Another Korby Gem

This comes from the first thing I ever read of Korby. When I was in junior high, the assistant pastor at my home church (Pastor Karl Bachman) told me that if I really wanted to understand what was going on in Synod, I needed to read *The Lively Function of the Gospel* - a festschrift in honor of Richard Caemerer. I picked it up and didn't understand hardly anything. But a few years later, in college, I came back to it, and of all the essays in the book, the one by this man Korby really grabbed hold. I remember reading it on the bus as I travelled to Montgomery College for classes. It was dense, hard to follow, deep - but I knew I was dealing with truth. It was worth trying to understand. I still think it is. Here's just a teasing taste from his essay *The Church at Worship*:

"The liturgical forms and actions are public instruments for such caring in calling. They are the training ground for 'gospeling' each other and being 'gospeled.' Obviously, ritual can become ritualism. But the conquest of ritualism is neither formlessness nor an infinite variation of forms. The overthrow of ritualism, like the destruction of any other idolatry, is brought about by the advent of the true God; that is, by the Gospel. True worship is always its own reformation." (p. 72)