Thinking allowed

Advice to "traditional worshippers"

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In an art­icle Dear Tra­di­tion­al Wor­ship­pers blog­ger “Jonath­an” gets to grips with some of the issues between “tra­di­tion­al” and “con­tem­por­ary” wor­ship. Writ­ing from an Amer­ic­an Meth­od­ist per­spect­ive he lists some of the things that are lost by “con­tem­por­ary” worship,

It’s dev­ast­at­ing to see what’s happened to wor­ship in the church. You’re right. The blind­ness sur­round­ing the issue is astound­ing. The insist­ence that the com­mon trends of the day are most fit­ting for pub­lic wor­ship is wrong and short-sighted. It’s griev­ing that most churches now let Chris­ti­ans choose to not learn the his­tor­ic creeds, or the great tra­di­tion of hymns and songs, or the great priv­ilege of pray­ing togeth­er and read­ing Scrip­ture togeth­er. The com­mer­cial­iz­a­tion of our sac­red time, well, it’s noth­ing short of tra­gic. Yeah, we’ve sac­ri­ficed so much of who we are.

I know you feel like it’s been stolen from you. I know the pain runs deep. I know you’ve lost jobs, friends, fam­ily, con­greg­a­tions. I know you’ve paid a dear price.

I hear you. I’m one of you. I get it.

But he continues

But here’s the deal. We’ve become part of the problem.

It’s not enough to say “we like it.” That does­n’t mat­ter. The worst thing that “con­tem­por­ary wor­ship” did was come on the scene, label itself as a viable choice, and then get away with labeling the liturgy as a choice, also. But we can learn from the brokenness.

It’s not enough to say, “That was my mom’s favor­ite hymn.” Or, “It’s my pref­er­ence.” Or, “Those were some of my best child­hood memor­ies.” It’s got to be deep­er than that, or we’re just guard­ing our rel­ics, our museum pieces.

It’s not about sen­ti­ment­al­ity. It’s not about taste or pref­er­ence. It’s about meaning.

The bot­tom line is this. We don’t keep tra­di­tion because it’s tra­di­tion, or because it’s old, or because it’s comfortable.

We keep tra­di­tion because it’s worth doing. Because it anchors us. Because it’s big­ger than us. Because it reminds us that we’re not alone. Because it keeps us hon­est. Because it helps us avoid think­ing that this wor­ship thing is all about us. Because it builds up the church. Because it lets us bet­ter engage our minds with our spir­it. Because it helps us respond as the vis­ible community.

So maybe we need to rethink our plan of action.

And he goes on to list a dozen point where action can be taken.

Def­in­itely worth a read.

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More Canadian trial liturgy

I noted earli­er the pub­lic­a­tion by the Anglic­an Church of Canada of tri­al Year A Col­lects ‘from Pente­cost to the Reign of Christ’.

The Cana­dian Church has added con­sid­er­ably more resources to that page in the inter­ven­ing peri­od. It now contains

  • Morn­ing and Even­ing Pray­er: Advent, Christ­mas and Epiphany
  • Tri­al Use Litur­gic­al Psalter
  • Tri­al Use Col­lects and Sea­son­al Pray­ers over the Gifts and after Com­mu­nion from Advent to the Bap­tism of Christ — Year B
  • Tri­al Use Col­lects and Sea­son­al Pray­ers over the Gifts and after Com­mu­nion from Advent to the Bap­tism of Christ — Year A
  • Tri­al Use Col­lects from Pente­cost to the Reign of Christ — Year A

In the Cana­dian Church each dio­ces­an bish­op can author­ize the this mater­i­al for tri­al use in their dio­cese, and the task Force encour­ages feed­back on their use.

(Thanks to Rod Gil­lis for draw­ing my atten­tion to the new mater­i­al. As before, I wel­come read­ers send­ing sug­ges­tions of suit­able links either by email or as a com­ment on an exist­ing article.)

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2014-15 Almanac


Each year since 2002 I have pro­duced a down­load­able cal­en­dar for the forth­com­ing litur­gic­al year, accord­ing to the rules of the Church of England’s Com­mon Wor­ship Cal­en­dar and Lectionary.

The 2014–15 Alman­ac is now avail­able for Out­look, Apple desktop and iOS Cal­en­dar, Google Cal­en­dar, Android devices and oth­er formats, with your choice of Sunday, week­day, euchar­ist­ic, office, col­lects, Excit­ing Holi­ness lec­tions, for Com­mon Wor­ship and BCP.

