A Sense of Belonging

“How do prayer, belief, and the life of the worshiping community relate to each other? In this book, Hilton Scott takes us on a fascinating tour along three urban, South African churches to answer this question. Carefully describing prayer in nine worship services and interpreting these through multiple disciplinary lenses, Scott argues for unity and diversity in liturgical inculturation. The global church has lessons to learn from this original study of lex orandi, lex credendi, lex (con)vivendi.”


—Armand Léon van Ommen, University of Aberdeen, United Kingdom





“Practices impact the formation of those participating in them. If a practice such as Sunday worship is, in the words of Martin Luther King Jr., ‘the most segregated hour’ of the week, it forms the participants in that worship in a specific way. Liturgical and ritual criticism of existing worship practices should therefore be an ongoing exercise. A sense of belonging sheds light on the formative potential of worship and the need for critical scrutiny.”


—Cas Wepener, Stellenbosch University, South Africa