Talk to Explore Church Worship Practices

Lisa DeBoer, Westmont professor of art history, examines various church worship practices in a talk, “Becoming the Body of Christ, or Not,” Monday, March 6, at 7 p.m. in Hieronymus Lounge at Westmont’s Kerrwood Hall. The Paul C. Wilt Phi Kappa Phi Lecture is free and open to the public.

Christians have commonly looked to biblical and theological sources to guide their worship practices, but ecclesiology, an appreciation of what it means to be the church, can also shape worship.

“This broader view gives critical insight into the universal and corporate dimensions of Christian worship,” says DeBoer, who will draw from her 10-year study of Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox practices.

In October, the Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts gave DeBoer the 2016 Arlin G. Meyer Prize in Non-Fiction for her book, “The Visual Arts and the Worshiping Church.”

DeBoer, who has been teaching at Westmont since 1999, graduated from Calvin College and earned a Master of Arts and a doctorate from the University of Michigan. She has received numerous scholarships, awards and fellowships, including a Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst Scholarship from the Federal Republic of Germany, a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Education, a Fulbright Fellowship for study at the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie in The Hague, a Lilly Fellows Program Post-Doctoral Fellowship, and Westmont’s Bruce and Adaline Bare Teacher of the Year Award for Humanities in 2003 and 2009.