No Priest? No Problem!

By Robin G. Jordan

Due to declining church attendance and a clergy shortage, it is becoming increasingly common in the Episcopal Church for congregations to have no priest of their own and to share a priest with one or more other congregations or to undergo lengthy periods between priests during which it must engage the temporary services of a supply priest once or twice a month. As a consequence, it is also becoming increasingly common for the laity to take a more active role in planning and conducting Sunday worship. This article was written to help those planning services for Sundays on which no priest is available.

The Book of Common Prayer (1979) provides congregations with three options for priestless Sundays--Festal Morning Prayer, a Service of the Word, and a Service of the Word with Communion. In this article I will look briefly at each option, beginning with Festal Morning Prayer. I will also share a number of things that I learned from my own experience as a worship planner and from my study of liturgics and church music and related subjects and which may prove helpful to those planning Sunday worship for their congregation. I am going to post separate tutorial articles on each option.

Festal Morning Prayer

Festal Morning Prayer differs from the weekday Office in a number of ways. At Festal Morning Prayer the invitatory psalm, the psalm or psalms appointed for the day, and the canticles after the lessons are sung. A sermon is preached after the Lessons or after the Collects. A hymn or anthem is sung after the Collects and an offering may be taken. The prayer for missions is omitted and a general intercession follows the hymn or anthem. At the weekday Office the congregation is typically small. The psalms and the canticles are usually recited. A few such congregations may sing them, but they are atypical. There is no sermon. No hymn or anthem is sung after the Collects. These are important differences. When they are not respected, the result will be a service that is far from satisfactory as the principal service on a Sunday morning.

A Service of the Word

In the Additional Directions for the Holy Eucharist, on pages of 406-407, The Book of Common Prayer makes provision for a Service of the Word comprised of following elements:

Hymn, psalm, or anthem (optional)
Opening Acclamation
Decalogue (optional)
Sentence of Scripture (optional)
Invitation to Confession
Confession of Sin
Absolution/Prayer for Pardon
Gloria or some other song of praise, Kyrie, or Trisagion
Salutation
Collect of the Day
First Reading
Psalm, hymn, or anthem
Second Reading
Psalm, hymn, or anthem
Gospel Reading
Sermon
Creed
Prayers of the People
Concluding Collect
Hymn or anthem (offering)
The Lord’s Prayer
The Grace, a blessing, or the Peace

The Penitential Order may be omitted and the service may begin with a hymn, psalm or anthem, followed by the Opening Acclamation and the Gloria in excelsis or some other Song of Praise or the Kyrie or the Trisagion, depending upon the season of the Christian Year or the occasion. The service may be led by a deacon or a lay person.

Among the advantages of this service is that it will largely be familiar to a congregation that has been regularly celebrating the Holy Eucharist on a Sunday morning.

A Service of the Word with Communion

A third option is a Service of the Word with Communion. This option is open to congregations to which the bishop has assigned a deacon. It does require the authorization of the bishop. It consists of a Service of the Word as previously described to which is added the distribution of communion from the reserved sacrament. Details of the manner in which the communion may be distributed from the reserved sacrament are also found in the Additional Directions for the Holy Eucharist, on page 408.

Things That I Have Learned

When he visited the smaller congregations in his episcopal area in the Diocese of Southwark, the Rt. Rev. Michael Marshal, then Bishop of Woolwich, found that these congregations typically tried to imitate the worship of larger congregations with dismal results. In his book Renewal In Worship (Morehouse-Barlow, 1982, 1985), he encourages smaller congregations to tailor their services to their particular circumstances—size, musical resources, place of worship, ministry target group, and so on--rather than trying unsuccessfully to model their services on the worship of the cathedral and the collegiate chapel. It is good advice.

