By Robin G. Jordan
One of the challenges of compiling a service book for a
denomination is that whoever is doing the actual drafting of the rites can
establish themselves in a position where they determine the content of the rites,
controlling what go into the rites and what does not. The other members of the
working group may fall into the bad habit of deferring to the drafting team simply
because they do not wish to undertake the task of drafting the rites themselves.
The drafting team’s personal preferences become the deciding factor rather than
important considerations such as the agreeableness of the rite’s doctrine to the
Scriptures and the denomination’s confession of faith, the suitability of the
rite for the varied contexts of the mission field, and so on.
This problem can be avoided by the application of the
principle of redundant external review. A series of panels conducts an
exhaustive review of each draft, evaluating the draft in accordance with
clearly-defined criteria and critiquing its strong and weak points. Each panel
would look at the draft’s language, its style, its doctrine, and other aspects
of the draft and would recommend changes. Each panel would have sufficient
authority to require the drafting team submit a new draft for its review and/or
to submit to the review process an alternative draft of its own if such action
was necessary. When the final draft of the rite is submitted to the
denominational governing body for its approval, each panel would have the
option of submitting a minority report recommending against its adoption and
explaining in detail why it is making such a recommendation. Each panel would also
have the option of recommending alternative wording or texts and /or
alternative rubrics and even an alternative rite along with a detailed
explanation of its recommendation. In this way the drafting team’s personal
preferences would be obviated as the final deciding factor.
The task of drafting rites is not as formidable as one might
imagine. I am speaking from personal experience, having put together proposals
for an alternative service book to An
Anglican Prayer Book (2008), a contemporary language revision of the 1956
Free Church of England Prayer Book, and a service book based on the murky
doctrinal and worship standards of the Anglican Church in North America. One needs to have a clear idea of what one is
seeking to accomplish and some degree of familiarity with the body of
liturgical material available to the compilers of service books. One also needs
to have a good understanding of the pitfalls of Prayer Book revision, as well
as the disparate theological views found in the Anglican Church and how they
may be given liturgical expression. One should also have more than a passing
acquaintance with the varied contexts of the mission field, and if the rites
are to be genuinely Anglican, a strong commitment to the protestant and reformed
principles of the Anglican formularies. A practical knowledge of general
liturgical principles and a measure of liturgical acumen does not hurt.
Those who form a working group commissioned with compiling a
service book for a denomination should come from a diversity of backgrounds and
should represent the entire spectrum of theological opinion found in the
denomination. While members of the academic community in the denomination’s
seminaries and theological schools may at first appear to an obvious choice,
they may actually prove a liability rather than an asset. Academics tend to place
what they perceive to be ideal forms of worship before practical considerations
and are too far removed from the reality of the twenty-first century mission
field. A professor of liturgics whose specialty is early and medieval liturgies
and who idolizes the past is particularly not a good choice for such a working
group.
The senior ministers of large churches may also not be a
good choice. The needs and resources of large churches are quite different from
those of small churches. Unless they have been involved extensively in small
church ministry, they are likely to have little or no grasp of the challenges
that face small churches.
No one school of Anglican thought should be allowed to
dominate the working group. Where agreement cannot be reached, a good guiding
principle is to defer to the Thirty-Nine Articles and the 1662 Book of Common
Prayer. This becomes the working group’s default position. The commission that
put together An Australian Prayer Book
(1978) followed this guiding principle in the compilation of its rites and
services.
Some disagreements boil down to matter of preferences. One
criticism leveled at the baptismal rite in Common
Prayer: Resources for Gospel-Shaped Gatherings is that it contains no
prayer over the water in the font, modeled upon a eucharistic prayer, a feature
of a number of more recent Anglican service books. Even from the perspective of
unreformed Catholic theology such a prayer is not essential to the validity or
effectualness of the sacrament.
The brief petition in the 1662 rite for the public baptism
of infants, “sanctify this water to the mystical washing away of sin,” is actually
redundant. The Flood Prayer earlier in the rite acknowledges that Christ by his
own baptism had sanctified water for that purpose. This petition is not found in
the 1552, 1559, or 1604 rites. It is one of the alterations that the
Restoration bishops made in the Prayer Book. The 1662 rite for private baptism
of infants permits its use but does not require it, showing that the
Restoration bishops themselves did not view it as essential to the validity or
effectualness of the sacrament.
