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Lecture Title: Liturgy is for Lovers: Agency, Action, and Christian Worship There is a deep irony about much contemporary evangelical worship: largely failing to appreciate the primacy of God's agency in worship, evangelical worship often mimics the problems of late medieval Catholicism by reducing worship to something we do. Of course that was precisely the situation that originally called for reform and motivated the Protestant Reformers. In this lecture, James K. A. Smith calls us to protest contemporary Protestantism and to reform the reformers. Retrieving the Reformers' emphasis on the primacy of God's agency in Christian worship will enable us to remember that worship is not merely expressive, but also formative. Recovering a "formative" emphasis in Christian worship engenders a more robust approach to discipleship, taking seriously the power of habit in a more holistic understanding of sanctification. James K. A. Smith (PhD Villanova University) is Professor of Philosophy at Calvin University. He is author of more than 15 books, including his award-winning three-volume Cultural Liturgies project, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Baker Academic, 2009), Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works (Baker Academic, 2013), and Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology (Baker Academic, 2017). The Henry Center for Theological Understanding provides theological resources that help bridge the gap between the academy and the church. It houses a cluster of initiatives, each of which is aimed at applying practical Christian wisdom to important kingdom issuesfor the good of the church, for the soul of the theological academy, for the sake of the world, and ultimately for the glory of God. The HCTU seeks to ground each of these initiatives in Scripture, and it pursues these goals collaboratively, in order to train a new generation of wise interpreters of the Wordlay persons and scholars alikefor the sake of tomorrow's church, academy, and world. Visit the HCTU website: https://henrycenter.tiu.edu/ Subscribe to the HCTU Newsletter: https://bit.ly/326pRL5 Connect with us! https://twitter.com/henry_center https://www.facebook.com/henrycenter/ https://www.instagram.com/thehenrycenter/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/thehenrycenter