How low can you go?
Gracious Rebel
Shipmate
Away on a family holiday in Kent this weekend and accompanied my elderly father this morning to a local village church. Neither of us are Anglicans but on this occasion he'd chosen an evangelical Anglican church as he liked the sound of it and it's demographics on FindaChurch. Well I've never been to such an unAnglican Anglican service!
They were incredibly friendly and welcoming, it wasn't a bad experience at all, (although it would drive me mad to be somewhere like that every week) it was just unrecognisable as being CofE.
Apart from one set prayer before communion and the Lords Prayer there was no formal Liturgy whatsoever. No lectionary readings (just a section of 2 Corinthians that they are clearly studying systematically), hardly a mention of Pentecost, Vicar was in a open necked shirt, communion was passed around the congregation person to person (consisting of cubed bread and a chalice of wine). (And of course the songs were all worship songs that I didn't know except for 'Ten thousand reasons' ) (Or is it 'Two thousand reasons'....I can't remember!)
How do they get away with it? I'm sure there are rules of minimum C of E standards that should be followed. Has anyone been to an Anglican church that is even lower?
(My own church at home which is URC/Baptist feels more 'Anglican ' than this Anglican church. For example we follow the lectionary, have some set prayers and responses each week and our minister wears a clerical collar!)
They were incredibly friendly and welcoming, it wasn't a bad experience at all, (although it would drive me mad to be somewhere like that every week) it was just unrecognisable as being CofE.
Apart from one set prayer before communion and the Lords Prayer there was no formal Liturgy whatsoever. No lectionary readings (just a section of 2 Corinthians that they are clearly studying systematically), hardly a mention of Pentecost, Vicar was in a open necked shirt, communion was passed around the congregation person to person (consisting of cubed bread and a chalice of wine). (And of course the songs were all worship songs that I didn't know except for 'Ten thousand reasons' ) (Or is it 'Two thousand reasons'....I can't remember!)
How do they get away with it? I'm sure there are rules of minimum C of E standards that should be followed. Has anyone been to an Anglican church that is even lower?
(My own church at home which is URC/Baptist feels more 'Anglican ' than this Anglican church. For example we follow the lectionary, have some set prayers and responses each week and our minister wears a clerical collar!)
Comments
Quite how it's reconciled (or not) with Canon law, I don't know - but at the other end of the spectrum are C of E churches which use the Roman Catholic liturgies for all services...
Although many variants are permitted, an officially approved eucharistic prayer should be used as a minimum.
Sorry that's not answering the question as I don't know the rubrics well enough. I have a sense you can get away with more in a non-Eucharistic service but that wasn't apparently the case here.
Exactly (for CofE read Piskies).
I sometimes get the feeling that there are people who think it's their duty to "evangelise" traditional churches, as though we were doing something wrong that needed to be corrected.
Trust me - from when I was one - this is exactly what some of us thought. "High and Dead" was our description.
Their near insistence on the need / desirability of prayers of penitence (which I agree with) sits oddly with the fact that the official liturgies for Palm Sunday, Easter Day, and for Baptism with Holy Communion don’t provide for it.
That drives me nuts when it gets left out. Do they think we magically stop sinning, and don’t need absolution, just because of the liturgical year?
It may also be worth noting that, at least with regard to the Easter Vigil, that the services of the Triduum—the Maundy/Holy Thursday Eucharist, the Good Friday service and the Easter Vigil—are considered one service spread over three days. So in those churches that mark the Triduum along the lines of the traditional services, confession and repentance are taken care of on Good Friday.
The latest translation of the Roman Missal has weakened the "One Liturgy" ideal (one greeting on Maunday Thursday and no dismissal until the end of the Easter Vigil) by having a greeting and sign of the cross at the start of the Easter Vigil. This has not pleased liturgical theologians at all.
I grew up in Brighton where many of the Anglican churches wafted much higher than the RC ones on billowing clouds of incense and acres of lace.
I was working from memory, which isn’t necessarily a good idea. I couldn’t remember the specifics for Maundy Thursday, and I was also treating the veneration of the cross and the reproaches as penitential in nature.
