The Perils of Low Church Ritualism

The Death of St. Bede

By Robin G Jordan

Low Church? Ritualism? Isn’t that an oxymoron? Low Church ritualism actually is not an oxymoron. As a school of churchmanship the Low Church school of churchmanship has “regular observance or practice of ritual,” which may at times be “excessive or without regard to its function,” its own traditional or fixed ways of doing things.

Some examples are wearing a cassock and surplice to read the prayers and a black gown and preaching tabs to preach the sermon, reading the service from the right side of the Lord’s table, reciting the Psalms instead of singing them, and extending one or both hands in a blessing rather than making the sign of the cross. They may not be as elaborate as High Church or Anglo-Catholic ritual, but they are ritual nonetheless. They are also used to define what is Anglican and what is not Anglican—at least in the minds of those who have adopted these practices.

Ritualism is concerned with practice, rather than principle. It is not confined to one particular school of churchmanship. It distinguishes a right way of doing things and a wrong way of doing them. But it to large extent ignores the principle that underlies the adoption of a particular practice. For example, at the Reformation Anglicans adopted the practice of wearing surplices at all services of public worship. The principle that underlay this choice of dress was that ordained ministers are not sacrificing priests and therefore they should not dress like them.

Wearing a surplice is not the only way that this principle can be implemented. An ordained minister can wear street clothes, or he can wear an academic gown if he has a university degree and is entitled to wear such a gown. He might wear some other loose, full length white garment with wide sleeves.

After the surplice was adopted as the official dress for ordained ministers at services of public worship, the underlying principle was largely forgotten. The wearing of the surplice became a traditional or fixed way of doing church. It became a ritual of the church.

Historic Anglicanism, however, is a set of principles, not a set of practices. When a practice becomes separated from the principle that underlies the practice, the practice can be used to propagate, uphold, strengthen, and reinforce doctrines that are contrary to the principle that originally underlay the practice. For example, an ordained minister can wear a surplice and stand at the right side of the Lord’s Table to read a communion service that embodies the belief that at their consecration bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ and the minister in offering up the Bread and Wine is Christ offering himself to the Father for the sins of the world. A minister can wear a black gown and preaching tabs to preach a sermon on how Christians should venerate the saints and ask the saints to intercede with God for them.

Adherence to a particular set of practices does not guarantee orthodoxy from Protestant, Reformed perspective. While conservative evangelicalism vanished from the Protestant Episcopal Church in the late nineteenth century, Low Churchmanship, however, did not. The doctrine of these Low Churchmen was progressive and not evangelical, What happened in the Protestant Episcopal Church shows that wearing what was once the uniform of an evangelical does not make the wearer an evangelical. This is why promoting a particular set of practices as the Protestant, Reformed cultus of the Anglican Church is a pointless exercise. The cultus can become a convenient smokescreen behind which heterodox and heretical ideas are spread. It can create a illusion of orthodoxy that deceives the unsuspecting.

Historic Anglicanism is first and foremost a set of principles. These principles can be given expression in other ways in this century than they were given expression in the sixteenth, seventeenth and later centuries. This fact, however, is not a license to replace a cultus that was inherited from an earlier century and gives expression to these principles with a cultus that is borrowed from some other church tradition and which does not give expression to the principles.

The danger of clinging to any particular cultus is what may have served the church well in past centuries may not serve the church well in the present century. The principles to which the cultus gave expression are what matters, not the cultus itself. A cultus may outlive its usefulness, in which case it may become a barrier to the mission of the church. It is a mistake to conclude that because the church did things in a certain way in an earlier century, we must do things the same way. We may pick up from how church was done in that particular time, ideas that may be useful in our own. The past can inform the present. On the other hand, the church has never been free from error, in doctrine and in practice, and we should exercise care in choosing what doctrine and practices we adopt from the past. We should also exercise similar care in what doctrine and practices we borrow from other traditions.

Take, for example, the practice of reading the Communion Service from the north side of the Lord’s Table. It originated at time when the Table was moveable and was brought to the entrance of the chancel or into the body of the nave for the Communion Service and was turned lengthwise. The underlying principle to which it gave expression was that the people should be able to hear what the minister is saying and see what he is doing. 

The practice of placing the Table against the East Wall and fencing the Table from the people with communion rails defeats this purpose. A minister who reads the service from the north side of the Table under such circumstances is not giving expression to the principle. Under those circumstances a better application of the principle would be to pull the Table away from the wall and the minister to stand behind the Table, facing the people across the Table. In reading the service from the north side of the Table under such circumstances is giving more weight to a ritual, a traditional or fixed way of reading the service, than to the original principle behind the practice which was to enable the people to hear what the minister was saying and to see what he was doing. It is a practice that no longer serves the people well.

While those who are Low Church in their churchmanship would like to think that they are free from the curse of ritualism, they are not. They are as much ritualists as their High Church, Anglo-Catholic, and Broad Church counterparts. Their rituals may be different. They may be less fussy. But they are nonetheless rituals. When they insist that their way of doing things is the only way that things can be done, they are really showing their ritualistic tendencies.

A certain amount of ritual is necessary for the smooth operation of a liturgy, but it should be highly functional in its nature and not rigidly binding upon the participants in the liturgy. The particular circumstances should determine how things are done, not a particular ritual. If the ritual does not fit the circumstances, it should not be used. 

For example. rather than saying the Collect for Purity, reading the Summary of the Law, and singing the Kyries at every celebration of Holy Communion, this ritual might be used in a cathedral on a major feast day but be omitted in a house church on an ordinary Sunday. For a house church congregation, a hymn or worship song or two, followed by a greeting and the prayer appointed for the day are a more than adequate way of beginning a celebration of Holy Communion.

What matters most is not that we observe a particular ritual but that we observe the principle that the ritual was adopted to express. As noted in an earlier example, there is more than one way of expressing the principle that ordained ministers should not dress like sacrificing priests. It is not necessary that they don a particular form of dress such as the surplice. When we insist that they must wear the surplice, we have entered the dark realm of Low Church ritualism where uniformity of practice is enthroned, and reformed principle is sent begging.