, and to find the nerve to come out of the Empire, creating counter-imperial alternatives.

Sudipta Singh

Mission Secretary, Research and Capacity Development, Council for World Mission, Singapore

1.Abraham Joshua Heschel, “On Prayer,” in Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, ed. Susannah Heschel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), 262.

2.http://wcrc.ch/accra.

3.“The Accra Confession,” World Communion of Reformed Churches, accessed May 20, 2020, http://wcrc.ch/accra/the-accra-confession, article 17.

4.“WARC/Global Dialogue on the Accra Confession,” accessed May 20, 2020, https://www.reformiert-info.de/WARCGlobal_Dialogue_on_the_Accra_Confession-4370-0-12-2.html.