ABSTRACT

The purpose of this book is to explore the relationship between the Christian activity of worship and the cultural context in which such activity takes place. Much has been written about the task of the contextualization or inculturation of Christian worship.1 I have drawn upon a number of these works in seeking to explore the themes inherent in the relationship between context, culture and worship. However my purpose is not to offer another work on the theories of inculturation as such, but rather through the particular example of the churches in southern India to ask questions about how the churches came to adopt the notion and task of inculturation, what this has meant during the twentieth century and what this may mean for the churches now at the beginning of the twenty-first.