THE CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVE OF WORSHIP AND CULTURE

Abstract

Like an Alexandrite stone, worship changes its colour and depth with the source and quality of light cast upon it. It assimilates many energies, ideas and practices from its own times and from a more distant past; and if these are explored in the right way and seen in the proper perspective, they qualify and sharpen our varying responses. One such perspective is consideration of the conventional understanding of worship and its functions in the light of the life of great men of prayer. This is what I have attempted to do in the first section. I have chosen for discussion in this section Gandhiji as the main source, not just because he has to his credit massive writings on the subject, I but more because all that he has said on worship is based not on any theological system but on his own experience as a man of prayer par excellence and on the experiments he conducted on common worship among men of different faiths.