Home > Work > Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation
41 " Second, the shared recitation of the Creed constitutes us as a historical people. "
― James K.A. Smith , Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation
42 " Third, the recitation of the Creed is the “I believe” moment in Christian worship. "
43 " What we believe is not a matter of intellectualizing salvation but rather a matter of knowing what to love, knowing to whom we pledge allegiance, and knowing what is at stake for us as people of the “baptismal city.” In reciting it each week, we rehearse the skeletal structure of the story in which we find our identity. "
44 " It is because we are God’s ambassadors and image bearers, charged with caring for creation, that we bring to him the concerns of creation, praying for each other, for the church, and for the world at large. "
45 " Finally, as we prepare to hear the Word proclaimed, a prayer for illumination positions and challenges our confidence in self-sufficient reason. "
46 " Our ultimate love/desire is shaped by practices, not ideas that are merely communicated to us. "
47 " According to Maximus the Confessor in "One Hundred Chapters of Love", the key to directing and increasing one's desire for God is the acquisition of the virtues-which, you'll recall, we described above as noncognitive "dispositions" acquired through practices. So how does one acquire such virtues, such dispositions of desire? Through participation in concrete Christian practices like confession. "
48 " The core claim of this book is that liturgies8—whether “sacred” or “secular”—shape and constitute our identities by forming our most fundamental desires and our most basic attunement to the world. In short, liturgies make us certain kinds of people, and what defines us is what we love. They do this because we are the sorts of animals whose orientation to the world is shaped from the body up more than from the head down. Liturgies aim our love to different ends precisely by training our hearts through our bodies. "
49 " Being a disciple of Jesus is not primarily a matter of getting the right ideas and doctrines and beliefs into your head in order to guarantee proper behavior; rather, it's a matter of being the kind of person who loves rightly--who loves God and neighbor and is oriented to the world by the primacy of that love. We are made to be such people by our immersion in the material practices of Christian worship--through affective impact, over time, of sights and smell in water and wine. "
50 " Delight yourself in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart. Psalm 37:4 NIV "
51 " the end of Christian education has been seen to be the dissemination and communication of Christian ideas rather than the formation of a peculiar people. "
52 " education is most fundamentally a matter of formation, "
53 " education, then, is a constellation of practices, rituals, and routines that inculcates a particular vision of the good life by inscribing or infusing that vision into the heart (the gut) by means of material, embodied practices. "
54 " The Scriptures function as the script of the worshiping community, the story that narrates the identity of the people of God, the constitution of this baptismal city, and the fuel of the Christian imagination. "
55 " When the Scriptures are read in the context of gathered worship, they are, in a sense, enacted at the same time. "
56 " Scripture also functions as something like the constitution of the baptismal city. "
57 " we should emphasize that the narrative of Scripture is a primary fund for the Christian imagination. "
58 " The tangible display and performance of the gospel in the Lord’s Supper is a deeply affecting practice. "
59 " First, lest we pass too quickly over the mundane and obvious, we should appreciate that the stuff of the Lord’s Supper—the “elements” as they’re sometimes called—are rather ho-hum stuff: bread and wine, staples of any daily diet in many parts of the world and across history. "
60 " These are not naturally occurring phenomena; they are the fruit of culture, the products of human making. In blessing the bread and giving thanks for it, Jesus not only hallows the stuff of the earth, but he also hallows the stuff of our hands. "