The Dangerous Act of Worship: Living God’s Call to Justice by Mark Labberton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Worship is so much more than a song. It’s an entire life that encompasses every action, every thought, every word, every inaction we participate in. Whether we realize this or not, we worship something or Someone every moment of every day. For those who follow Jesus Christ, we pray and hope that every action worships God, and yet so often when we think about what that worship means, we only stop to think about the music portion of a Sunday service or the latest album from the newest worship band. And while some might stop to think of worship as action and word, rarely is seeking justice a part of that vision of worship.
In his book The Dangerous Act of Worship, Mark Labberton seeks to paint a vision of the most dangerous act of worship: living out God’s call to justice in the world. This means looking to the least of these both next door and across an ocean. How are we as followers of Jesus caring for the orphan, widow, and voiceless out in the world? Have we forgotten this call to justice?
While this basic message is much needed in the American evangelical church today, Labberton spends almost 200 pages to say the same thing over and over: go out and worship through justice. He paints some biblical backdrop for this vision, which is extremely helpful, however when we gets to the nuts and bolts of what this will look like, he tends to wander through metaphor after metaphor that never quite lands and ends up being repetitive.
This is one of those books where if you read the first three chapters and the last one, you would have the gist of the entire work. Again, this perspective shift is helpful, so I’m not totally dismissing Labberton’s book. If you are interested in social justice and how that interplay works within the church context, this would be a helpful book for theory and biblical underpinnings. However, if you’re looking for a how-to manual or practical look at how this plays out, it would be better to look elsewhere.