When a mentor saw me struggling with worship in our fledging church plant, he handed me a copy of Marva Dawn’s
Reaching Out Without Dumbing Down: A Theology of Worship in this Urgent Time. I wondered what a Lutheran and a lover of historic worship practices would have to say to a congregation whose traditions came more from indie rock shows than any church.
It turns out that the work of Marva Dawn who died last month at age 72 was life-giving. Like many in my generation, I began ministry with a sense that there was something unsatisfying about the experiences I’d grown up with, and Dawn invited us to reconsider much that had been laid aside in the decades before.