Down­load is free, dona­tions are invited.

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Liturgy and the 100 best Christian books

Is a story about some­thing which didn’t hap­pen news?

The Church Times has recently pub­lished its list of “100 best Chris­ti­an books”.

Amongst these 100 works there is not a single volume con­tain­ing or con­cern­ing liturgy. The closest is per­haps at num­ber 37 The Pray­ers and Med­it­a­tions of St Anselm.

This might be con­sidered a strange omis­sion in a list, par­tic­u­larly in an Anglic­an com­pil­a­tion, although the com­pilers delib­er­ately decided to exclude the Book of Com­mon Pray­er (mean­ing pre­sum­ably the 1662 edi­tion) and favour­ite hymn books. Even so, it is sur­pris­ing that there are no books about liturgy and litur­gic­al prac­tice included.

So I invite read­ers to make sug­ges­tions of books of or about liturgy that they think might have been included, and why.

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worship or performance

This week’s edit­or­i­al at Anglic­ans Online pon­ders the ques­tion When is a ser­vice wor­ship and when is it per­form­ance?.

Our friend enjoys the cleans­ing end-of-the-day, begin­ning-of-the-week feel to Com­pline on Sunday even­ings. She, like us, views the ser­vices of the Daily Office as wor­ship­ful expres­sions of our beliefs and faith. Ima­gine her sur­prise when she sat down with the pew sheet: The second word on the inside cov­er was ‘per­form­ance’.

Com­pline as per­form­ance? She brought us the pew sheet. We read it through. Unfor­tu­nately, this time the sung ser­vice of Com­pline seemed to be replaced with a con­cert based on Com­pline. Soloists were named, a long bio­graph­ic­al sketch of the con­duct­or was included. No men­tion was made of the his­tory or role of Com­pline in the wor­ship life of our tra­di­tion. No men­tion of wel­com­ing the con­greg­a­tion to a time of pray­er. Per­haps we are being too picky. Per­haps it is enough the ser­vice is being offered no mat­ter the circumstances.

We were left to pon­der: When is a ser­vice wor­ship and when is it per­form­ance? Does it mat­ter? Should it matter?

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Liturgical presidency

The term ‘pres­id­ent’ sig­ni­fies an import­ant shift in litur­gic­al think­ing. The words ‘priest’ and even ‘min­is­ter’, used in the 1662 Book of Com­mon Pray­er, appear to have a per­fectly clear and adequate mean­ing. But bib­lic­al under­stand­ings of priest­hood encom­passed ideas of a spe­cially-selec­ted per­son who might carry out func­tions on behalf of people from which they might even be excluded. The Holy of Hol­ies of the Temple was reserved for the priest­hood, who per­formed their func­tions largely in secret. 

A pres­id­ent acts in the midst of a gath­er­ing of the people of God. The most ancient Chris­ti­an churches are mod­elled on the spaces for civil gath­er­ings of the Roman Empire. This is our mod­el for the set­ting of the Eucharist.

Through­out Chris­ti­an his­tory, there has been a ten­sion between the roles of priest (min­is­ter­ing on behalf of the people in a holy place) and pres­id­ent. Towards the end of the Middle Ages, with the norm for the West­ern Mass being the daily duty of clergy, priest­hood was para­mount, and pres­id­ency could vir­tu­ally disappear.

  • The priest might be alone, save for one server
  • He had his back to the people
  • Some of the pray­ers were silent, or even delib­er­ately secret
  • Lat­in, a reli­gious lan­guage used to address God, was used in pref­er­ence to the ver­nacu­lar used to address the people
  • The priest might be sep­ar­ated from the people by a screen, a choir formed of a reli­gious com­munity or both
  • Women were kept away from the altar, and only men would serve

The Reform­a­tion began a reversal. In the BCP, Eng­lish is employed, and the priest must speak aud­ibly. But Cranmer’s idea of a gath­er­ing around the holy table set length­wise in the church with the pres­id­ent at the ‘north side’ soon lost its mean­ing when the tables were returned to the spaces formerly occu­pied by medi­ev­al stone altars.

