Ancient Christian Worship
Ancient Christian Worship: Early Church Practices in Social, Historical, and Theological Perspective by Andrew B. McGowan
Andrew B. McGowan is an Australian scholar of early Christianity, Anglican priest, and academic administrator with a Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame. He is presently the J. L. Caldwell McFaddin and Rosine B. McFaddin Professor of Anglican Studies and Pastoral Theology at Yale Divinity School.
His scholarly work centers on the ritual practices, social history, and liturgical traditions of early Christian communities, with particular emphasis on food, meals, and worship which make it an interesting addition for those researching the history of Christian ritual practices in their earliest recoverable settings.
A few interesting key points of this book which examines Christian worship during the 1st century AD through the early 5th century AD include:
1. Early worship was diverse, domestic, and centered on real communal meals rather than a separate mass.
2. Distinct Eucharistic rites, fixed liturgies, church buildings, and the normative practice of infant baptism emerged only gradually, mostly in the 3rd–4th centuries.
3. The book treats major practices thematically: meal/Eucharist, Scripture and preaching, music and prayer, baptismal initiation, gesture and space, and the shaping of Christian time (daily, weekly, annual).
Reader’s note: McGowan wrote an interesting article on July 10, 2025 titled “How December 25 Became Christmas” published at the Biblical Archaeology Society: https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/people-cultures-in-the-bible/jesus-historical-jesus/how-december-25-became-christmas/
Reader’s note: For those interested in the topic of asserted pagan dependencies, Patrick Zukeran wrote an accessible article published at Probe Ministries: https://probe.org/the-pagan-connection-did-christianity-borrow-from-the-mystery-religions/
Readers interested in a more scholarly examination may start with Ronald H. Nash’s “Christianity and the Hellenistic world” and “The gospel and the Greeks: Did the New Testament borrow from pagan thought?” Note that there is an abundance of scholars from the 20th (and now early 21st) century who wrote many accessible scholarly works rebutting the modern assertion of secularists with respect to the topic.
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