For example, a small choir does not have enough voices to sing a four-part anthem. However, it would have no difficulty in singing a new hymn as a unison anthem. The congregation also has a member who is a percussionist in his high school band and can play a cajon or box drum or a djembe. Steven P Starke has written a hymn, “All You Works of God Bless the Lord,” metrical setting of the Benedicite, set to LINSTEAD, a tune that Doreen Potter adapted from a Jamaican folk melody and to which the hymn, “Let Us Our Talents and Tongues Employ” is also set. It can be sung to the accompaniment of a hand drum and hand clapping. It also has an easy-to-learn refrain. After learning the hymn, accompanied by the youth on the cajon or djembe, the choir introduces the hymn as the first canticle of Festal Morning Prayer. When the hymn is used again at Festal Morning Prayer on a subsequent Sunday, the congregation is invited to join in the refrain. The hymn is repeated on several more Sundays and becomes a part of the congregation’s repertoire.

It is wise to consider first time worship visitors and first time worship viewers, if the service is live streamed on the internet or broadcast on cable TV, in planning services. They are going to react differently to a service than cradle or long-time Episcopalians. For example, most of them are not accustomed to reciting lengthy texts, and the experience has a high likelihood of discouraging them from returning for a second visit or in the case of a first time viewer to click away to something more interesting.

It also makes good sense to do what one can to improve the congregation’s music ministry, building on the congregation’s gifts and strengths, regularly evaluating the congregation’s weekly worship service and considering ways of improving the service.

It is a mistake to underestimate the role that music plays in the life of the Church. The songs used in the liturgy are not just embellishments to the liturgy but an integral part of the congregation’s worship, of its corporate prayer. They are also an important means of transmitting and reinforcing the faith and values of a congregation. The members of a congregation are more likely to remember and assimilate the lyrics of a hymn that they have heard and sung a number of times than they are the words of a sermon that they heard only once.

Group singing, which includes congregational singing, researchers have found, raises oxytocin levels in individual human beings. Oxytocin is critically involved in social bonding. It also reduces stress and improves mood. Group singing also fosters and strengthens group identity and group unity. These are important considerations in a time of declining church attendance. Enthusiastic group singing stimulates enthusiasm for the group in its members and increases the likelihood that they will invite others to join the group. The enthusiasm of the singers can also be infectious and make a first time worship visitor not only want to join in but also return for a second visit. Recitation of lengthy texts has not been shown to have these effects.

Researchers have also found that the quality of the music in the worship of a congregation plays a key role in the decision of unchurched or lightly churched individuals to begin regularly worshiping with that congregation and eventually becoming a member of the church. These individuals used the attention that was given to the music as a major indicator of how seriously the congregation took the worship of God. This was found to be the case whatever the style of music that the congregation used in its worship.

It must be noted that music quality and music style are not the same thing albeit people are apt to confuse the two.

Whoever is planning the service needs to work closely with whoever is selecting the music for the service. The selection of the music can make a significant difference in the service, and it is not a good idea to leave its selection solely to the church’s music minister, presuming the church has one, music group leader, or accompanist. The right choice of songs can lend vitality to a service. The wrong choice can cause a service to drag or worse.

Knowledge of how to choose and use hymns, psalms, canticles, anthems, worship songs, and service music in liturgical worship is indispensable as is familiarity not only with The Hymnal 1982 and its supplements, official and unofficial, and their predecessors such as More Hymns and Spiritual Songs, Hymns II, and Songs for Celebration, but also the hymnals and hymnal supplements of its sister churches like the Anglican Church of Canada, the Church of England, the Church of Ireland, and the Scottish Episcopal Church and mainline denominations like the Disciples of Christ, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, the Presbyterian Church USA, the United Church of Christ, and the United Methodist Church. So is familiarity with the music published by Augsburg-Concordia, Band Camp, Getty Music, GIA, Hope Music Publishing, Northwestern Publishing House, and OCP in the United States, Kevin Mayhew, Jubilate Hymns, and Resound Music, in the United Kingdom, and other publishers of sacred music. This includes the songs of music groups like City Alight, Emu Music, Liturgical Folk, Sovereign Grace, and The Braeded Chord, and those of song writers like Richard Bruxvoort Corrigan, Elisa Massa, Andrea Sandefer, and Karen Young Wimberly. A large part of their repertoire is suitable for use in liturgical worship and may have specifically been written for that purpose.