For the Reformers there were few clear mod­els of pres­id­ency at hand, and this meant that the BCP does not provide adequate guid­ance. The BCP Euchar­ist begins, not with an act of litur­gic­al pres­id­ency, but with the private devo­tion of the priest. The priest alone says the Lord’s Pray­er, and the people are not even invited to respond with the ‘Amen’. They respond only after the Col­lect for Pur­ity. It seems as though the first task of the priest in this ser­vice is not pres­id­ency, but, once he has pur­i­fied him­self with his devo­tions, to admon­ish the people by remind­ing them of the Ten Com­mand­ments. Tra­di­tion­ally, the priest only turns to face the con­greg­a­tion at this point. What pic­ture must go through his mind as he turns from the vis­ion of saints in a sun­lit east win­dow to the people below in the nave? Is he Moses, com­ing down the moun­tain from his encounter with God to deliv­er the law to a dis­obedi­ent crowd of golden calf worshippers? 

Pres­id­ency is also not very evid­ent at the begin­ning of the BCP Order for the Buri­al of the Dead. The priest intones a series of bib­lic­al texts as the coffin is brought into church, start­ling the con­greg­a­tion with a boom­ing voice from the back declar­ing that ‘I am the resur­rec­tion and the life’. It isn’t a good pres­id­en­tial act. And Morn­ing Pray­er opens not with a greet­ing, but with the recol­lec­tion of ‘the wicked man’. That glor­i­ous address to the con­greg­a­tion, ‘dearly beloved brethren’, is lost in what appears like a great deal of fin­ger-wag­ging. The leg­acy of cen­tur­ies of inad­equate mod­els of pres­id­ency enshrined in the texts of the BCP has giv­en those called to min­is­ter a poor mod­el of how to lead wor­ship. What is more, the need to keep to a faith­ful adher­ence to the words of the Pray­er Book, without addi­tions, made it dif­fi­cult to assert a pres­id­en­tial role.

Today the pres­id­ent at the Euchar­ist is bid­den to address the people and greet them in the name of the Lord, invit­ing their response by estab­lish­ing the entire body as a gath­er­ing for wor­ship. This, crit­ic­ally, requires the use of mod­ern Eng­lish. The reten­tion of ‘King James Eng­lish’ at this point is dis­astrous because, whilst we might like to address our cre­at­or rev­er­en­tially as ‘Thou’, for the con­greg­a­tion to use the same expres­sion (and with thy spir­it) when respond­ing to the vicar sounds quite over the top. (The post Vat­ic­an 2 Span­ish trans­la­tion of the Lat­in Mass got it right when the people’s response was ‘Y con tu espir­itu’ rather than the respect­ful address in the third per­son used when speak­ing defer­en­tially to superiors.)

For­tu­nately Com­mon Wor­ship encour­ages flex­ib­il­ity in the open­ing greet­ing. The pres­id­ent may add oth­er words of greet­ing, and may then, after the greet­ing, give fur­ther words of intro­duc­tion in order to enable and enrich the par­ti­cip­a­tion of the entire gath­er­ing. The bap­tism party are acknow­ledged, and the can­did­ate is named. Returned former parish­ion­ers can be wel­comed, and sig­ni­fic­ant vis­it­ors are poin­ted out. The pres­id­ent may intro­duce him­self or her­self and name oth­ers who will take a sig­ni­fic­ant role in the ser­vice. The occa­sion for cel­eb­ra­tion is high­lighted. In short, the pres­id­ent ini­ti­ates ‘The Gath­er­ing’ of all who will share in wor­ship and sets out the journey.

With this begin­ning, the con­greg­a­tion will look to the pres­id­ent to keep them on course through­out the ser­vice. The days when the liturgy pro­ceeded without announce­ments, hymns were simply lis­ted on the board, and the reg­u­lar wor­ship­pers always knew what came next are over. That sep­ar­a­tion of ‘sheep’, who knew what would hap­pen next, and ‘goats’, who were com­pletely at sea, is unac­cept­able. The pres­id­ent real­ises the import­ance of includ­ing every­one so that they are able to par­ti­cip­ate; kneel­ing, sit­ting, stand­ing, speak­ing without embar­rass­ment. This has the advant­age of allow­ing flex­ib­il­ity into the ser­vice without giv­ing the impres­sion that some­how things have gone wrong when the usu­al order is varied.