And vice versa!
Which particular way of doing things? This was a fairly common pattern at some point (pre Oxford Movement):
https://www.meisterdrucke.ie/fine-art-prints/Hablot-Knight-Browne/108258/Our-pew-in-church,-illustration-from-'David-Copperfield'-by-Charles-Dickens.html
Good, if that's what works!
I suspect most of us would rather BCP Mattins than the DIY job described above.
Yeah, and lowchurchism has a long history in the UK (one might almost say a dominant one when you consider levels of involvement).
I'm really not at all clear what that illustration is meant to show.
Evangelicalism of its time, altar very much in the background, people facing the the pulpit rather than east, vicar in Geneva robes who has obviously been speaking for some time judging by the number of people either distracted or falling asleep.
Doesn't tell me they've abandoned the liturgy and lectionary, which would appear to be the issue here.
I'm not personally a great fan of the BCP as it stands - rather too wordy for my liking (or attention span), but the services do work, IYSWIM.
Whatever happened to 'Prayer Book evangelicals'?
Back in my full-on charismatic evangelical days, like @KarlLB I always felt comfortable visiting charismatic and evangelical Anglican settings as I knew that nothing would happen that was too 'out there'. That changed as charismatic evangelicals began to ape what was going on in independent charismatic or 'non-denominational' churches.
I'm not knocking what the independents and the 'non-denoms' were doing but it made more sense, if I can put it that way, in their context than an Anglican one.
I know I'm Mr Both-And but I must confess I'm increasingly of the view that the lowest of the low within Anglicanism would be far better off in an independent setting of some kind whilst the hyper-High Church people really ought to be in Rome.
We'd welcome them across the Bosphorus too, but then we've got enough eccentrics of our own to contend with ... 😉
Yes, yes, I know Anglicanism is a broad church and I appreciate that but there must surely come a point when a parish could either fall out of the bottom or topple over from the top.
They merged with Reform.
Sure, but ask them what the load bearing issues were and you may get a different answer (although probably a superset rather than something disjoint).
High Church ritual doesn't necessarily make a good match with Rome. For starters post-V2 Roman forms are closer to broad church Parish Communion practice than High Anglo-Catholic usage. The Society may have much in common theologically with Rome but liturgically not necessarily, and plenty of very high Affirming Catholic congregations depart from Rome on many Epiphanies issues.
What I think we can agree is that, whatever good material there is in Common Worship, it was the last nail in the coffin for a reliably common liturgical experience across the CofE.
Ok. I'll qualify that. Hyper-Anglo-Papalist, not all Anglo-Catholics. I am aware that there are grades and shades at the Higher end of the Anglican spectrum just as there is at the low end and in the 'Broad' middle.
As for Common Worship, yes, it contains some good material but it's not as if some of the snake-belly low parishes appear to go anywhere near it.
I'm sure some of the High Church Anglicans don't either.
The problem is that some of its provisions are so broad that a church can technically be using it while barely touching the liturgical text. A "Service of the Word" can be almost anything so long as it has a Bible reading at some point.
One could argue that, for better or worse, compromise and fudge have been part of the Anglican DNA from the outset.
What we are seeing now might be seen as the inevitable outworking of that. Once an agreed framework has been elasticated to the extent that the 'stretch' and 'boing' goes out of it then we end up with 'no judge in Israel. Everyone did what was right in their own eyes.'
To the Law and to the testimony! Everyone to their tent, O Israel!'
1. Historically the C of E has been held together by the use of a common liturgy. Book of Common Prayer, 1662. Everyone paid lip service to it, and most churches used it more or less by the book, at least during most of the last century. Low church places would celebrate Communion, as the main service, not as frequently (once a month perhaps, though often with an early 8 o'clock on other Sundays). But they were less likely to tinker with the words of the liturgy or the lectionary at HC... maybe they would be more flexible at Morning or Evening Prayer. Surplice and black scarf would be worn, seasons and greater feasts would be observed. The liturgy in high church places might look very different, often indistinguishable from then (pre-Vatican 2) RC practice. But except in the very few most extreme, flagrantly bishop-taunting anglo-papalist parishes the Prayer Book rite would be followed, some of it possibly muttered sotto voce and supplemented by much material from the Roman Missal (cf The English Missal which was basically a translation of the then Roman Rite into faux-Cranmerian English, with the text of the BCP interwoven at appropriate points). The vast majority of parishes would do neither, but observe the BCP liturgy clothed with more or less ceremonial and vesture as suited each church's preference. It was possible for any C of E Anglican to attend any C of E church and be assured of a recognisable liturgy even if the style might be unfamiliar.