A congregation can benefit from the use of a variety of styles of music in its Sunday worship, particularly if it is seeking to reach and engage families with young children. Songs with repetitions and refrains and memorable lyrics not only enable young children to join in the congregational singing but also non-literate adults, neurodivergent individuals, and people with learning disabilities.

The importance of being intentional in introducing new music cannot be overemphasized. This can be done in a number of ways. Preludes and postludes can be used to introduce new tunes. One way of introducing a new song is to have a cantor, small ensemble, or choir sing several verses and then have the congregation join in on the final verse. In the early days of St. Peter’s of the Lakes, Gilbertsville, Kentucky, a new church plant launched in 1980, the congregation devoted time after the service on Sunday morning to learning new service music for the upcoming season. During the first decade of its existence, St. Michael’s, Mandeville, Louisiana, a new church plant launched in 1985, we used pre-service congregational rehearsals to teach and practice new music. At the Church of the Beloved, Madisonville, Louisiana, a new church plant launched in 2002, we used CDs of the worship songs used in what was originally a weeknight service to teach the songs to the congregation and to accompany the congregational singing. 

The value of sizing up the community in which the congregation’s place of worship is located and the outlying districts and of familiarizing oneself with the demographics and psychographics of the area, the prevalent culture of the area, any subcultures, popular musical tastes and preferences, and so on also cannot be overemphasized. This will help worship planners identify connections and potential connections with the residents of the area and factor them into their worship planning.

For example, Mandeville, Louisiana in the 1980s was a community with a rapidly growing population. A number of new subdivisions had sprung up on the edges of the town. When we sized up the community, we found that the segment of the population that was experiencing the most rapid growth was families with teenagers or young children. The lion’s share of these families came from diverse religious backgrounds or had no religious background at all. A number of these families were mixed—one or both parents had previously been married and one or more children from a previous marriage. A number of them had a mixed religious background, typically Protestant and Roman Catholic. Episcopalians who had not yet found a church home formed an extremely tiny segment of the population. We made the largest population segment our primary ministry target group. In selecting hymns, we used the Ecumenical Hymn List which listed hymns found in a number of denominational hymnals and the tunes to which they were set, hymns and tunes that were likely to be familiar to unchurched couples and individuals with a Protestant background. We also selected hymns, songs, and service music from several Roman Catholic hymnals and music collections. (Interestingly a number of hymns, songs, and service music in these hymnals and music collections originally came from Anglican, Lutheran, and other Protestant sources.) Additionally, we used a number of worship songs from the Episcopal Church’s Community of Celebration and later on the Vineyard Movement. This particular blend of music, the liveliness of the congregational singing, and the warmth and friendliness of the congregation were often given by newcomers as the reasons that they had decided to attend St. Michael’s.

I now live in a region of Kentucky which for a number of years was the site of a shape-note hymn sing that attracted people from around the country. A number of the region’s churches use shape-note hymns in their worship. Blue-grass music and gospel songs also have a following in the region. To build a musical bridge with the area’s residents, I would incorporate a number of shape-note hymns, shape-note hymn tunes, and gospel songs into the repertoire of my congregation. I might consider planning a musical evening hosted by the church and featuring a particular style of music popular in the area, a music evening to which the public would be invited.

Among the characteristics of dying churches which researcher have identified is that they bear little or no resemblance to the neighborhoods or communities in which they are located and have negligible connections to that neighborhood or community. This knowledge hopefully will motivate us to build bridges to our own neighborhood or community through our congregation’s worship as well as its ministries and special events.

A notion that worship planners for a congregation need to quickly disabuse themselves is that making superfluous additions to a service enriches the worship of the congregation. These additions typically take the form of extra prayers and other devotions. All these additions do is unnecessarily lengthen the service and increase the likelihood that people will experience the service as dull and uninteresting. A service can become so cluttered with such embellishments that it loses its basic shape. A time-tested liturgical principle is “LESS IS MORE.”

For example, the Holy Eucharist has its own entrance rite which already contains a number of redundant elements. It does not need anything more tacked on it. Long and verbose forms of the Prayers of the People are not anymore prayerful than a short litany. They are not going to impress God with their wordiness. We have Jesus’ word for it.