Some may object that they do not want what can appear like an unne­ces­sary run­ning com­ment­ary on a famil­i­ar ser­vice. But the new­comers must be invited in. Indeed, this idea is para­mount in gos­pel stor­ies which provide mod­els for the Euchar­ist. At the feed­ing of the 5,000, when the dis­ciples want to send the people away, Jesus gath­ers the crowd to sit on the grass to be present for the break­ing of bread. 

The pres­id­en­tial role of Jesus at the Last Sup­per, as Pas­sov­er is cel­eb­rated, is clear in every depic­tion of the event. The ris­en Christ takes that role again, at Emmaus, and on the shores of Galilee when he invites the dis­ciples to ‘come and have break­fast’. Jesus presides at the break­ing of bread, and gives us the mod­el for the Chris­ti­an Euchar­ist. The mould, of the old priest­hood at the Temple, is broken, for the veil of the Temple has been torn apart. It is not the busi­ness of the Chris­ti­an priest­hood today to try to put it back.

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Worship Matters: an evening event

News of an even­ing with Gra­ham Kendrick for wor­ship lead­ers and wor­ship groups organ­ized by LICC (the Lon­don Insti­tute for Con­tem­por­ary Christianity)

Wor­ship Matters:
Lead­ing Wor­ship for the Front­line — 18th September

Wor­ship mat­ters. It expresses our under­stand­ing of God, shapes us as dis­ciples and is the core activ­ity of churches. So what does it mean to lead wor­ship in a church that wants to take whole-life dis­ciple­ship seriously?

Join Gra­ham Kendrick for Wor­ship Mat­ters: Lead­ing Wor­ship for the Front­line — an even­ing that offers insight, ideas and encour­age­ment for wor­ship lead­ers and wor­ship­pers, who want wor­ship to engage with the every­day exper­i­ences of life on our Frontlines.

Why not invite mem­bers of your wor­ship team to begin a con­ver­sa­tion togeth­er about how your church’s exper­i­ence of wor­ship can be developed to embrace a whole-life perspective.

Hos­ted by Neil Hud­son, Dir­ect­or of LICC’s Ima­gine Pro­ject, the even­ing will also include input from Ant­ony Bil­ling­ton, LICC’s Head of Theo­logy, who will offer some bib­lic­al-theo­lo­gic­al reflec­tion on whole-life wor­ship. You will be equipped and encour­aged as you return to your loc­al churches.

Things you need to know:

Date: Thursday 18th Septem­ber, 6:30pm – 8:30pm
Ven­ue: LICC, St Peter’s, Vere Street, Lon­don W1G 0DQ
Cost: £8 (£6 con­ces­sion) — includes light refreshments
This event will be streamed live across the inter­net, if you can’t make it to Lon­don why not con­sider host­ing your own group and engage with us on the night via livestream?

Book Now 

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Uses for an altar table

Holy Table at St Michael and All Angels Church in Uffington, Lincolnshire

Updated

The role (and oth­er aspects) of the altar or holy table will be con­sidered in some detail in a future post. But this story in today’s press is of some interest.

The Daily Tele­graph reports that Lin­coln dio­cese has banned [a church] from using altar to serve cups of tea.

Accord­ing to the report

Wor­ship­pers at the St Michael and All Angels Church in Uff­ing­ton, Lin­colnshire, wanted their oak altar to double up as a place to “serve refreshments”. 

Update: Law and Reli­gion UK provides some more details. Per­haps most sig­ni­fic­ant is that the altar is one in a chapel, not the church’s main altar, pic­tured above and in the Tele­graph report. The peti­tion was to place a table in the chapel which could be used to serve refresh­ments, and which would be used occa­sion­ally as an altar.

But the Chan­cel­lor of the dio­cese, Mark Bishop, 

decided the altar could only be used for wor­ship, not to serve snacks.

Rul­ing that “an inter­change­able use for the altar” was cer­tainly not accept­able, he said a “decent table of wood, stone or oth­er suit­able mater­i­al” should be provided in every church or chapel for cel­eb­ra­tion of Holy Communion.

He added: “The table, as becomes the table of Lord, shall be kept in a suf­fi­cient and seemly man­ner, and from time to time repaired, and shall be covered in the time of Divine Ser­vice with a cov­er­ing of silk or oth­er decent stuff, and with a fair white lin­en cloth at the time of the cel­eb­ra­tion of the Holy Communion.

