Jack be nimble,
Jack be quick,
Jack jump over
The candlestick.
I am slowly making my way through the late Dean William Palmer Ladd’s Prayer Book Interleaves (1942, 1943; 1957). It is a delightful book. Among the ideals in worship, for instance, toward which he urged the devout and intelligent priest to aspire and strive is to recognize that “there is no ideal way.” “Services must be adapted,” he writes, “to the size of the church and other conditions of place, time, and circumstance.”
In Dean Ladd’s book I find much with which I agree. It is a thin volume and may be downloaded in a PDF format from the internet.
I have never developed the kind of sentimental attachment to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer or the 1928 Book of Common Prayer which some Anglicans and Episcopalians I know have developed. I am well-acquainted with both Prayer Books and used them as a youngster. I have also used the 1928 Prayer Book in more recent years. To me Prayer Books and Hymn Books are just that—Prayer Books and Hymn Books, collections of prayers and collections of hymns. They may have historical significance; they may reflect particular influences in the Anglican Church. We, however, can make too much of them. Instead of helping us to further God’s mission, they can become a hindrance to that mission.
I drifted away from the Episcopal Church in university and did not return to that church until I was well into my thirties. By that time the 1979 Book of Common Prayer had been in use for several years. It would be the Prayer Book that I used for the next seventeen odd years, not only at public services of worship but also in my private devotions.
During the same time period I would become acquainted with a number of Anglican Service Books. I have become familiar with more Service Books since that time. Each has its strengths and limitations. None of them are in my opinion ideal. They are human products and therefore they have their imperfections.
If I have fallen into the temptation of putting one Service Book on a pedestal as have many Anglicans and Episcopalians, it has never lasted very long. A former pastor told me that I have a highly developed sense of liturgical correctness. His observation was not a compliment. That sense of liturgical correctness, however, has kept me from idealizing any particular Service Book.
I have found features in Anglican Service Books which I have thought were desirable in a collection of rites and services. I also found desirable features in the more recent Catholic, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Reformed Service Books. As well as being agreeable to Scripture and edifying, these features would enhance our services of public worship and make them more engaging and inspiring.
I see nothing wrong with variety and flexibility in worship; provided that, we preach an undiluted gospel and teach the essentials of the Christian faith and life. The imposition of a rigid uniformity on the Church would deprive the Church of the agility, or nimbleness, that it needs to respond to an increasingly diverse, rapidly changing world. We are not living and ministering in the eleventh or seventeenth century. We are living and ministering in the twenty-first century.
If we are to be faithful to the Great Commission in our generation, we cannot place our preferences before evangelistic engagement. The arguments that I hear against variety and flexibility in worship boil down to preferences, not just to putting one’s preferences first but imposing one’s preferences on everyone else. Whether these preferences would help or hinder the furtherance of the Great Commission is not given consideration. If a church is to be successful in reaching and engaging a broad segment of the unchurched population of the neighborhood or community where it is located, it needs the capacity to localize the liturgy, to adapt it to the requirements of a particular area.
One thing that church planters have learned over the past 35 odd years is that what may work in one area may not work in another. A denomination or church planting network cannot adopt a cookie cutter approach to church planting. Every neighborhood, every community, is different. Every year church plants fail because they were not good matches with the neighborhood or community at which they were targeted. Some groups planting a new church have greater difficulty in launching and growing a new church than other groups because they carry too much baggage. They are weighed down by pre-conceived ideas of how to do church. Anglicans and Episcopalians fall into this category.
Rather than lightening the load for them, those in positions of leadership at the denominational (or network), judicatorial, and local level are doing the opposite. They are loading them up with more baggage—Prayer Books ill-suited for the twenty-first century North American mission field; unhelpful notions of how church should be done, beliefs and theories unrelated to particular circumstances of a new congregation and detached from the realities of the mission field; all kinds of useless and unnecessary paraphernalia and junk!
God has put us in a particular time and place to serve him there—in that time, in that place. If God had intended that we serve him in a different time and place, God would have put us in that time and place.
Our task is to learn as much as we can about the time and place where God has placed us, its peoples, its cultures, its technologies, and to use that knowledge to accomplish God’s mission in that time and in that place, the mission that God has given us, not the mission that we would give ourselves but God’s mission.
We may be inclined to promote a particular school of churchmanship, a particular Service Book, a particular social and political agenda, to substitute our mission for God’s mission. However, we do not get to pick the agenda and then to claim God’s stamp of approval for our agenda, to assert that our agenda is God’s.
