Customer Reviews

Protestant Worship: Traditions in Transition

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As I was going through my inquirer's class in the Episcopal Church, I ran across this book in the local Bible Book Store. It only encouraged me to continue. I absolutely recommend it to everyone interested in Protestant Christianity. For example, I was totally baffled as to why the church I was attending had the choir separated from the congregation and facing each other or a blank wall, in a completely illogical manner. Once I read Professor White's description of the church buildings encouraged after the rather ambitious Catholic Revival in the Anglican Communion, I understood.
But that is only about one chapter in this comprehensive book. Professor White describes with dispassion and accuracy the worship of virtually all the mainline Protestant denominations and their development since the Reformation. If you find this topic interesting, this is an indispensable book.

As one who has studied liturgy at the University of Notre Dame and as one who has had a long interest in Protestant worship traditions, I found Professor White's work exceptional. Few other persons, if any, could pull together so much information from such an array of sources and present it richly in a way that is very understandable. As one who has a library of several hundred books on liturgy, this work would definitely be one of the five or ten that I would keep if I had to get rid of all others.

Ever wonder how different denominations came into existence? where did baptists come from? what is the history of methodism? in a consise chapter on each of the major denominational developments following the reformation, James F. White traces the origins of each denomination, and follows them through to their modern incarnations. excellent for the beginning church historian.

Everything I have read by James F. White has been excellent. His "Brief History of Christian Worship" is outstanding, as is his "Introduction to Christian Worship." White is extremely articulate, without being verbose. His writing style is very readable, and his approach to worship is balanced and unbiased. This book on Protestant Worship includes chapters on nine different denominational worship styles, and you can only read the ones that interest you, as I chose to do. Coming from a Free Church perspective, I was interested in Anabaptist Worship, Separatist and Puritan Worship, and Frontier (or Revival) Worship. For more on Free Church Worship see "Gathering: A Spirituality And Theology of Worship in Free Church Tradition," by Christopher J. Ellis.

This book is a comprehensive survey of the historical development of Protestant Worship. However, White is not content with using words demanding medium cognitive effort; rather he opted to put in place arduous words where an unadorned word would prove sufficient. Another disappointment is that there is no picture at all in the book to illustrate the many graphical descriptions of various church architectures. He obviously did not hold to the view "a picture is worth a thousand words" but rather took the exact opposite view. The above two factors combine to make the reading of this book taking twice as much time as it should.

I found this book extremely useful!!
Is all I wanted to know -as a first approach to protestant worship. I reccommend it to all the people interested in protestant traditions, differences and origins. Besides, the book is very well-written (so you won't get tired of it easily!) and it is not excessively long. It's a great option!