By Robin G. Jordan
At the time The
Hymnal, 1940 was compiled, choral music and choirs were at their height in
the Episcopal Church. Where Morning Prayer was the main Sunday morning service,
it typically was a choral service with the organist playing voluntaries before
and after the service and the choir chanting the Psalms and the canticles and
singing one or more anthems. The Hymnal,
1940 was compiled with the expectation that the churches using the hymnal
would have an organ and an organist and a choir and a choir director and the
acoustical environment of the church would be favorable to plainsong and
Anglican chant. With The Hymnal, 1940
the Joint Commission on the Revision of the Hymnal sought to promote the
cathedral choral service as the ideal form of worship for all congregations in
the Episcopal Church. This is a totally unrealistic model for most Continuing
Anglican churches in the twenty-first century. Only a few have the musical
resources and the favorable acoustical environment to pull off this type of
service with a measure of success.
A more realistic model for these churches is found not in
the worship of the medieval cathedral and monastic church but in the homelier
worship of the auditory churches of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early
nineteenth centuries. The congregation was the primary musical resource of
these churches. The principal form of church music was the metrical psalm. Metrical
versions of the Gloria Patri, the Ten
Commandments, the Prayer Book canticles, the Creeds, the Gloria in excelsis, and the Lord’s Prayer and a selection of hymns
and Scriptural paraphrases were also sung. The tunes were familiar and few in
number and the singing was led by the parish clerk and a few members of the
congregation who could sing with confidence. What instruments were played, were
used to provide the right pitch. The worship of these churches was tailored to
the resources and circumstances of the church, not to an unrealistic ideal.
With a chronic shortage of clergy in a number of the
Continuing Anglican jurisdictions, several congregations often may share a
priest. Morning Prayer once more has become the main Sunday morning service on
most Sundays. A visiting priest may celebrate Holy Communion with a particular
congregation on one Sunday of the month.
This development has created a host of problems for
congregations that have traditionally looked to a member of the clergy for
leadership in the five essential church functions of evangelism, discipleship,
ministry, fellowship, and worship. These functions stem from the Great
Commission that our resurrected Lord gave to his whole Church before he
ascended to the right hand of the Father. They are not only critical to the
numerical and spiritual growth of a church, the expansion of its ministries,
and its advance in missions but also to the continuance of its viability. Having overly relied in the past on clergy
leadership, these congregations are ill-prepared to go it on their own, so to
speak. The members of the clergy who have provided leadership to these
congregations have themselves been ill-equipped to lead a church in the
twenty-first century and have left the congregations that they served likewise
ill-equipped.
The lack of a priest of their own does not release the
members of a small church congregation from their obligation to carry out these
five functions in fulfillment of the Great Commission. On the day of our Lord’s
return they will be required to give an accounting of what they did in the
service of the Kingdom. Their church does not exist to serve them. It exists to
serve God. It exists to serve other people on His behalf. God has placed them
in a particular community and region to be missionaries to that community and
region.
This may come as a surprise to some congregations. They have
always thought of missionaries as folks with a special calling who travel to
far off places to spread the gospel. But the fact is all Christians are called
to join God in his mission. The reason that they exist as a church is that God
has need of more workers in a particular part of his vineyard. For this purpose
God has gathered together the members of a congregation into a church, not to
fulfill their needs but to serve God Himself and to serve other people on His
behalf.
A not uncommon reaction to this news is “But we’re a small
church. We don’t have a priest.” What size a church is and whether it has a
particular type of leader, however, does not matter. A number of Anglican
provinces, the Anglican Church of Kenya, for example, are employing networks of
small congregations, each congregation served by one or more lay readers or
catechists, to reach and engage the unchurched population in a particular
district. In China thousands and
hundreds of thousands are coming to know Christ through the ministry and
witness of house churches—small gathering of Christians meeting in apartments,
shops, and similar venues for Bible study, worship, prayer, and fellowship. The
apostle Paul tells us that God uses people of no consequence—the
nobodies—in the eyes of the world to
accomplish his purposes (1 Corinthians 1:26-29).
The Great Commission has implications for how all
congregations worship on Sunday mornings irrespective of size. Among the
implications are that Sunday morning services must be meaningful and appealing
to outsiders as well as inspiring and edifying to members of the congregation.
Visitors must come away, not only having heard the good news of salvation
through faith in Jesus Christ but also thinking to themselves, “those folks
take the worship of God seriously.” In all things a congregation’s worship must
glorify God.
