Percy Dearmer: The Art of Public Worship

By Robin G. Jordan

The first six chapters of The Art of Public Worship were originally delivered as the Bohleen Lectures in Philadelphia in January 1919. At the time he gave these lectures, Percy Dearmer was a visiting professor at the Berkeley Divinity School in New Haven, Connecticut. In the years following World War I both the English and American Church were experiencing a significant decline in attendance. Dearmer addresses what he believed were the causes of this decline in his lectures.

During World War I Dearmer served as a chaplain to the British Red Cross ambulance unit in Serbia and with the Young Men’s Christian Association in France. He would experience the horrors of war first hand. Dearmer lost a wife and a son in that war, his wife to a fever and his son to a stray shell. The influence of his wartime experiences is discernible in The Art of Public Worship.

Although Dearmer gave the Bohleen Lectures and penned the remaining chapters of The Art of Public Worship almost a hundred years ago, a number of the observations that he makes are as applicable today as they were then.

Dearmer notes early in The Art of Public Worship that “Christianity is not declining but increasing.” The Gospel was advancing in his day as it is today. What was declining was church-going in the United Kingdom and the United States.

Dearmer also draws attention to the negative impact that an increasingly individualistic view of religion was having upon church attendance in the post-war years. Dearmer acknowledges a profound distrust of “the magniloquent pretensions of the ‘blue domer.’

For readers unfamiliar with this term, it is a reference to “an individual who does not go to church, preferring to worship outdoors beneath the ‘blue dome’ of heaven.”

This is rationale for not attending church is one that we hear even today. We may have had a parishioner tells us that he feels closer to God on the golf course than in church. Perhaps he does. But swinging a golf club and knocking a golf ball across the green is not worshiping God.

Dearmer himself experienced the temptation not to attend church on Sunday morning. He was an ardent rock gardener. He was seen on at least one occasion working in his rock garden on Sunday morning. He was also known to go to church with the soil from his rock garden on his boots.

While recognizing that attitudes toward church attendance are changing, Dearmer also recognizes that “there is little to draw average sensible folk to church, and little to help them when they get there.” Churches bear a part of the responsibility for the decline in church attendance.

His description of a typical service of Morning Prayer in many parishes in which Morning Prayer was the principal service on Sunday morning, sad to say, fits a typical service of Morning Prayer in many Continuing Anglican and Episcopal churches where it is still the principal Sunday morning service.

“Mattins at home was a helpful little service which two or three could say together in a quarter of an hour. Mattins in church was generally a service that took an hour and a half, in a hideous, stuffy, and pretentious building, where the service was marred by bad reading and bad singing, and overlaid under a mass of dreary music, stupid hymns, and sermons that were not interesting.”

A lot of good ideas and useful insights can be gleaned from The Art of Public Worship, ideas and insights that will make our worship services more attractive and helpful. We can learn from the writers of the early twentieth century as well as from the writers of today.

The Art of Public Worship may be read online on the Internet Archive website. Internet Archive also offers several download options.