God has set the agenda and we can either carryout God’s agenda as obedient servants of God and devoted followers of Jesus or we can persist in our rebellion against God while deceiving ourselves that we are doing God’s will. The human heart is deceitful beyond measure. We can too easily convince ourselves that what we are doing is the right thing, honors God, and fulfills God’s plan for us when in fact we are disobeying God.
Anglicans and Episcopalians for a variety of reasons get side-tracked by matters whose importance in the scheme of things is far less than those who are diverting the attention of churches with these matters maintain. A church’s primary focus and number one priority is God’s mission—reconciling humankind to himself. Our role in that mission is spelled out in the gospels: Matthew—going into the world, making disciples of all people groups, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and instructing them in what Jesus commanded; Mark—proclaiming eternal salvation, spreading the good news of Jesus Christ to all creation; Luke—proclaiming repentance and forgiveness of sins to the entire world; and John—telling the world about how God gave his only begotten Son that all who believe in him may have eternal life, what Jesus taught in his earthly ministry and its implications for humankind, and what Jesus accomplished for us with his suffering and death and his rising to life again.
To carryout their role churches need to prune themselves of the dead wood and become leaner. They need to leave the building and engage the unchurched where they live, work, and play. They need to take an interest in the neighborhood or community where God has placed them and establish deep, lasting connections with the neighborhood or community. They need to become nimbler, more adroit at sizing up changing circumstances and quicker at responding creatively and effectively to these changes. At the same time they need to maintain an unswerving commitment to the gospel and the articles of the Christian faith. Being adaptable, being able to adjust to new conditions, does not require churches shedding sound, orthodox biblical teaching.
Churches need to resist the temptation to return to the past, to turn back the clock to a bygone era in worship and ministry. The unchurched population of the neighborhood or community where God has placed them are not inhabitants of the eleventh century or the seventeenth century. They are inhabitants of the twenty-first century. They do not share our fascination with the church of the eleventh century or our obsession with the church of the seventeenth century. They may question the need for the church altogether and may not see its relevance to their world or to themselves. The time spent explaining why the priest turns his back to the people or the minister stands at the north end of a table is better used in helping them see how faith in Jesus Christ can make a difference to their lives and to the lives of others.
We were called to be ambassadors for Jesus, his representatives to our neighborhood or community. We were not called to be proponents of a particular school of churchmanship, Service Book, or social and political agenda. If we truly wish to be seen and heard as Jesus’ disciples, his face, his heart, his hands, his voice, we need to know the difference.
Jack jump over
The candlestick.
I am slowly making my way through the late Dean William Palmer Ladd’s Prayer Book Interleaves (1942, 1943; 1957). It is a delightful book. Among the ideals in worship, for instance, toward which he urged the devout and intelligent priest to aspire and strive is to recognize that “there is no ideal way.” “Services must be adapted,” he writes, “to the size of the church and other conditions of place, time, and circumstance.”
In Dean Ladd’s book I find much with which I agree. It is a thin volume and may be downloaded in a PDF format from the internet.
I have never developed the kind of sentimental attachment to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer or the 1928 Book of Common Prayer which some Anglicans and Episcopalians I know have developed. I am well-acquainted with both Prayer Books and used them as a youngster. I have also used the 1928 Prayer Book in more recent years. To me Prayer Books and Hymn Books are just that—Prayer Books and Hymn Books, collections of prayers and collections of hymns. They may have historical significance; they may reflect particular influences in the Anglican Church. We, however, can make too much of them. Instead of helping us to further God’s mission, they can become a hindrance to that mission.
I drifted away from the Episcopal Church in university and did not return to that church until I was well into my thirties. By that time the 1979 Book of Common Prayer had been in use for several years. It would be the Prayer Book that I used for the next seventeen odd years, not only at public services of worship but also in my private devotions.
During the same time period I would become acquainted with a number of Anglican Service Books. I have become familiar with more Service Books since that time. Each has its strengths and limitations. None of them are in my opinion ideal. They are human products and therefore they have their imperfections.
If I have fallen into the temptation of putting one Service Book on a pedestal as have many Anglicans and Episcopalians, it has never lasted very long. A former pastor told me that I have a highly developed sense of liturgical correctness. His observation was not a compliment. That sense of liturgical correctness, however, has kept me from idealizing any particular Service Book.
I have found features in Anglican Service Books which I have thought were desirable in a collection of rites and services. I also found desirable features in the more recent Catholic, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Reformed Service Books. As well as being agreeable to Scripture and edifying, these features would enhance our services of public worship and make them more engaging and inspiring.
I see nothing wrong with variety and flexibility in worship; provided that, we preach an undiluted gospel and teach the essentials of the Christian faith and life. The imposition of a rigid uniformity on the Church would deprive the Church of the agility, or nimbleness, that it needs to respond to an increasingly diverse, rapidly changing world. We are not living and ministering in the eleventh or seventeenth century. We are living and ministering in the twenty-first century.