2. From the last quarter of the 20th century this approach was being nibbled away at by various experimental and authorised alternatives. The nail in the coffin was Common Worship 2000 , a confusing collection of various liturgies representing various styles of theology or degrees of formality, for one core book of worship services. Nevertheless canon law continues to insist on a few rules, for the eucharist in particular. And the church in the OP appears to break most of them. First, although the lectionary allows flexibility at some points in the year, for great feasts like Pentecost the set readings are obligatory as far as I know, and must always include a Gospel reading. If the 'prayer before communion' was one of the authorised Eucharistic Prayers that would pass, but it seems as if they might not have been bothered if it were authorised or not. I'm not sure if passing the elements from one to another at communion, rather than the priest or other ministers administering them is strictly allowed either, but it's not a great point of principle and common in some small informal gatherings.
3. For many years it was the evangelicals who stuck most faithfully to the official words, and criticised the anglo-catholics who dared to deviate from them or at least enrich them with other texts. Now it's often the other way about. Even those anglo-catholics who proudly claim to use the Roman rite are at least using something which has a family resemblance to the Anglican tradition, and until the revised translation of the former some years ago would have been virtually identical.
4. However at least the parish in Kent had not ditched the eucharist in favour of a service of the word, which on a feast such as Pentecost is required by canon law (unless a priest is unavailable) but which in many places today is considered optional.
I'm old enough to remember when even quite full-on charismatic Anglicans retained a degree of ceremonial in their eucharistic services. There were (are?) charismatic Anglo-Catholics of course.
At least the parish mentioned in the OP didn't have a digital 'count-down' before the start of the service and intersperse things with video 'adverts' gorgeous forthcoming events, all of which were going to be 'awesome' or 'amazing' - which is what I've seen at some places of this ilk.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying everywhere has to be the same but ...
How do you know what they DIDN'T have?
There was actually a recently made very professional promotional video for the church (complete with overhead drone footage and vox pop style quotes from members of the congregation about how good the church was) shown within the service...they were going to be showing it at a village community day the next day so wanted to showcase it to the church people first.
There was also a family quiz within the service presented in the style of a TV quiz show. In fact the whole format of the service reminded me of a chat show or a magazine format TV show, with a succession of different 'presenters' taking the lead up front.
Distinct lack of Awe and Reverence or any formal ceremony or ritual. Oh yes one more thing, the weekly bulletin had a whole blank page for 'sermon notes'. Hope all this gives a better flavour of what this church was like.
Horses for courses though...my father said it was the highlight of our weekend away!
I don't think any of us here are saying that. The question is, can a church sit so loosely to the liturgy and still claim to be Anglican? Christians, of whatever church or grouping, can freely worship in whatever manner they choose: I don't think anybody still wants to fine or execute people who won't conform.
But Anglican identity has always been centred on and to some extent defined by the liturgy, the Book of Common Prayer. Why do these people still want to be Anglican?
Liturgy/worship is one of the ways that a denomination identifies itself. Anglicans used to see themselves as a Via Media, placed equally between the Churches of the Reformation and the RCC/Orthodox churches. My perception is that they have moved more towards the Churches of the Reformation in recent decades in terms of the kind of worship described here and with things like dead horse issues.
Maybe I'm wrong.
Really? The Restoration Trust?
Sorry, I meant the Church Revitalisation Trust.
I think it's unwise to judge Anglicans in general by the peculiarities of the CofE, many of which are artefacts of Establishment. I'd also suggest that many actual Churches of the Reformation, Lutherans and Presbyterians in particular, are far more liturgically minded than modern Evangelical Anglicans.