Services of the Word for the North American Mission Field

By Robin G. Jordan

In the 1970s (if not earlier), a number of Anglican provinces came to recognize the need for a service of the Word “for use on occasions when the prescribed service of Morning and Evening Prayer or Holy Communion may not meet the needs of a particular congregation.” There was a growing need for a service that was simple enough for children but which would attract their parents and other adults who were unused to the services of Morning Prayer and Holy Communion.

In the United Kingdom church attendance was declining as the nation became more secular. The number of people who had grown up with these services was also declining. There was also a growing number of unbaptized adults as well as unbaptized children.

Just as it was becoming a trend for some parents to not have their child immunized against common childhood diseases, it was also becoming a trend to not have them baptized. Being an atheist and being an antivaxxer in the UK sometimes went hand in hand. Go figure!

From the 1970s on these same provinces began to experiment with alternative services to Morning and Evening Prayer and Holy Communion. They would produce several different forms of what are generally described as “Services of the Word.”

The idea was not a new one. The rubrics of the 1926 Irish Prayer Book permitted the use of selections from the services of the church and from Holy Scripture on special occasions, subject to the approval of the ordinary. They also permitted the preaching of a sermon on special occasions without the use of Morning or Evening Prayer, also subject to the ordinary’s approval, with the proviso that the sermon be preceded and followed by prayers taken from the prayer book. In addition the 1926 Irish Prayer Book contained two alternative forms for Evening Prayer.

In 1988 the Roman Catholic Church produced a Directory for Sunday Celebrations in Absence of a Priest. This resource was developed for parishes in dioceses that were experiencing a shortage of priests, a growing problem in the United States. It provided norms and guidelines for such celebrations. One of the requirements was that these celebrations should be distinct from the Mass. They were essentially services of Word albeit they might include communion from the reserved sacrament.

Among the better examples of Anglican Services of the Word are the Church of Ireland’s A Service of the Word (1993), the Church of England’s Common Worship (2000)’s A Service of the Word, the Diocese of Sydney’s Sunday Services (2001)’s Services of Prayer, Praise, and Proclamation, the Church of Ireland’s The Book of Common Prayer (2004)’s Service of the Word and the Diocese of Sydney’s Common Prayer: Resources for Gospel-Shaped Gatherings (2012)’s Services of the Word and Prayer

In 2001 the Anglican Church of Canada has published two Services of the Word. I find the forms of service for Morning and Evening Prayer in the Book of Alternative Services far more flexible than the ACC’s Services of the Word, which are modeled upon the same worship pattern as the Holy Eucharist in the BAS. They are adaptable to a variety of worship settings

In 2015 the Scottish Episcopal Church also published A Service of the Word 2015. Like the ACC’s Services of the Word, the service is rather formal. This can be a disadvantage when the purpose of the service is to attract people who are unaccustomed to liturgical worship. They do not react to the more structured forms of service in the same way that Anglicans do. For example, one of my friends who had attended a Methodist church as a child and who was not entirely unfamiliar with liturgical worship experienced a negative reaction to the priest and people’s exchange of the salutation. “The Lord be with you: And also with you” while attending an Episcopal Church celebration of the Holy Eucharist with his wife. He experienced it as “intrusive.” This may have been an idiosyncratic reaction but it illustrates how guests can react differently to liturgical worship than church members and regular attendees.

The New Zealand Prayer Book (1988) has a form for Morning and Evening Worship. The rubrics state:

This service provides for those occasions of public worship when there is a need for a Service of the Word. The service is modelled on Morning and Evening Prayer (Mattins and Evensong) from the Book of Common Prayer….

Like the BAS’s forms for Morning and Evening Prayer evidences a degree of flexibility that characterizes the better Services of the Word. For this reason I have included a link to the form.

Services of the Word like these ones not only meet the need that I identified earlier, they provide the Anglican provinces with an invaluable tool for reaching the unchurched and spiritually-disconnected.

Anglican provinces like the Anglican Church of Kenya and the Church of Uganda have adopted what has proven to be an effective strategy for reaching the spiritually lost in their context. Their parishes are composed of a network of congregations at different locations. These congregations are not chapels of ease but missionary outposts. A deacon or lay reader has pastoral charge of one of these congregations. He conducts services, preaches sermons, and most importantly leads the congregation in evangelism. This strategy has also been adapted to the United States and has achieved a measure of success.

Services of the Word are the kind of service that church networks using this strategy need. The proposed “BCP 2019,” however, contains no guidelines and liturgical material for a service of the Word. Such guidelines and liturgical material are a common feature of the more recent Anglican prayer books.

The proposed book does not even make provision for a service of Ante-Communion. Such provision has been a feature of Anglican prayer books going back to the 1552 Prayer Book.

The absence of these two types of service from the proposed "BCP 2019" is surprising. Church attendance in the US and Canada is declining while the unchurched and unbaptized population is increasing. The number of people who are unused to liturgical worship, much less services like Morning Prayer and Holy Communion, is on the rise. From a historical perspective the rates of growth of liturgical denominations has been slower than that of the non-liturgical or semi-liturgical denominations in the United States. Their rates of decline have also been greater. The members of liturgical churches (i.e., Anglican, Episcopalians, Lutheran, etc.) form a relatively small segment of the general population. This suggests that liturgy does not have the allure that its proponents believe that it has. In the liturgical denominations the more free-flowing services have tended to attract more people than the more formal services if the past 30 odd years is anything to go upon.

The proposed book limits ACNA’ers to two forms of service—Morning and Evening Prayer and Holy Communion. This is one of the reasons that the book is NOT a mission-shaped service book. Those who prepared the book have never served on the North American mission field or planted or pioneered a new church. If they have, it was decades ago. They are not qualified to produce a mission-shaped service book.

A lot of trees were killed to put the proposed book into print. They were killed for nothing. The pew edition has not yet been distributed and the book needs major revisions.

Clergy and congregations can buy into the hype and struggle to use the book. But it is not going to live up to Bishop Duncan’s claims. It it is authorized, clergy and congregations that serious about fulfilling the Great Commission will have little choice but supplement or replace the book with rites and services from mission-shaped service books. If they do not, they will be impeding their own efforts to reach the unchurched and spiritually-disconnected. For those who are not willing to do that, I have provided links to the services of the Word online and to the Diocese of Sydney’s website, bettergatherings.com.