A Prayer Book for What? The Challenges of a Common Liturgy—Part 3

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.

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