Robert Webber and the Shape of the Church to Come : Duane W.H. Arnold, PhD
Robert Webber and the Shape of the Church to Come
By Duane W.H. Arnold, PhD
Robert Webber, for many years, taught Theology and Church History at Wheaton College. His evangelical credentials were impeccable—shaped in part by his undergraduate years at Bob Jones University and then honed further through doctoral work at Concordia Theological Seminary in St. Louis. He even had the great fortune to marry the daughter of Harold Lindsell, long-time editor of Christianity Today. Yet, for all those institutional credentials, Bob was not interested in preserving evangelicalism as a museum piece. He was more interested in breathing life into its bones.
In 1977, he was one of the key figures behind the Chicago Call, a statement issued by a group of younger evangelical leaders urging a return to classical Christian orthodoxy. The Call emphasized the authority of Scripture, the centrality of the creeds, and the Church as a visible, historical, and sacramental community. For Webber, it was an early articulation of what would become his lifelong effort to help evangelicals recover a more rooted and embodied faith.
I first met Bob in 1979, not long after he had published Common Roots: A Call to Evangelical Maturity, that slender but provocative book in which he called evangelicals to return to the faith and practices of the early Church. That work marked a turning point, not only for Webber but for a generation of readers. He was suggesting something radical: that the vitality evangelicals longed for was not to be found in the latest church growth models or marketing techniques, but in the worship, theology, and sacramental life of the early centuries of the Church.
Over the years, we became friends and occasional correspondents. He advised me on doctoral programs, warning me to stay away from anything that was too “narrow”. We spoke on the telephone often, trading stories and talking about books we had discovered. In all of our interactions, Bob was a force of nature—warm, curious, exuberant, and, at times, delightfully impish. I still remember visiting his office at Wheaton. A large window overlooked the Billy Graham Center, a structure that might seem the very symbol of evangelical triumph. Yet Bob had surrounded that window with icons. There, staring back around the glass of the window, were the saints of the Church—Cyril, Basil, Augustine, and Irenaeus—framing the revivalism of the twentieth century with the memory of a more ancient witness.
That was Bob.
Curly hair (that he wanted to grow out longer), a mustache, and a mischievous smile—he was clearly on his own journey. It was a journey backward and forward. He called it ancient-future faith, a phrase that would later become emblematic of his theological vision. His vision, however, was not merely to add to evangelicalism the accoutrements of Anglican, Roman, or Orthodox worship. Ancient-future was not meant to be a gimmick for church growth, or some new marketing tool, as some have made it (which would have horrified Bob). What he meant by ancient-future was not a new slogan, but a much more radical vision.
At the heart of that vision was ecclesiology. Webber wrote, “The church is not an end in itself, but the sign of the Kingdom, pointing to God’s rule and reign in the world” (Ancient-Future Faith, 1999, p. 75). For Webber, the Church was not a platform, not a personality cult, not a holding tank for the rapture. The Church was, and remains, the Body of Christ—formed by Word and Sacrament, shaped in community, called into mission. He believed that in the early Church, worship was not a tool of evangelism but its very source of being. As he insisted, “Worship forms the believer in the narrative of God’s saving acts. It is through worship that the Church becomes what it is called to be” (Worship Old and New, 1994, p. 142). Baptism was not a cultural rite of passage but an ontological transformation. Eucharist was not a memorial snack, but the eschatological banquet of the Kingdom.
Moreover, he rejected the shallow ecclesiology that saw the Church as a voluntary association of like-minded individuals. The Church, for Webber, was the very means by which Christ’s presence and purpose are made manifest in the world. His prayer for the world becomes ours. He frequently cited the Fathers, especially Irenaeus and Athanasius. For example, he often returned to Irenaeus’s image of the Church as the restored image of God, reflecting divine life in unity and holiness (The Younger Evangelicals, 2002, p. 114).
What made Webber’s work distinctive was that he refused to place this vision on the dusty shelves of historical curiosity. He pressed it into the present. He invited pastors to recover the liturgical year, to preach from the lectionary, to center worship on the Table. He urged students to study not only modern theology but patristic sources, to read De Doctrina Christiana alongside Bonhoeffer, and to understand that theology and doxology are inseparable. He urged that “The recovery of the Church calendar is not nostalgic; it is formative. It immerses the believer in the rhythm of the Christian story” (Ancient-Future Time, 2004, p. 23).
Webber was unflinching in his critique of the Church’s failures, particularly in the late modern era. He lamented how consumerism, individualism, and entertainment culture had hollowed out the Church’s identity. As he wrote, “The Church has failed to form people into a spiritual counterculture. Instead, it has mirrored the values of the world” (The Divine Embrace, 2006, p. 112). For Webber, the Church’s complicity in cultural accommodation had left it fragmented and forgetful, often more concerned with relevance and power than with faithfulness. He believed that only by reclaiming its theological and liturgical identity could the Church become the transformative presence it was called to be.
