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| The Holy Table at St.Mark's Anglican Church, Benton, Kentucky |
Among the most important principles for planning the Sunday liturgy that I have learned in more than 30 years of ministry is the principle of tailoring the liturgy to the circumstances of the local church.
By “liturgy” I am referring not only to the rites and services of The Book of Common Prayer in its various editions such as the services of Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, and Holy Communion but also to any repetitive pattern of worship in a local church. Churches that do not identify themselves as liturgical nonetheless generally follow a set pattern of worship with minor variations from week to week. For some Continuing Anglican churches the Sunday liturgy is a service of Holy Communion but for many smaller Continuing Anglican churches, it is often a service of Morning Prayer.
By “local church” I am referring to “a gathering of believing people” in a specific locality, i.e., town, village, unincorporated community, etc. In large urban areas the specific locality may be a particular district or neighborhood of the city.
Bishop Michael Marshall articulates this principle in his book, Renewal in Worship, published in 1982. While visiting churches in his capacity as the Bishop of Woolwich, Marshall noticed that the smaller churches were trying to imitate the worship of the larger churches with painfully unsuccessful results. Marshall concluded that the smaller churches would have far better results if they tailored their worship to their particular circumstances – size of the congregation, the setting in which it worshiped, its musical resources, and other relevant variables. In his book he suggests a number of ways that smaller churches might tailor their worship to these variables.
One variable Marshall does not mention in Renewal in Worship is what may be described as the “cultural landscape” of the part of the mission field where God has set a particular local church. This is a critical variable. We must have a thorough understanding of this landscape in order to come up with effective strategies for reaching the people who live in our part of the mission field. As Ed Stetzer and David Putnam stress in the introduction to their book, Breaking the Missional Code, the way we do things impacts our ability to reach our community effectively. This includes the way that we worship. Understanding the cultural setting in which the people that we are seeking to reach live can help us make the right choices and avoid the wrong ones.
One of the members of my church made the observation that we would have more guests and attendees on Sunday morning if we were a Baptist church. There was an element of truth to what he said.
In How to Reach Secular People George Hunter describes four barriers that secular people must cross in order to become Christians. The first barrier is the image barrier – secular people’s perceptions of the church. These perceptions may vary with people group, population segment, or cultural environment. These perceptions may be inaccurate but through our lack of awareness of them and our insensitivity to them we can inadvertently reinforce them.
The second barrier is the cultural barrier. Hunter calls this barrier “stained-glass barrier.” He notes:
"When secular people do visit a church, it can be a culturally-alienating experience. If they do not understand the jargon, relate to the music, identify with the people, or feel comfortable in the facility, they infer that Christianity (and the Christian God) is not for people like them."The third barrier is the gospel barrier. In Hunter’s view the gospel barrier is the only legitimate barrier that secular people should have to face in becoming Christians.
The fourth barrier, is the total commitment barrier Having crossed the gospel barrier, a person must respond to Christ’s call to total commitment.
The point of Hunter’s discussion of these barriers is that churches should do everything that they can to remove all image and cultural barriers. The more effective a church is at eliminating these kinds of barriers, the more effective it will be at reaching unchurched non-believers and dechurched believers.
For Continuing Anglican churches the cultural barrier is apt to loom quite large. Sunday morning at a Continuing Anglican church, indeed at any liturgical church, can not only be a jarring experience for secular people but also Christians from so-called “non-liturgical” worship traditions. One article to which I recently posted a link compared the experience to sucking on a lemon.
In the Jackson Purchase, the region of westernmost Kentucky in which I live, the cultural barrier may not be as large for Baptist churches as it is for Continuing Anglican churches. Even secular people living in the region are likely to have had some exposure to the church culture prevalent in Baptist churches.
Baptist churches form the largest group of churches in the region. Church of Christ churches and United Methodist churches form the second largest and third largest group of churches respectively.
Continuing Anglican, Episcopalian, Lutheran, and Roman Catholic churches together form the smallest group of churches in the region. Secular people and even Christians are far less likely to have been exposed to the church culture found in these liturgical churches.
Back in the 1980s and 1990s I was involved in the planning, launching, and pioneering of St. Michael’s Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Louisiana. In the 1980s the Episcopal Church was experiencing what may have been its last wave of church planting. St. Peter’s of the Lakes, the last new Episcopal church planted here in the Jackson Purchase, was launched in 1980.
The new church’s early success was in part due to serendipity and in part due to a deliberate effort to make St. Michael’s the kind of church that would be effective in reaching the area where it was planted. In the 1980s it was not unusual for a Episcopal church to grow with the area in which it was located. The new church had been planted in an area that was experiencing explosive growth. .
The vicar preferred to use the shorter forms of prayer and a bare minimum of ceremony. He also preferred to wear a cassock alb and a stole on most Sundays. As it happened, his preferences lined up with what Stetzer and Putnam describe as the “missional choices” for the area.
