Issue 38.1 of Liturgy is entitled “Future Renewals: Looking toward the Next 50 Years of Worship Scholarship and Practice” and is guest-edited by Andrew Wymer and Melinda Quivik.

Issue 37.4 of Liturgy is entitled “Renewals in Retrospect: Fifty Years of Worship Scholarship amidst the Changing Worlds of Worship” and is guest-edited by Andrew Wymer and Melinda Quivik.

Issue 37.3 of Liturgy is entitled “Pentecostalism and Historic Churches” and is guest-edited by Matthew Sigler.

The essays in this issue of Liturgy focus on worship as a tool for negotiating individual and collective identity. Ethicist Kwame Appiah has several salient observations about identity that are germane to the theme of this issue of Liturgy. He writes that “identities come, first, with labels and ideas about why and to whom they should be applied. Second, your identity shapes your thoughts about how you should behave; and third, it affects the way other people treat you. Finally, all these dimensions of identity are contestable, always up for dispute: who’s in, what they’re like, how they should behave and be treated.”

As the board of The Liturgical Conference gathered together for our annual meeting in February 2017 soon after the inauguration of the president of the United States who campaigned on a provocative and divisive political agenda, we recognized the need for an upcoming issue of Liturgy to explore the interconnectedness of liturgy and politics. We hoped to bring together the voices of scholars and practitioners who could provide a timely, liturgical engagement with the powers that divide and demean. This issue means to show how communities of faith might liturgically engage matters of power during the 2020 election cycle in the U.S.

This issue of Liturgy dealing with “Innovating Adapted Traditions” explores the many ways worship leaders are creatively addressing contemporary needs.

For many centuries, Christians have blended cultural customs and societal expectations with biblical and theological understandings of marriage and human relationships. The essays that follow show how different churches bring together elements of culture and Christianity, rites that couples, guided by clergy, embody in particular ways.

While postcolonial perspectives on liturgy are relatively recent, its pioneers and their robust views are well represented in the essays that follow. Their contributions address a series of foci—baptism; reading, proclamation, and prayer in ministry of the word; orders; and silence.

In the following seven essays, theologians across the Christian ecumenical spectrum describe and analyze liturgical confession of faith and confession of sin, reconciliation in sacramental rite and in a fragmented society, from a wealth of historical, traditional, and critical perspectives.

This concept, “communities of musical practice,” is the focus of this issue of Liturgy. In the essays that follow, we have attempted to provide a diverse, though necessarily limited, exploration of several distinct musical communities.