The Shape of Participation

The Shape of Participation is a work of constructive theology addressed to theologians, seminarians, and thoughtful pastors. Owens engages and deepens recent popular discussions of church practices by approaching practices from the church Fathers' understanding of the church's participation in God. Through a wide-ranging engagement with theologians, both ancient and contemporary--including Cyril of Alexandria, Maximus the Confessor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Herbert McCabe--Owens argues that the embodied practices of the church are the church's participation in the life of God, making the church Jesus' own continued, peaceable embodiment in and for the world. This book is for theologians, pastors, and anyone who wants a deeper understanding of how the visible presence of God's church is extraordinarily good news in a violent world.

""I'm grateful for this account of the church's relationship to the life of God for refusing the hopelessness of so much contemporary ecclesiology. All of us who persist in preaching or hearing the Word and receiving God's good gifts at the table will be strengthened and encouraged by Owens's theocentric understanding of what the church is up to in the world.""
--Beth Felker Jones
Wheaton College

""A wonderful book--Owens takes the significant interest in 'practices' that has emerged over the last decade, engages it theologically in rich ways with attention to specific ecclesial examples, and deepens it through insightful analyses of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Herbert McCabe, and Maximus the Confessor. Pastors and scholars alike will benefit from careful study of Owens's significant argument.""
--L. Gregory Jones
Duke University

""By reframing the church's practices as a participation in Christ and, indeed, as Christ's own practicing in and for the world, Owens has brought to the study of Christian practice new theological depth, shape, and creativity. Moreover, by doing this in dialogue with ancient as well as contemporary theological and philosophical sources and in a way that takes seriously the concrete, embodied church rather than remaining on the level of idealized and abstract ecclesiology, he has provided us a helpful new model for thinking about what it means to be the church.""
--Bryan Stone
Boston University School of Theology


L. Roger Owens is co-pastor with his wife Ginger Thomas of Duke Memorial United Methodist Church, Durham, North Carolina. His next book is So I Send You: An Introduction to the Missional Church (forthcoming in the Cascade Companion series of Cascade Books).