Ancient Christian Worship

"Consistently learned and insightful, Andrew McGowan offers a comprehensive introduction to the worship life of early Christians. He covers the broad spectrum of Christian practice, from celebrating common meals to reading and commenting on Scripture, praying in various forms, initiating new members, and shaping sacred time and space. He is sensitive to both the continuities and the evolutionary changes in practice as Christians adapted their common life across a range of cultures and social circumstances. McGowan covers an impressive range of primary materials and deftly sifts through the scholarly debates surrounding them, preparing an easily accessible feast for anyone interested in the origins and multifold forms of early Christian liturgical practice."

"This is the book that I wish I had written, but Andrew McGowan has done it so much better. Easily accessible to a nonspecialist reader, it nevertheless contains the fruit of the most up-to-date academic scholarship. Anyone wanting a reliable and comprehensive introduction to the practices of the early Christians must start here."

"Ancient Christian Worship is the book that scholars, teachers, and students of early Christianity and liturgical history have long needed. Andrew McGowan provides an authoritative, accessible, and up-to-date synthesis of what we know (and do not know) about the worship lives of the ancient Christians. Anyone interested in the early church or Christian liturgy will learn from this gracefully written and clearly argued book."

"Andrew McGowan provides a clear and beautifully written introduction to ancient Christian worship. While never oversimplifying the richness and complexity of his subject, McGowan has produced a study that is simultaneously comprehensive and accessible. All readers, from beginners to those more advanced, will be rewarded by both his erudition and his insight. This work justifiably will be cherished by students and teachers alike for generations to come."

"Ancient Christian Worship provides pastors, students, and interested readers with a lively, detailed account of how Christians ate together, prayed, read Scripture, and celebrated with song and dance from New Testament times to the fourth-century basilica churches. The story of diversity and change will encourage twenty-first-century believers struggling with church renewal."

"One of our best liturgical historians has written the book we hoped he would. In readable and engaging prose, Ancient Christian Worship draws together a quarter century of recent scholarship on the origins of Christian worship. It will soon be required reading for anyone interested in the critical study of the ancient Christian church, including students and scholars of the New Testament and Late Antiquity."

"The proliferation of detailed studies of ancient Christian worship leaves nonspecialists in want of a reliable and well-researched survey. Andrew McGowan comes to our aid in this splendid volume. Informed by an expert knowledge of the field and a keen methodological awareness, yet writing with a clarity that renders the work accessible to any educated reader, McGowan surveys the early Christians' communal eating and drinking, teaching and preaching, song and dance, initiation and prayer, and feasts and fasts. He gives due attention to the diversity attested in the first four centuries but also recognizes commonalities discernible in the sources. When students inquire about early Christian worship, this will now be the book I recommend as the starting point for serious research."

"Ancient Christian Worship is a wonderfully broad but deep introduction to the sources and complex history of early Christian liturgical traditions. Readers will find here not only an astute interpretation of the backgrounds and foregrounds of early liturgy but also a vivid demonstration of what the various components of early worship services actually looked and sounded like. Here indeed is a treasury of insights into the formative theology of worship and into the manifold actions of praise, of holy feasting and fasting, of reading and proclaiming and interpreting the Word, and of holding forth a vision of sacred time that bridged salvation history with the present experience of the church."