The Rt. Rev. Wayne Smith, Bishop of Missouri, now retired, wrote Admirable Simplicity: Principles for Worship Planning in the Anglican Tradition (Church Publishing, 1996). It is a “overview of the nature of Anglican worship and the inherent simplicity within the rites and rubrics gleaned from primary and secondary sources in the tradition, combined with a good dose of reason.” The late Rev. Dr. Marion J. Hatchett, longtime professor of liturgics and church music at the School of Theology, the University of the South Sewanee, Tennessee, and author of Commentary on an American Prayer Book; A Liturgical Index to The Hymnal 1982; A Guide to the Practice of Church Music; Sanctifying Life, Time, and Space: A Introduction to Liturgical Studies, and other works recommended Bishop Smith’s book to be read not only by clergy and church musicians but also members of parish worship committees and any others involved in liturgical planning. Reading Professor Hatchett’s own books would also benefit worship planners as would reading those of Howard Galley, Leonell Mitchell, Boone Porter, Charles Price, William Sydnor and others who played a critical role in the compilation and introduction of Episcopal Church’s 1979 revision of The Book of Common Prayer. While one does not have to be a bookworm to do worship planning, it does not hurt to be well-read.

The best way to enrich the worship of a congregation is not through the addition of extra prayers and other devotions to the liturgy but through the creative, thoughtful choosing and using of music in the liturgy. For example, the selection of bright, vigorous hymn to get the Holy Eucharist off to a good start, a lively setting of the Gloria in excelsis or some other song of praise to keep it moving, an anthem for the Gradual, one based upon the psalm appointed for the day and highlighting the vocal talents of the choir, a rousing alleluia to greet Christ in the Gospel, a period of silent reflection after the Gospel reading, a meditative hymn that echoes of the themes of the readings at the offertory, and a medley of songs in which the communicants can join without books or service leaflets in their hands as they go forward to receive the sacramental bread and wine and experience a foretaste of the joyous procession of the redeemed at the Wedding Supper of the Lamb. These are just some ways a celebration of the Holy Eucharist can be transformed.

The liturgy, whether it is Festal Morning Prayer, a Service of the Word, or the Holy Eucharist, is the work of the whole people of God, gathered as a worshiping assembly on Sunday morning or some other occasion. Everyone has a role to play, including the children. When we segregate the younger children in another room from the adults and the teenagers and do not involve them in the worship service, we should not be surprised that when they grow older, they migrate to some other church or drop out of church altogether. It is desirable that worship planners routinely re-evaluate and rethink the role of the children in the service. When I visited St. John’s Murray, Kentucky in the late 1980s or early 1990s, a team of preteen girls collected and presented the offerings of the people. This is one way of involving the older children. At St. Michael’s I recruited and trained teenagers and older children to read the lessons and to lead the Prayers of the People. I also established a rota of families with young children to serve as gift bearers. The gift bearers would bring forward the alms basins and the bread and wine. I left it to the discretion of the parents who carried what since they knew their child or children better than I did.

The music director and I were careful to include at least one song in which the younger children were able to participate, a song with repetitions or a refrain or both. The simple hymns and songs in Songs for Celebration and Come Celebrate and several Roman Catholic music collections proved very useful. We also chose service music—Gospel Acclamation, Santus-Benedictus, Memorial Acclamation, Fraction Anthem--that was not too difficult for the younger children. The music director, an elementary school teacher who played the piano, had previously directed a children’s choir and she taught hand gestures to the younger children to go with the songs. We also hosted family nights at which a meal was served and at which the adults joined the children in singing familiar songs and learning new ones after the meal. The music director accompanied the singing on the piano and I served as song leader. I later wrote an occasional paper for the diocese’s committee on liturgy and music on integrating children into Sunday worship, based upon what we had learned during that time as well as what I had gleaned from the literature on all-age or multigenerational worship.

In one church plant in which I was involved, the sermon was preceded by a children’s moment after which the younger children were dismissed and went to a adjoining room where they took part in a planned learning activity conducted by members of the children’s ministry team. At the offertory they rejoined their parents and at communion time went forward with their parents to receive communion. On occasion the children brought with them banners, placards, and other items that they had made and carried them in the offertory procession.