One criticism leveled at the 1662 Prayer of Consecration is
its lack of a full-blown epiclesis of the Eastern Orthodox type, invoking the
Holy Spirit for the purpose of consecrating the eucharistic elements. Such an
epiclesis, however, is not essential to the validity or effectualness of the
sacrament. It is a preference. From a Reformed perspective such an invocation
is not Scriptural. The Scriptures contain no references to the invocation of
the Holy Spirit for the purposes of consecrating inanimate objects. Even the
references to Jesus’ blessing the bread and wine at the Last Supper are
references to his giving thanks to God over the bread and wine. On the other hand,
the Scriptures do contain references to people receiving the gift of the Holy
Spirit or the Holy Spirit being operative in people.
Arguments that the omission of these preferences from the
rites in question is an impoverishment are specious.
The wording of the baptismal rite in Common Prayer: Resources for Gospel-Shaped Gatherings does not
preclude the occurrence of regeneration at baptism. It, however, does not
insist that regeneration automatically and invariably occurs at baptism, a
position not consistent with the Scriptures. It is a rite that both
Anglo-Catholics and evangelicals could use.
If a service book is going to meet the requirements of being
a common liturgy for the denomination, its rites must be free from in-your-face
elements—texts, wording, and rubrics that are boldly and defiantly aggressive in
their expression of a particular doctrinal point of view. For example, the
ordinal in Texts for Common Prayer substitutes
“three offices” for “these offices” in the historic Preface to the Anglican
Ordinal, thereby limiting its interpretation to that of one recognized school
of Anglican thought and excluding that of another such school. This other recognized
school of Anglican thought includes the English Reformers themselves. The
ordinal in Texts for Common Prayer incorporates
rubrics from the partially-reformed 1549 Prayer Book, which countenance
Medieval Catholic practices that the English Reformers would eventually reject
on scriptural grounds due to their doctrinal implications. The two forms for
the service of Holy Communion in Texts
for Common Prayer incorporate texts and rubrics from the Roman and
Anglican Missals.
The alteration of the wording of the Anglican Ordinal’s
Preface and the inclusion of these other elements in the rites in Texts for Common Prayer show a lack of
sensitivity to the concerns of other recognized schools of Anglican thought and a
corresponding shortage of due regard for their sensibilities. They reflect
poorly upon the Prayer Book and Common Liturgy Task Force and the College of
Bishops. The College of Bishop has endorsed these rites and their contents.
The original wording of the Anglican Ordinal’s Preface
should have been left unchanged. The presentation of a chalice with the Bible
in the ordination service for presbyters should have been made optional along
with the vesting of the newly-made deacon with maniple, stole, and dalmatic in
the ordination service for deacons; the prostration of the ordinand and vesting
of the newly-ordained presbyter in stole and chasuble and the anointing of his
hands in the ordination service for presbyters; the prostration of the bishop
elect and presentation of the new bishop with
pastoral staff, anointing of his forehead, and his presentation with a
pectoral cross, an episcopal ring, and a mitre in the consecration service for
bishops. The rubrics for these postures and ceremonies and the accompanying
texts should have been placed in a section at the end of the pertinent rite and
with them a disclaimer that the Anglican Church in North America does not
attach any particular doctrinal significance to these postures and ceremonies
and they are not be understood as implying any doctrines other than those
authorized by the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion and/or The Book of Common Prayer of 1662. This would have permitted
Anglo-Catholics and those of similar mind to use these postures and ceremonies
but would have withheld the sanctioning of any doctrines associated with these
practices not authorized by the Anglican formularies.
In the case of the texts and rubrics from the Roman and
Anglican Missals even a cursory perusal of the liturgies listed in my article, “A Compendium of More Recent Anglican Liturgies,” shows that their inclusion was
unwarranted. A plethora of alternative
texts and rubrics acceptable to most if not all recognized schools of Anglican
thought are available.
North America has in the Continuum a raft of Independent
Catholic Churches masquerading as Anglican Churches. It does need another such
denomination. What North America is missing is a viable alternative to the
Episcopal Church (USA) and the Anglican Church of Canada that fully accepts the
authority of the Scriptures and is committed to the protestant and reformed
principles of the Anglican formularies.
A working group developing a common liturgy for a
denomination needs to exhibit not only skill and cleverness in the way it
handles the disparate views of the recognized schools of thought represented in
the denomination but also finesse in how it deals with the varied contexts of the
mission field. All Christian churches are on the mission field. The mission
field stretches from within the walls of the building in which a church meets
to distant lands. It encompasses all people groups.
Irrespective of whether they welcome and accept the role,
all Christians are missionaries. They are missionaries to the members of their
own families, their neighbors, to their friends, their co-workers and
colleagues, their fellow students, to everyone in and outside their network of
relationships. Being a missionary is an inseparable part of being a disciple of
Jesus Christ.
The profession of a Christian who does not see himself as a
missionary and who does not live out the Great Commission in his own life is
flawed. Christ did not establish his Church to serve the saved. He established
the Church to reach the lost.
