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| Toongabbie Anglican Church |
Among the firmly held beliefs with which I left Louisiana in 2007 was the conviction that if the Anglican Church is going to reach a large segment of North America’s unchurched population, it needs to shed a lot of the fat that it has gained in the last two centuries, to become leaner in the key area of worship, and to build more muscle in the key areas of fellowship, discipleship, evangelism, and ministry. This fat is a major hindrance to the Anglican Church and is keeping it from effectively fulfilling the Great Commission.
The Episcopal church that I helped to launch in the 1980s streamlined its worship services, using a liturgy that had been pruned of its extraneous elements. Its worship services exemplified the liturgical principle that less is more. I cannot say whether our vicar, later rector had learned this principle at seminary or whether he just liked to keep the services simple. I am inclined to believe that it was the later. In any case it was a sound decision on his part.
During the early years of the church worship services were held in a variety of non-traditional settings—an office building, a storefront, and an old high school gymnasium. Even after the church occupied its own building, the worship setting was non-traditional. The building was multipurpose. The worship area also served as a large classroom and a fellowship hall. The streamlined worship services worked well in all of these settings.
The simplified worship services proved to have other advantages. They were easy for first-time guests to follow, particular for those who were unaccustomed to liturgical forms of worship. They did not drag. They had no tediously long sections of unrelieved text during which the congregation was expected to kneel—a characteristic of the Communion Service in the 1928 Prayer Book (and unfortunately a characteristic of the form of Holy Communion in the 2019 Proposed ACNA Prayer Book). They were for a large part congregational and participatory. Since the same elements were used Sunday after Sunday, the younger children who had very limited or non-existent reading skills were also able to take part as well as the older children and adults. They were able to learn the people’s parts through hearing them repeated over and over again (and in some cases, the priest’s parts too.) The older children and adults were also able to memorize the people’s parts. This enabled them to participate in the services without burying their nose in a service book or church bulletin.
The streamlined worship services were in a language that, except for a few theological terms, everyone understood. No archaisms or unfamiliar words. No peculiar grammatical structures. Anglicans and Episcopalians who are attached to the Jacobean English of the 1928 Prayer Book services, the 1979 Prayer Book Rite I services, and the King James Bible do not realize how difficult this language can be for guests who were not exposed to the language in their formative years like I was. Foreign exchange students who are learning English struggle with it. The only exposure American students may have had to the language was in a high school English class when they studied the plays and poetry of William Shakespeare. Chances are that they just read the CliffNotes. At Murray State University where I am a student, only small number of students—English literature majors and drama students—have more than a passing acquaintance with the language. With these two exceptions none of the students show any interest in learning it. To them it is a dead language like Latin.
Most importantly the simplified worship services resonated with the church’s primary ministry target group—the new families flooding western St. Tammany Parish. Most of these families did not have a liturgical church background, much less an Episcopal background. A number of them had no church background at all. Some had attended a church in their previous community; others had not.
A small Continuing Anglican church was launched in eastern St. Tammany Parish around the same time. It met for a time in a hospital chapel. It did not flourish and the congregation eventually disbanded. It used the longer 1928 Prayer Book services and focused its outreach efforts on traditionalist Episcopalians who were disaffected from the Episcopal Church or who had not affiliated with an existing Episcopal church. These Episcopalians, however, formed a very tiny segment of the population. By the mid-1980s most Episcopalians had grown accustomed to the new Prayer Book. A number of Episcopal churches offered traditional language services modeled on the 1928 Prayer Book services for older members of their congregations. The ordination of women was not a major issue in the Diocese of Louisiana since the bishop was one of the few remaining Episcopal bishops who refused to ordain women. The diocese had one woman deacon who had been ordained in a more liberal diocese.
This Continuing Anglican church made a number of miscalculations. As well as misreading the situation, it made several other mistakes, errors of judgment that have been made over and over again by a number of Continuing Anglican churches. It did not take time to study the local population and ascertain what would be the best way to reach that population. It put its preferences first. It targeted an extremely tiny population segment that would disappear in a few years. It used Prayer Book services that did not resonate with the local population and adopted styles of music and worship that were on a different wave length from a growing segment of the church-going public. It was doomed from the outset.