In a time in the history of the Church in which those who attend a church attend less often than they once did and a large number of people no longer attend a church at all, we need to be more mindful of how we worship. It makes a difference. One of the realities of life is that people will invest in activities that interest or excite them, activities that give meaning to their lives. If they are not getting anything out of what they are doing, they will stop doing it. They will find something else to do.

Those who have responsibility for planning the worship of a congregation can make its worship an experience toward which the congregation genuinely looks forward each Sunday, an experience that invigorates and strengthens their faith and sends them back into the world, rejoicing in the power of the Holy Spirit. Or they can make the congregation’s weekly worship service something that the congregation attends out of a sense of duty and obligation, hoping to please God by their presence and to earn God’s favor, something at which the members of the congregation go through the motions, but their hearts are not in what they are doing, and their minds are elsewhere.

Among the things that churches have learned from the COVID-19 epidemic is that if a family or individual attends a church primarily out of habit, that family or individual may experience a change in habits during a prolonged absence from the church and may replace church attendance with other activities on Sunday morning.

It is possible to make a congregation’s weekly worship service a more meaningful experience for those who attend without resorting to gimmicks and the like, an experience that will cause them not only to return week after week but also to invite family, friends, neighbors, colleagues, classmates, and others to join them. The first step is to identify the congregation’s strengths, what it has going for it. In the process it may discover that it has more strengths than it realizes. The next step is to identify where the weekly worship service might be improved, what can be done better than it is presently done. The third step is to develop and implement specific actions that can be taken to make these improvements, building whenever possible upon the congregation’s strengths.

For example, a congregation may have members who are able to play musical instruments such as the cello and the flute. In place of a organ prelude, an instrumental piece performed on the cello or on the flute might be used as the prelude. A congregation may have choir with enough voices to sing an easy or moderately difficult SATB or SAB anthem. For a particular Sunday the choir might learn and perform a variable psalm to a plainsong chant for Festal Morning Prayer, and sing this psalm at the appropriate place in the service in addition to or in place of a anthem after the Collects. On that particular Sunday the congregation can sing a seasonal hymn or a general hymn of praise after the Collects.

A common problem that those planning their congregation’s weekly worship service face is that they do not have a clear idea of what belongs in the service and what does not or even worse they have the wrong idea. It is important for worship planners to recognize mistakes when they make them and to learn from their mistakes. Refusing to admit that they have made a mistake and to correct the mistake is not a good attitude to take. It can result in a worship experience that is mediocre at best, and which can hinder the congregation’s spiritual growth.

It is helpful to take a pastoral view and to see a congregation’s weekly worship service as a form of spiritual care that is extended not only to the members of the congregation but also to first time worship visitors and first time worship viewers. If we value someone, if they matter to us, we will want to do right by them. We will want to provide them with the best spiritual care that we can offer. We are not going to settle for anything less. We will want to see them grow spiritually, to bloom and to bear fruit. Consequently, we will always have an eye open for where there may be room for improvement, for where we can do better.

When it comes to worship, what honors God the most is offering God the best that we can offer, not the best that St. Ambrose’s or St. George’s can offer. Just as the attention we give to the music of our weekly worship service can reveal to a visitor or an online or cable TV viewer, how much we value the worship of God so can the attention that we give to worship planning can reveal how much we value God and the people of God.

Our Lord summarized what J.B. Phillips in his translation of the New Testament renders as “the essence of true religion” in the Greatest Commandment (Matthew 22:37-40):

“‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”

We give expression to how much we love God and how much we love our neighbor not only in the way that we live our daily lives but also in the way that we worship on Sundays and other occasions. What we do and how we do it reveals how much we value God and our neighbor; how much they matter to us. This is not lost on visitors and online and cable TV viewers. It may intrigue them enough to return for a second or third visit or visit our church in person for the first time. In fact, it says more about how welcoming we are as a congregation than someone reading a statement at the beginning of every service that we are a congregation that welcomes all people.