For a good introduction to the relationship of church and
context, I recommend Ed Stetzer’s Planting Missional Churches and Ed
Stetzer and David Putman’s Breaking the Missional Code. Both books emphasize that church
planters need to become experts in the particular context in which they are
planting a church if they hope to succeed in planting a church in that context.
Those who do not pay adequate attention to context and adopt a
“one-size-fits-all” model can expect to fail.
Churches that pay no attention their particular context do
not grow. They decline and die. In Autopsy of a Deceased Church Thom
Rainer identifies this characteristic as one of eleven signs of a church’s
impending death.
The role of the denomination and its judicatories is not to
do missionary work for local congregations but to support the local
congregation’s missionary activities. They provide this support in a number of
ways. One of these ways is to provide local congregations with the right kind
of worship resources, resources that local congregations can adapt and use in
their particular context. For an Anglican jurisdiction that has a serious
commitment to fulfilling the Great Commission, the provision of these resources
carries with it certain implications.
1. The worship resources must be in a language easily
understood not only by the congregations that are using the resource but also
by the ministry target group that they are trying to reach. They do not need
worship resources that erect linguistic barriers between their ministry target
group and themselves. Worship resources must be in contemporary English or
whatever language the ministry target group speaks— Vietnamese, Spanish, Korean,
Hmong, Cree, etc.
2. The worship resources must be Scriptural and
theologically-sound. They should not
just contain Scripture in the form of readings and songs from Scripture and
Scriptural language and imagery. They should also teach what the Scriptures
plainly teach, what can with certainty be read out of Scripture, what is without
any ambiguity expressed by one or more of its human writers. They must reflect
the application of the principles of interpreting Scripture by Scripture and
not expounding one passage of Scripture in such a way that it disagrees with
another.
The worship resources must not prescribe practices that are contrary
to the Word of God or repugnant to God’s Word or permit such practices. A
practice is contrary to Scripture when what is implies is contradictory or
antithetical to what Scripture teaches. A practice is repugnant to Scripture
when what implies is in conflict with, incompatible with, at variance with, or
inconsistent with the teaching of Scripture. The Scriptures do not need to
expressly prohibit a practice for the practice to be contrary to Scripture or
repugnant to Scripture.
In cases where members of the denomination or the larger
family of churches to which the denomination belongs have historically been
divided over whether a practice is agreeable to the teaching of Scripture a
good guiding principle is to not authorize the practice. This principle is
consistent with Scripture. If the practice is not sanctioned, it will not
offend anyone or cause anyone to stumble. While some may see the practice as
harmless, others do not. This alone is sufficient reason not to authorize it. In
this way the consciences of those who do view the practice as harmful is
respected.
In order to be genuinely Anglican the worship resources in
an Anglican jurisdiction must embody the protestant and reformed principles of
the Anglican Church, which are based upon the Scriptures and which are set out
in the Anglican formularies—the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion and The Book
of Common Prayer of 1662. Where they depart from these principles, they cannot
be regarded as authentically Anglican.
3. The worship resources must offer a wide assortment of
options from which those planning the worship of a congregation can choose not
only patterns of worship but also the components for these worship patterns—sentences of Scripture, liturgical greetings, prayers,
affirmations of faith, canticles, psalms, hymns, and other worship songs, and
the like. Local congregations must have the flexibility that they need to
tailor their worship gatherings to their circumstances and to their context.
In 1982 Michael Marshall, then Bishop of Woolwich, wrote Renewal in Worship. This seminal book examined
the challenges that small churches face in the area of worship. Marshall
offered a prescription for meeting these challenges. Among his recommendations
was that small churches should not imitate the worship of large churches but
should make their worship fit their circumstances—the building in which they
were worshiping, the size of the congregation, its musical resources, the occasion,
and so forth. He recommend that small churches also select music for their worship
that they could expect to do well with their limited resources, and not attempt
music that was beyond their reach.
Since that time churches large and small have come to
recognize the importance of tailoring worship not just to the circumstances of
the church but also to its context. A particular worship pattern may work in
one context but not in another. Regional tastes and preferences in music may be
a critical determinant in the selection of the best kind of worship music to
use in a particular context. So may the age echelon of the ministry target
group that church is trying to reach.
Among the implications is that the worship resources that a
denomination produces for its churches should be sensitive to their needs.
Their development should be informed by such needs and not by the particular
interests of the working group commissioned to develop them.
I am saving my examination of how a number of Anglican
provinces have responded to the challenges of developing a common liturgy for upcoming articles in this series. We will also look at what difficulties they have
encountered and what ways a congregation might avoid or mitigate these
difficulties.
Photo: waymarking.com
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