“It would be com­pletely inap­pro­pri­ate for an altar to be used occa­sion­ally for the cel­eb­ra­tion of Holy Com­mu­nion, but more fre­quently ‘for the ser­vice of refreshments’.

“The oblig­a­tion of the Church­war­dens is to ensure that the Lord’s Table is kept in a ‘suf­fi­cient and seemly man­ner’ and I am quite sat­is­fied that what is pro­posed does not amount to that.”

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Liturgy for the reburial of a long-dead king and a liturgical re-ordering project

There prob­ably aren’t many examples to hand for the author­it­ies at Leicester Cathed­ral, who will be com­pil­ing the ser­vice for the re-buri­al of Richard III, sched­uled for Thursday 26 March 2015.

In a press release last week the Cathed­ral author­it­ies say that

  • On Sunday 22 March the Uni­ver­sity of Leicester will trans­fer the mor­tal remains into a lead-lined coffin and they will travel from Leicester to Bosworth
  • In the even­ing, the remains of Richard III will be received into the care of the Cathedral
  • They will lie in repose for 3 days
  • They will be rebur­ied on the morn­ing of Thursday 26 March
  • The next days, Fri­day 27 March and Sat­urday 28 March, the tomb stone itself will be put in place and revealed and there will be a ser­vice to mark the com­ple­tion of the reinterment.

The reburi­al ser­vice will be broad­cast live on Chan­nel 4, with high­lights being shown in the evening.

Fur­ther details can be read on the Cathedral’s Richard III site.

We hope that litur­gic­al mater­i­al asso­ci­ated with these events will be avail­able to link to near­er the time. Here is what the Cathed­ral is say­ing right now:

[T]his raises inter­est­ing ques­tions about lan­guage. Ves­pers of the Dead is not famil­i­ar today and ser­vices were in Lat­in. Pray­ing for the dead can be a con­tro­ver­sial issue, but, des­pite the con­dem­na­tion in the Art­icles of Faith, is part of Anglic­an prac­tice, although not for all. And in law the Church of Eng­land is a con­tinu­ous body since Sax­on times, there­fore we are the suc­cessor of the Church to which Richard belonged, so an Anglic­an funer­al is entirely right, how­ever we choose to diver­si­fy with­in that. … So what we shall do with Richard, is sculpt some­thing which both recog­nises tra­di­tion and Richard’s faith, but speaks also to the mod­ern world.

Mean­while the Cathed­ral is appeal­ing for £2.5 mil­lions for the re-order­ing pro­ject which will include a fit­ting set­ting for the King’s remains. Some details of the reorder­ing can be found at the Leicester dio­ces­an web­site and at the BBC. Although full draw­ings and images of the cur­rent plans do not seem to be gen­er­ally avail­able, inform­a­tion of the 2013 plans sub­mit­ted to the Cathed­rals Fab­ric Com­mis­sion can be found in some detail here. My under­stand­ing is that the only sub­stan­tial change from the earli­er plans is in the plinth on which the tomb slab will be placed.

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Marking the centenary of the start of the First World War

The Church of Eng­land has pro­duced a set of Litur­gic­al Resources for use at ser­vices com­mem­or­at­ing the anniversary of World War One. They are avail­able here as part of a sec­tion of the web­site ded­ic­ated to the com­mem­or­a­tion.

  • Read­ings, Pray­ers, Hymns, Art and Music:
    Word / PDF
  • An out­line for a ser­vice around a First World War memorial:
    Word / PDF
  • Prop­ers for a Requiem Eucharist:
    Word / PDF
  • Vigil Ser­vice for either 3 or 4 August, 2014:
    Word / PDF

A candle-lit vigil of pray­er and an act of sol­emn reflec­tion to mark the cen­ten­ary of the start of the First World War will be held in West­min­ster Abbey on 4 August 2014. The ser­vice is one of a num­ber of events being announced by the Gov­ern­ment to mark the cen­ten­ary of the Great War. Draw­ing upon Sir Edward Grey’s fam­ous remark that “the lights are going out all over Europe”, the Abbey will mark the cen­ten­ary by mov­ing from light into dark­ness, until one candle remains at the Grave of the Unknown Sol­dier, which will be extin­guished at 11.00pm to mark the moment at which Bri­tain entered the war.

UPDATE
West­min­ster Abbey has now pub­lished the Order of Ser­vice for the Vigil Ser­vice. It can be found as a pdf file on this page. You can access the pdf dir­ectly here

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