National Worship Conference

ORDER and

June 25 - 28, 2008, Montréal, Québec

Plenary Sessions

Our keynote speakers will be Gordon Lathrop and Karen Ward.

Gordon Lathrop

Presentation One: Ordo and Coyote: yet more reflections on order, disorder, and Christian Worship
Presentation Two: The Third Wave: the liturgical movement and postmodernism
Presentation Three: Strong Centre, Open Door

Karen Ward

Presentation One: Emerging Worship Recon A field report - what is happening on the ground, in alternative/emerging/Vatican III worship
Presentation Two: Anglican and Lutheran Gifts for emerging worship
Presentation Three: Some ‘Order’ in some ‘Chaos’ -principles for emerging worship based in “Trinitarian” being.

Bonus Plenary: Open Dialogue with Gordon Lathrop and Karen Ward, at the plenary session in Quebec City.

About our speakers

About Gordon Lathrop

Sponsored by Faithlife Financial.

• recognized international liturgical scholar; prominent author as a liturgical theologian; professor emeritus at Lutheran Theological Seminary, Philadelphia
• a defining force in both North American and international liturgical thinking
• with regards to the conference theme : “ I think that the questions you hope to address in your 2008 national conference are among the most important current questions in worship. They are, of course, a current version of the old tensions between the local and the global, the parochial and the catholic, the contextual and the transcultural, in Christian worship. But these questions do not go away and they have a particularly pointed form in this postmodern context. I would be glad to be part of a discussion about these issues. ‘Order and Chaos’ is a fine focus, though Karen will tell you that her experiments are not without order, and I have recently been working more on chaos — which I suppose I have always thought lurks in the tensions of ordo! But more of that if we actually come together in discussion.”

About Karen Ward

• noted for her future church work in Seattle through a mission called Church of the Apostles (COTA) where she is the “Abbess”. Visit COTA online.
• Karen is a leader in the “emerging church movement” and a former church-wide staff person and leader in the introduction of the Adult Catechumenate in the ELCA.
• her parish website explains : “Church of the Apostles is a future church with an ancient faith … in the story of Jesus, we have glimpsed god's future and know that ‘this-could-change-everything.’ So our purpose is to help God-change-everything, by participating in God's future within today's culture and our local zipcode in community around Jesus Christ. The future is not something we manufacture, and community is not something we can coerce you into, but both are works of the spirit to which God calls you.”
• the ancient faith pattern is clearly recognisable in her community and it is a joint community operating under the auspices of the Episcopalian (Anglican) Diocese of Olympia, WA and The Northwest Washington Synod (ELCA).
• “New monasticism” is core to the mission and ethos of Church of the Apostles, Seattle and their small parish mission centre www.praxisctr.org (contact info@praxisctr.org) offers peer learning opportunities from emerging church planter “submersion” training, to urban mission “emmersions” for sabbatical clergy, to day long “Learning Party” and “Learning Day” mission workshops for dioceses and synods around North America.