Transformational Preaching and Worship

This book explores worship’s social developmental impact in shaping the lifeworld of its participants. Using a model called coorienation, the author demonstrates how to evaluate the interaction of roles and symbols within an embodied imagination context. This type of analysis not only exposes limiting or harmful patterns to remove or rework, but it reveals ways to create wide and edifying invitations through preaching and liturgical elements. Going beyond a simple constructive inquiry, this model makes room for the transformational experiences of worshippers and the phenomenological realities of the Holy Other as an active participant. By critically examining worship through this lens, leaders can gain knowledge to craft settings that aim for these profound encounters that deepen relationships with God, with others, and with ourselves. In this way we can embrace the multiplicity of roles and relationships littered throughout our world, uniting in a polyphonic existence that reverberates in concert with God’s own tremendous multifaceted Being.