I am mentioning what happened to this Continuing Anglican church for several reasons. While they use contemporary language, a number of the services of the 2019 Proposed ACNA Prayer Book suffer from the same drawbacks as the services of the 1928 Prayer Book. The 2019 Proposed ACNA Prayer Book embodies a particular ecclesial praxis and encourages the prioritizing of this praxis over missional engagement. The underlying philosophy is to treat a congregation’s own preferences as more important than its mission to the specific part of the Lord’s vineyard where he has sent the congregation to labor. The proposed book reinforces the proclivity of a number of ACNA churches to reach out only to people like the existing members of the congregation rather than a broad segment of a community’s population—a proclivity that other Continuing Anglican churches, like the one in question, have exhibited. This proclivity has not served these churches or their respective jurisdictions well, much less the mission of the Church.
The presentation and the three church plants that I described in my article, “What Really Matters: Being Christ’s Church to the Community,” as well as my reading, reinforced and strengthened this conviction. If the Anglican Church is going to reach a large segment of North America’s unchurched population, its worship services need to be leaner, having no superfluous fat. My involvement in a non-denominational church for more than 9 years and a small Continuing Anglican church for the past two years, both here in western Kentucky, have further lent weight to this conviction.
This view is contrary to what has been the popular trend in some quarters of the North American Anglican Church. This trend has been to pack on the fat as if the local church was a bear storing up fat for its winter hibernation. Behind this trend is the mistaken belief that the fat makes the local church more attractive to non-churchgoers as well as churchgoers. At least this is how those packing on the fat appear to rationalize what they are doing. There is also a lot of talk about reviving early church practices but too often the practices in question are actually medieval or later developments. What is simple and practical, however, receives far less attention than what is showy and prolix.
The services of the United Methodist church plant, which I described in my previous article, illustrated what could be done with a simple worship pattern, some basic liturgical elements, and an eclectic blend of contemporary, traditional, and global worship music. The services were in two halves. The first half was a service of the Word and Prayers. The second half was the Lord’s Supper. The worship pattern was flexible and adaptable enough to use in a variety of settings. It could have been easily used in a large worship center as well as in a living room or a park pavilion.
The form of Holy Communion in the 2019 Proposed ACNA Prayer Book, on the other hand, is modeled on the late Medieval Mass and contains too many unnecessary elements. It is designed for the conventional setting of a traditional cathedral, seminary chapel, or parish church. As I previously noted, it suffers from a number of the drawbacks of the 1928 Communion Service. The Anglican priest who occasionally presided at celebrations of Holy Communion at the Episcopal church plant that I described in my previous article worked his way around a number of these drawbacks by using the 1928 Communion of the Sick. Its rubrics permitted the simplification of the first half of the service, requiring the priest to use only the lengthy preparation, eucharistic prayer, communion rite, and post-communion thanksgiving. Congregations that adopt the 2019 Proposed ACNA Prayer Book will not have this option. The 2019 Proposed ACNA Prayer Book substitutes communion from the reserved sacrament for a home or hospital celebration of the Holy Communion. They will be required to use the 2019 Proposed ACNA Prayer Book’s lengthy form of Holy Communion in whatever setting they worship.
Among the advantages of the services of Common Prayer: Resources for Gospel-Shaped Gatherings is that they are simple, practical, flexible, and adaptable. The Lord’s Supper Form 1, for example, is “a modern and simplified restatement of the order created by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer during the Reformation of the sixteenth century.” They embody doctrine and principles of the historic Anglican formularies and the central Anglican theological tradition. These qualities make them highly suitable for use on the North American mission field. The elements in these services can be interchanged between the different forms. Supplemental liturgical material is available at bettergatherings.com. Combined with solid Biblical preaching and the best of contemporary, traditional, and global worship music, these services would be a good addition to a church’s mission toolbox.
To build a house requires the right tools and the right materials if the house is to survive heavy rains, high winds, and the like. It also needs to be built on the right foundation. While it is possible to build a house with the wrong tools and the wrong materials on the wrong foundation, that house sooner or later is going to collapse. The purpose of a denomination is to serve the judicatories and churches forming the denomination and not the other way around. It is incumbent upon a denomination to give its constituent judicatories and churches proper tools for mission. Otherwise, it is failing in its purpose. In such a case it falls to the constituent judicatories and churches to develop such tools on their own or to make use of the tools that other church networks or churches have developed.
Our first loyalty is to Christ. Our primary task is to spread the gospel, to make disciples, to baptize them, and to teach them what Christ has commanded. If a denomination is not doing an effective job of developing tools for mission and marshalling resources for mission, it may be time to form a new organization that does.
Image Credit: Toongabbie Anglican Church
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