Robert E. Webber Quotes & Sayings

Beneath the privatization of worship is the ever-present individualism of our culture. — Robert E. Webber

The primary metaphor for the Easter season is the church as the resurrected people living a resurrected spirituality. Because of Easter we are in union with Christ and are called to live in our baptismal identity in his resurrection. This essential theme of Easter cannot be communicated in a day. It takes a season. — Robert E. Webber

The church has unfolded in many forms, and no one single external form stands alone as the CORRECT visible expression. As the church settled in various geographical areas and as it penetrated through a variety of cultures, it found expression in multifaceted forms. Thus, the insistence that the church must exist in a single form is a denial not only of the richness of creation, but also of the complexities of the human response. — Robert E. Webber

I find when most people are honest about their spiritual pilgrimage, they admit to the difficulty of maintaining the habit of a spiritual discipline. What attracks me most about the Anglican spiritual tradition is that it provides purposeful spiritual direction in the life of Christ. — Robert E. Webber

For years, the church has emphasized evangelism, teaching, fellowship, missions, and service to society to the neglect of the very source of its power
worship. — Robert E. Webber

In the Episcopal Church I find a healthy sense of unity and diversity. In this tradition we recognize that that which holds the church together is more important than that which divides the church. — Robert E. Webber

We must learn, then, not to HAVE a spirituality, something we turn on at a particular place or time, but to BE spiritual, as a habit of life, a continuous state of being. It is to this end that we seek after God in the stillness and hubbub of life, but always and everywhere in and through the church, where Christ is made present to us and, through us, to the world. — Robert E. Webber

To summarize, Easter Sunday is the most important Sunday. It is the Sunday of all Sundays. It is the day of the new beginning of the entire cosmos, the day of resurrection.

In our worship we must be careful not to reduce our message to the Easter fact only. The Easter fact must include the message this fact proclaims: God makes all things new. It must also include the message that we have been raised with Christ. Calling God's people to die to sin and rise to the new life is central not only to Easter day but to the Easter season. — Robert E. Webber

Because God is the subject who acts upon me in worship, my participation is not reduced to verbal responses or to singing, but it is living in the pattern of the one who is revealed in worship. — Robert E. Webber

There is something explainable about what man has accomplished in God's creation, while the creation itself remains a mystery. — Robert E. Webber

Ancient worship ... does truth. All one has to do is to study the ancient liturgies to see that liturgies clearly do truth by their order and in their substance. This is why so many young people today are now adding ancient elements to their worship ... This recovery of ancient practices is not the mere restoration of ritual but a deep, profound, and passionate engagement with truth - truth that forms and shapes the spiritual life into a Christlikeness that issues forth in the call to a godly and holy life and into a deep commitment to justice and to the needs of the poor. — Robert E. Webber

The faith engaged with Platonism in the ancient world, with Aristotle in the medieval world, with nominalism in the Reformation era, and with rationalism in the modern world. Now the church must engage with the emergence of a postmodern, post- Christian, neo-pagan world. — Robert E. Webber

God works through life, through people, and through physical, tangible, and material reality to communicate his healing presence in our lives. — Robert E. Webber