If we are to be faithful to the Great Commission in our generation, we cannot place our preferences before evangelistic engagement. The arguments that I hear against variety and flexibility in worship boil down to preferences, not just to putting one’s preferences first but imposing one’s preferences on everyone else. Whether these preferences would help or hinder the furtherance of the Great Commission is not given consideration. If a church is to be successful in reaching and engaging a broad segment of the unchurched population of the neighborhood or community where it is located, it needs the capacity to localize the liturgy, to adapt it to the requirements of a particular area.
One thing that church planters have learned over the past 35 odd years is that what may work in one area may not work in another. A denomination or church planting network cannot adopt a cookie cutter approach to church planting. Every neighborhood, every community, is different. Every year church plants fail because they were not good matches with the neighborhood or community at which they were targeted. Some groups planting a new church have greater difficulty in launching and growing a new church than other groups because they carry too much baggage. They are weighed down by pre-conceived ideas of how to do church. Anglicans and Episcopalians fall into this category.
Rather than lightening the load for them, those in positions of leadership at the denominational (or network), judicatorial, and local level are doing the opposite. They are loading them up with more baggage—Prayer Books ill-suited for the twenty-first century North American mission field; unhelpful notions of how church should be done, beliefs and theories unrelated to particular circumstances of a new congregation and detached from the realities of the mission field; all kinds of useless and unnecessary paraphernalia and junk!
God has put us in a particular time and place to serve him there—in that time, in that place. If God had intended that we serve him in a different time and place, God would have put us in that time and place.
Our task is to learn as much as we can about the time and place where God has placed us, its peoples, its cultures, its technologies, and to use that knowledge to accomplish God’s mission in that time and in that place, the mission that God has given us, not the mission that we would give ourselves but God’s mission.
We may be inclined to promote a particular school of churchmanship, a particular Service Book, a particular social and political agenda, to substitute our mission for God’s mission. However, we do not get to pick the agenda and then to claim God’s stamp of approval for our agenda, to assert that our agenda is God’s.
God has set the agenda and we can either carryout God’s agenda as obedient servants of God and devoted followers of Jesus or we can persist in our rebellion against God while deceiving ourselves that we are doing God’s will. The human heart is deceitful beyond measure. We can too easily convince ourselves that what we are doing is the right thing, honors God, and fulfills God’s plan for us when in fact we are disobeying God.
Anglicans and Episcopalians for a variety of reasons get side-tracked by matters whose importance in the scheme of things is far less than those who are diverting the attention of churches with these matters maintain. A church’s primary focus and number one priority is God’s mission—reconciling humankind to himself. Our role in that mission is spelled out in the gospels: Matthew—going into the world, making disciples of all people groups, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and instructing them in what Jesus commanded; Mark—proclaiming eternal salvation, spreading the good news of Jesus Christ to all creation; Luke—proclaiming repentance and forgiveness of sins to the entire world; and John—telling the world about how God gave his only begotten Son that all who believe in him may have eternal life, what Jesus taught in his earthly ministry and its implications for humankind, and what Jesus accomplished for us with his suffering and death and his rising to life again.
To carryout their role churches need to prune themselves of the dead wood and become leaner. They need to leave the building and engage the unchurched where they live, work, and play. They need to take an interest in the neighborhood or community where God has placed them and establish deep, lasting connections with the neighborhood or community. They need to become nimbler, more adroit at sizing up changing circumstances and quicker at responding creatively and effectively to these changes. At the same time they need to maintain an unswerving commitment to the gospel and the articles of the Christian faith. Being adaptable, being able to adjust to new conditions, does not require churches shedding sound, orthodox biblical teaching.
Churches need to resist the temptation to return to the past, to turn back the clock to a bygone era in worship and ministry. The unchurched population of the neighborhood or community where God has placed them are not inhabitants of the eleventh century or the seventeenth century. They are inhabitants of the twenty-first century. They do not share our fascination with the church of the eleventh century or our obsession with the church of the seventeenth century. They may question the need for the church altogether and may not see its relevance to their world or to themselves. The time spent explaining why the priest turns his back to the people or the minister stands at the north end of a table is better used in helping them see how faith in Jesus Christ can make a difference to their lives and to the lives of others.
We were called to be ambassadors for Jesus, his representatives to our neighborhood or community. We were not called to be proponents of a particular school of churchmanship, Service Book, or social and political agenda. If we truly wish to be seen and heard as Jesus’ disciples, his face, his heart, his hands, his voice, we need to know the difference.
No comments:
Post a Comment