This article series takes as its model for the small
Anglican church a more congregational form of worship than the cathedral choral
service. The articles were prepared with attention to the implications of the
Great Commission for the worship of the small Anglican church.. They cover not
only the music for the service of Morning Prayer but also the conduct of the
service itself. They seek to take advantage of the wide selection of hymns and
worship songs to which the Gulbransen Digital Hymnal DH-100 CP, the Gulbransen
Digital Hymnal DH 200, and similar digital hymnal players give access. While
recognizing the limitations of the small church congregation, they seek to help
the small church congregation to overcome these limitations.
This article series was inspired in part by an article by
the late Peter Toon, “Worship Simply, Engage in Mission Joyfully: How to Grow a
Traditional Church,” which was at one time posted on the Prayer Book Society
USA website but for reasons unknown to this writer was removed from that
website following Dr. Toon’s untimely death. In the article Dr. Toon suggests a
number of ways that Continuing Anglican churches can free themselves from the
1950s type of experience and model into which they have become locked and move
into the twenty-first century. Among these ways is to make selective use of
more recent forms of church music along with making more creative use of
traditional church music.
This article series is taken from an occasional paper that I
put together for the worship planners of a small Anglican church and in which I
offered suggestions on how they might make better use of the digital hymnal
player that the church uses to accompany congregational singing. A peculiarity of
the The Hymnal, 1940 is that the Joint
Commission on the Revision of the Hymnal changed the names of many of the hymn
tunes. The Hymnal, 1940 was compiled after the outbreak of World War II in
Europe in 1939 and the hymn name changes reflect the growing anti-German
sentiment in the United States at the time. While their digital hymnal player
contained a substantial number of the hymn tunes used in The Hymnal, 1940, a large number of these hymn tunes were listed
under different names from the hymn tune names used in The Hymnal, 1940. (The Hymnal 1982 was listed in the
digital hymn player’s instructions as one of the hymnals for whose hymns it is
programmed to provide musical accompaniment . However, the original names of
the hymn tunes have been restored in The
Hymnal 1982. A number of the older hymn tunes that are no longer widely
used have also been retired.) The digital hymnal player also contained many
tunes of newer hymns or hymns not used in The
Hymnal, 1940, which would be useful additions to the congregation’s hymn
repertoire.
2 comments:
I have read your thoughts on worship in the small Anglican parish with interest. You may not be aware of the 1940 Hymnal resources that we are sharing at no cost and with no copyright restrictions with any parish for the asking. We have music files (WAV or MP3) for nearly all of the hymns in the 1940 Hymnal, plus a few others from the Trinity Hymnal, 1982 Hymnal, or Lutheran hymn books. Using the freeware Audacity program, anybody can edit verse numbers, tempo, pitch, etc. A more extensive description is posted on our church website:
http://www.allsaintstc.org/Worship.html
Since we produce this organ accompaniment in-house, we can share the technique with anybody willing to play these organ accompaniment files on a laptop, tablet or smartphone with some inexpensive amplification system. I would be happy to provide files for the asking and instructions how to adapt the method to individualized needs.
Fr Kurt Henle
Does your church produce piano files as well as organ? Two of the new church plants with which I have been involved used piano as the primary instrument to accompany congregational singing. St.Michael’s grew from a mission to a parish in the space of eight years. North Cross moved into its own building within a five-year time period.
The Rev. Jerry Godwin in the Standing Commission on Church Music’s Joyful Noise: Teaching Music in Small Churches (1984) recommends the use of the piano for accompanying the congregational singing in small churches, as well as for teaching new hymn tunes to the congregation. The compilers of Church Music R.F.D.: A Practical Music Manual for Pastors and Music Workers of Small Churches (1982) make the same recommendation. Percy Dearmer recommended the use of the piano for these purposes in English parish churches in The Art of Public Worship as early as 1920.
Among the advantages of the piano is that the congregation can hear the notes of a hymn tune better when played on a piano than they can when played on an organ. The members of the congregation can hear the voices of the other singers, which encourages them to sing. Pianists are also easier to find than organists. Dearmer found that members of the congregation were more likely to join in the singing when a hymn was accompanied on the piano. He went as far as advocating a moratorium on organ playing. He concluded that abysmal organ playing was one of the reasons that people were no longer attending church.
The two digital hymnal players that I mention in the article provide keyboard sound of acoustical piano as well as pipe organ, enabling a congregation to sing to a piano accompaniment while mastering a new hymn and then to an organ accompaniment after they have mastered it.
Thom Rainer in his research into the reasons why formerly unchurched people had started to attend a church found that what had attracted formerly unchurched people to a particular church was the quality of the music, not the style of music or the type of musical accompaniment. The formerly unchurched people that he surveyed were attending the whole spectrum of churches in terms of music style (traditional, “new traditional,” blended, contemporary) and musical accompaniment type (organ, piano, guitar, etc.). The church’s commitment to a high degree of excellence in the music of its services of public worship conveyed to the formerly unchurched people the message that the church took the worship of God seriously.
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