It was in the music department that a deliberate effort was made to make the mission the kind of church that would be effective in reaching the area. Based upon the research that I had done into the characteristics of the population of the area, we adopted the following strategy. Episcopalians moving into the area or unaffiliated with a church formed a very small segment of the population. Families and individuals coming from other Protestant, Roman Catholic, or mixed background formed a much larger segment of the population. While Episcopalians, other Protestants, and Roman Catholics shared a common set of standard hymns, Episcopalians sung them to different tunes. Where a hymn was set to a different tune in The Hymnal 1940 from that which it was commonly sung to in other Protestant and Roman Catholic churches, we generally used the more common tune. We also took note of the growing popularity of praise choruses and worship songs in many Protestant churches and some Roman Catholic churches and how the use of these songs was impacting attendance at these churches. Our use of an eclectic blend of standard hymns, praise choruses, and worship songs would prove to be the right choice for reaching many families living in the area.
An important consideration to which we gave attention in the selection of music for our Sunday liturgy was accessibility. We chose hymns and songs that the congregation would be able to sing. While we had a small choir, the principal task of the choir was to lead the congregational singing and not to perform special music.
We invested in a good-quality upright piano based upon my research that a piano was the best musical instrument for a small church. A piano is the better instrument for accompanying the congregational singing and teaching new music than an organ. The congregation can more easily distinguish the notes of a tune when played on a piano than they can when played on an organ. Pianists who are skilled at playing the piano are also easier to find than organists who are skilled at playing the organ. As early as 1919 in The Art of Public Worship Percy Dearmer who is best known for The Parson’s Handbook advocated the replacement of organs with pianos, based upon his experiences on the front in World War I. He concluded from these experiences that pianos encouraged congregational singing while organs did not.
We met in a variety of worship settings – a tennis club’s clubhouse, an office building, a storefront, and an old high school gymnasium – before we moved into a building of our own. Except for the high school gymnasium the floors were covered with sound-deadening carpet and the ceilings with sound-deadening acoustic tile, not the ideal worship setting from a musical standpoint. The high school gymnasium had a horrible echo and sound ricocheted off the ceiling, walls, and floor.
Interviews with Episcopalians who gave us a try but then decided that pioneering a new church was not for them confirmed that we had made the right choice in focusing upon a larger segment of the area’s population than Episcopalians moving to the area or unaffiliated with an area church. In the worship settings that we met we were not able to create the kind of ambience that Episcopalians associate with church and they missed this ambience – the polished brass, the needlepoint kneeling cushions, the flickering candles, the stained glass windows, the organ voluntaries, the vested choir, the choral anthems. We opted for what we could do well within the limits of our circumstances – a relaxed, informal atmosphere; enthusiastic congregational singing; well-read Scripture readings, a family-friendly celebration of the Holy Eucharist that involved the children as well as the adults, Sunday school for both adults and children, and Vacation Bible School. Like our eclectic blend of traditional and contemporary music, these choices would prove to be the right ones for the area. Within a space of eight years the church would go from a subsidized mission to a self-supporting parish.
Now it must be mentioned that the church, while it was a mission, largely used the contemporary language Rite II of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. The sponsoring church, my original home parish, used both Rite I and Rite II and its Rite I early morning service and early evening service were as well attended as its Rite II mid-morning service. Rite I early morning services were a common practice in both the deanery and the diocese. However, the mission’s vicar refused to consider this option and adopted the practice of alternating rites from Sunday to Sunday. This practice made no one happy - those who preferred the traditional language rite and those who preferred the contemporary language rite.
The only other priest that I have known to adopt a similar practice was an interim rector at my original home parish. His rationale was that he was exposing the congregations of the church to the different styles of music and worship that they might expect when they called a new rector. I suspected that he was deliberately creating a state of disequilibrium in the church’s congregations so that they would accept whatever the new rector did since it would restore stability to the music and worship of the church.
The mission’s vicar would eventually discontinue using Rite I except during Advent and Lent and then not consistently from year to year.
It was my experience in helping to pioneer a new United Methodist church in the same area in the first decade of this century that would convince me that a church could use traditional language like the Tudor English in the 1928 Book of Common Prayer and in Rite I of the 1979 Prayer Book in its worship and reach the area. The two small Continuing Anglican churches that were planted in the area were not able to establish a niche for themselves in the area and eventually disbanded. They did not make the right choices for the area. The new United Methodist church, on the other hand, outgrew its first meeting place – a funeral home chapel – in two years and moved into rented space in a local maritime museum. The three years that it was at the maritime museum, it would continue to grow and eventually build a spacious facility of its own. I will look at what it did and the principles underlying what it did in my next article.
Image: Bella Raj
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