Robert Eugene Webber (November 27, 1933 – April 27, 2007) was an American theologian known for his work on worship and the early church. He played a key role in the Convergence Movement, a movement among evangelical and charismatic churches in the United States to blend charismatic worship with liturgies from the Book of Common Prayer and other liturgical sources.[1]
The son of a Baptist minister, Webber was born in Philadelphia and raised for the first seven years of his life in the small village of Mitulu in the Belgian Congo where his parents were missionaries with the Africa Inland Mission.[2] Chester Robert Webber and Harriett Basto Russell Webber had three children, Robert, an older sister Eleanor (Webber) Entwistle, and a younger brother, Kenneth Webber. His family returned to the United States when his brother became seriously ill and his father then became pastor of the Montgomeryville Baptist Church in Colmar, Pennsylvania.[3][4]
Webber was married twice. First, to N. Dawn McCallum Webber and they had 3 children: John, Alexandra, and Stefany. His second marriage was to Joanne Lindsell Webber, who had one son, Jeremy Buffam.
Webber began teaching theology at Wheaton College in 1968.[7]Existentialism was the primary focus of Webber's research and lectures during his first years at Wheaton.[8] However, he soon shifted his focus to the early church.[8] In 1978 he wrote Common Roots, a book that examined the impact of 2nd-century Christianity on the modern church.[8]
In 1985 Webber wrote Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail: Why Evangelicals Are Attracted to the Liturgical Church, in which he described the reasons behind his own gradual shift away from his fundamentalist/evangelical background toward the Anglican tradition. Webber faced an enormous amount of criticism from evangelicals in response to this book.[5] Nevertheless, his work was highly influential, and his ideas grew in popularity in evangelical circles.[5]
During the latter half of his life, Webber took a special interest in Christian worship practices. He wrote more than 40 books on the topic of worship, focusing on how the worship practices of the ancient church have value for the church in the 21st-century postmodern era. Among his books are Ancient-Future Worship, Ancient-Future Faith, Ancient-Future Time, Ancient-Future Evangelism, The Younger Evangelicals, and The Divine Embrace. Webber also served as editor of The Complete Library of Christian Worship (1995), an eight-volume series created to serve as a comprehensive reference for professors, students, pastors, and worship leaders. The series draws on several thousand texts and publications and covers topics like Old and New Testament worship and contemporary applications for music and the arts.[9]
Webber founded The Robert E. Webber Institute for Worship StudiesinJacksonville, Florida, in 1998.[10] The school offers Doctor of Worship Studies and Master of Worship Studies degrees. It is the only accredited graduate institution in the United States to focus exclusively on worship education.[11] He remained president of the institute until his death.[12]
Webber retired from Wheaton in 2000 and was named Professor Emeritus.[13] In 2000, Webber took a position as the Myers Professor of Ministry and Director of the M.A. in Worship and Spirituality at Northern Seminary in Lombard, Illinois, which he served in until his death in 2007.[2][14][13]
In 2006, he organized and edited the "Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future", a document intended "to restore the priority of the divinely inspired biblical story of God's acts in history".[15]
Webber died of pancreatic cancer on April 27, 2007, at his home in Sawyer, Michigan, aged 73.[16]
In 2012, Trinity School for Ministry, an evangelical Anglican seminary in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, established the Robert E. Webber Center for an Ancient Evangelical Future.[17] The Center's mission is to continue Webber's vision: to recover the theological, spiritual and liturgical resources of the ancient Christian Tradition for the church today.[8]
