Roy M. Oswald & Jean Morris Trumbauer, Transforming Rituals (Alban Institute, 1999)

One of the primary motifs of contemporary missiology, and one of its most promising streams, is transformation. It’s at the heart of much of what we do in mission and evangelism today.

We facilitate personal or social/structural change. We serve as gadflies to the ‘old guard’ in church health and growth. We wrestle with the big picture (a la David Bosch and friends), or we immerse ourselves in incremental shifts at the coal face in church planting or revitalization ministries. But we’re all inspired by transforming visions, and blown away by the stories of transformed people, and passionate about the fruits of transformation.

I am convinced that transformation (missional or otherwise) properly begins with personal change. You might have a ‘Damascus Road’ experience. It might take the form of a quiet ‘aha!’ as you read a particularly lucid or insightful book or article. Or you might experience the kind of transformation that shaped spiritual giants like Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton or Bill Bright. But all transformation, I think, starts with the personal.

With this in mind, I was intrigued to see Oswald and Trumbauer’s Transforming Rituals, with its subtitle “Daily practices for changing lives.” It got me thinking about how we can responsibly and creatively encourage (ourselves and) others to embrace transformation – no less than the ongoing metanoia advocated by the gospel. And how rituals and disciplines can inform mission.

For a Baptist pastor like me, steeped in programs and pragmatics, a fresh wind blows through these pages. The authors set about encouraging and assisting congregational leaders to move beyond their concern for Sunday ritual and to begin to envision the roles church leaders might play to assist members to ritualize their everyday lives.

They also endeavour to familiarize readers with the breadth and depth of the role of ritual in human life. They help us identify and evaluate the rituals that are part of our lives by default, and to harness and transform these in fruitful ways.

Successive chapters discuss family rituals, congregational rituals and rituals that move beyond the church to embrace the wider community. In Australia there are many opportunities for churches to engage their communities – from the large ones like ANZAC Day, Refugee Sunday, Clean Up Australia Day and anniversaries of natural disasters to the plethora of small local milestones and meaningful moments. Chapter 7 showcases the ways in which two US churches implemented transforming rituals.

There are reflection exercises at the end of every chapter, heaps of ideas for rituals, and seven appendices with liturgical resources for events ranging from stillbirth to the blessing of animals to school violence. These are good as catalysts but do not embrace postmodern learning/experience well.

Transforming Rituals is the kind of book you can use to seed new ideas and think laterally – especially if you’re feeling creatively challenged. While it’s written for the local church pastor and has (at least for me) a ‘high-church’ liturgical flavour, missional church leaders and evangelists might find food for thought and action here too.

I’ll certainly be using this book as a springboard to rethink how I use daily practices to change lives, starting with mine.

Rod Benson is University Ministry Coordinator with the CEGM and Baptist chaplain at Macquarie University. Contact him at