You see, Webber saw that ecclesiology was not a side topic. It was not an “added extra”. He wrote, “Our ecclesiology determines how we view mission, discipleship, and the Church’s role in the world. A weak ecclesiology leads to a fragmented witness” (The Divine Embrace, 2006, p. 167). It was the lens through which one views not only discipleship but justice and culture as well. When the Church forgets what it is, it inevitably forgets what it is for.
In a time when churches—both progressive and conservative—are tempted to reinvent themselves every decade, Webber’s legacy reminds us that renewal is not novelty. It is memory. It is retrieval. It is participation in the mystery of Christ through the Church, across time and culture.
I miss Bob. I miss his laugh, his letters, and his stubborn refusal to settle for anything less than the fullness of the faith. He believed, fiercely, that the Church could be more—because he believed, deeply, that the Body of Christ was not a metaphor — it was meant to be a reality.
Books by Robert Webber
Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality Through the Christian Year
I don’t know how much immersion in the church calendar and liturgy is actually formative. I grew up in the Roman Catholic Church, immersed with all my family and many others in calendar and liturgy, but that didn’t stop my family from being only nominally Catholic, and it hasn’t stopped many millions of Americans from becoming disengaged from or entirely leaving the Catholic Church. The only thing that prevents the Roman Catholic Church in the U.S. from being in the kind of death spiral membership situation of the mainline Protestant churches is immigration from majority Catholic countries.
Robert F
Thank you for the honest reflection. You’re right—mere exposure to liturgy or the church calendar isn’t automatically formative. Webber would likely agree. His point wasn’t that ritual alone transforms, but that when paired with intentional catechesis, community, and a living faith, the liturgical rhythm can shape Christian identity over time. Without that deeper integration, any tradition—Catholic, Protestant, or otherwise—risks becoming merely cultural.
I have no doubt that what you say is true. Ritual paired with all that you cited, over time, has that ability, — as long as there is steady integrity in all the elements. With that integrity carried through all facets of worship and church life I think liturgy and ritual, whether high or low liturgy and ritual, can soundly Christian identity. The question is: whether low church or high church, where is that integrity to be found throughout church institutions? It seems a rare thing, found here and there, but not as a matter of course to be found in churches, whether Catholic, Orthodox, evangelical, etc. Without that integrity, and concern for the image of God in every person, as discussed by John Lennox in a previous post, it all is empty piety, high or low church.
Robert F
That’s a crucial and necessary challenge. Webber himself would have agreed—he was no romantic about liturgy for its own sake. The integrity you speak of, that concern for the image of God in every person, is the true test of any ecclesial tradition. Without it, yes, even the most beautiful liturgy or the most energetic revival becomes empty piety. The crisis isn’t simply stylistic—high or low—but spiritual and moral. The Church’s credibility rests not on aesthetics or structure, but on the lived witness of the Gospel. Integrity, then, isn’t a feature of style but of faithfulness.
I wonder if the attraction toward a more liturgical format (including the lectionary from the church calendar) for those who grew up in a Baptistic setting is due, among other reasons, to the sense of disconnect with the larger, historical church tradition.
As I am checking out other churches, some of the Baptist churches we have visited are more prone to engaging in some type of new program intended to grow their church. These programs are not rooted in either a broad ecclesial tradition or connected to communicate to the present [post-modern] culture. They seem terribly out of touch with anything other than themselves and the way it was done in the mid-to-late twentieth century. Their cultural expression doesn’t seem to penetrate much below the surface. And conversely, things like the church calendar, public worship that recites a creed, and public, communal prayers of repentance have a much deeper feel that ministers to our souls, rather than feeling good because a few more people are attending.
pstrmike
Yes, I think that’s exactly right. For many who were shaped in a Baptistic or non-liturgical environment, the move toward a more structured form of worship—lectionary, calendar, creed—isn’t about novelty. It’s about a longing for depth and continuity. There’s a sense that we’ve been cut off from the larger story of the Church, and we’re trying to recover something older, something wiser, something that doesn’t begin and end with us.
Too often, what’s offered instead is just the next program, the next rebrand, the next attempt to “reach people” without ever asking what it means to form people. And as you noted, these efforts are rarely connected to either the historical Church or the present cultural moment. They float untethered—nostalgic for a version of the mid-20th century that’s long since faded.
The irony is that things like the Church calendar, the public confession of sin, and the recitation of the Creed were never meant to be museum pieces. They were—and are—meant to shape us, to remind us who we are, and to place us in the presence of something far greater than ourselves. That’s not about chasing feelings or numbers. It’s about finding our lives rooted in the life of Christ.
I read Worship is a Verb in 1985. Wonderful book!
Wonderful indeed!
“Worship is a verb. It is not something done to us or for us, but by us…”
I keep hearing today that faith is a verb. Last time I checked you can’t “faith” someone.
JD
I have not come across that one…