Anna Norman-Walker ViaMedia.News Who Speaks for Anglican Evangelicals?
Rachel Williams spends a day with the Community of St Anselm
Evening Standard These millennials have left behind their friends, families and jobs to live like monks for a year
Andrew Brown The Guardian Taking a lesson from Michael Curry could just save the Church of England
“It is so handicapped by self-importance that applying the flexibility of other churches could revive its plummeting numbers”
Andrew Brown Church Times How right-wing populists appropriate Christ
Philip Welsh Church Times Time to retreat from throwaway liturgy
“Under Common Worship, service sheets have started to get in the way of God, says Philip Welsh. He proposes a solution”
… and here’s one I missed last week:
Torin Douglas Church Times Maintaining faith in the mainstream media
“Religious broadcasting has had a rocky 40 years — but it is now being taken more seriously, says Torin Douglas”
Given the presence of RCs in the Community of St Anselm I am curious how they handle the matter of eucharistic fellowship? What protocols may heave been laid down by RCs for Rcs here?
Living in France where in effect the Catholic Church is “the sole provider” we have been very pleasantly received. But the Community of St Anselm is in the context of the Church of England. Chemin Neuf faces this as a challenge as well, due to their ecumenical horizons.
Interested to contrast Andrew Brown’s piece with Philip Welsh’s. Working in an unchurched area, many of the CofE’s standard texts are impenetrable to those outside the church, and the flexibility of CW allows us to find liturgies that connect. It doesn’t mean that we change every week, nor that we never use CW, but that liturgy can be contextual. Personally, I like the Iona Community’s approach. They revise the abbey worship book every now and then, including mostly new material, and then use it regularly. And their resource books do offer liturgy that connects with people.
Clericalism stalks in some unlikely places, but one of those it is strongest is probably that part of the church striving for ‘contextual liturgy.’ I’m not accusing Jeremy Fagan, or anyone in particular, of that. But there is a sort of liberal version of ‘Father knows best’ in which the (doubtless overworked and hard-pressed) parish priest slaves over his/her computer half the week to produce the ideal liturgy. And the congregation smile indulgently as they are handed their badly formatted sheet of A4 folded lengthways, possibly even printed in Comic Sans (I have seen it!) and then miss half the… Read more »
Matters of Eucharistic hospitality are an agony. I have been privileged to worship with members of the St Anselm community at Lambeth, but in a Eucharistic service the RC members do not receive communion but do of course receive a blessing. My only sibling, Geoffrey, who is a RC and learning disabled, sometimes takes me to Mass and I known what it feels like not to be able fully to participate. I am sure Pope Francis has a private view on this.
Yes, Anthony (Archer). And the odd thing is that when my wife, Diana, and I are in situations where we are overseas (where no-one knows us as Anglicans) and – in all good conscience – go up to receive the Sacrament, both our and their private consciences are at peace – on our part knowing that Christ is available at the Mass to all Baptised Believers. I sometimes tell the priest at the door upon leaving that I am an Anglican priest who believes that Christ is present in the Elements of the Mass, and this has always been received… Read more »
I taught for over 20 years in Catholic schools in Sydney. Very early in that time (about 1980) I was invited to take part in 3 separate week long retreats (I believe I was the first non-catholic to be invited to do so in the diocese). On the first night I stayed seated when mass was distributed and, being asked why by other participants, I told them I was an Anglican. The next morning the Jesuit priest who was leading the retreat called me over and told me that, as I was a member of the community, I was welcome… Read more »
Thank you for the clarification AA.
We have fortunately been spared that.
I suspect at the level of St Anselm, and because located inside the C of E, the flexibility is difficult to receive an OK from the RCC for.
Philip Welsh has put his thumb on the pulse. Yes, Common Worship is better than anything we’ve had before, but boy-oh-boy do clergypeople love to play about with our worship from Sunday to Sunday! How we are expected to internalise ever-changing alternatives, as well-meaning clergy spend too much of their time re-arranging the jigsaw pieces of liturgical text to make every service searingly ‘relevant’ is beyond me. That’s what makes the liturgical text ‘impenetrable’ (@Jeremy Fagan) because we are not given time for words to work their way into the fibres of our souls, to repeat them, and rediscover them… Read more »
David Emmett, you may be right in some cases, but some do work hard at contextual liturgy and do it collegially. When I was in a very tough parish and CW had just come in I worked out with the PCC what would best suit our people, and we road-tested it until people were happy with it. We then printed 4 booklets, for the 4 seasons, and used those for years.
The CofE has a poor record in building congregations in deprived areas, which suggests that the St. Hyacinth’s approach of ‘engaging with the mystery’ hasn’t always been effective.
My experience is similar to Janet’s: forming a small group of church members, resourced by me but chaired by a couple of laypeople, and spending a whole church year trying out different options for each season, with lots of consultation, before printing a worship folder which is still in use seven years later. We called the group the non-music worship team, and I was surprised at the creativity unleashed – often I (the vicar) would have made different liturgical choices, but it wasn’t for me to decide!
I’m a CoE (persistent) lay participant, married to “a Catholic”. It’s a quite discomfiting to read the accounts of Anglican priests/clergy being welcomed to RC communion. For me it’s been made very clear that, with the exception of our wedding, paragraph 1400 of the CCC applies (..intercommunion…is not possible.)
3.57
The English context is certainly a special challenge for RC-Anglican relationships given the long and conflicted history and the established church reality.
Discomfiting personally — how so?
It may be “discomforting” to hear that “Catholics” ignore official rules with regard to inter-communion. I would suggest “Catholics” also ignore their own rules with regard to contraception, masturbation, same-sex marriage, divorce and abortion and most think that celibacy is pointless. Only the unmarried man in the Vatican, who make the rules, believe they should be obeyed.
Participant observer: I’m sorry that has been your experience (and the experience of many Anglicans and others denied communion by official RC policy). But in practice many Catholic priests do not take a hard line approach and it’s not just as if clergy were in a particularly privileged position. I hesitate to name names or places for obvious reasons, but I can point to several RC institutions where intercommunion is taken for granted (even if they don’t make a song and dance about it.) And as far as I know the direction of the French hierarchy that Anglicans unable to… Read more »
Common Worship like the many alternative service books used in the US Episcopal Church provide such a vast array of options as to be bewildering to most people. My parish was a waning one during the era when the clergy insisted on using all the varying options week by week season by season. With new leadership the decision was to offer essentially the same mass every day according to the ’79 prayerbook as it made it easier for visitors and newcomers. I’m happy to report a nearly 200% increase in attendance over the past 20 years.
I am intrigued by Janet Fife’s comment about liturgical contextualisation, because I thought Common Worship was precisely that: services and prayers for the Church of England. It is not as if it is has been generated by a central bureaucracy like the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, and then has to be inculturated for an English context. The process of authorising it has been extremely collegial: initial drafting by a liturgical commission representing different shades of theological stance and ecclesial experience; General Synod; quite a bit of ‘road testing and feedback in parishes and other… Read more »
This may spoil Participant observer’s entire day! The Remembrance Day tradition at the NATO base in S. Netherlands in the early 70s was for Sittard (RC) Cathedral to invite a Brit contingent to join with them on ‘our’ day in Nov, rather than theirs in May. Though not a concelebration, I accepted the Dean’s gracious invitation to distribute the host with him. This was noted. So was our tiny but accomplished choir who sang John Ireland’s ‘Greater Love hath No Man’ perfectly, accompanied on the organ by Air Chief Marshal Sir Lewis Hodges’ PSO, their “choir” comprising 80 singalong teenagers… Read more »
Simon R, I was referring to a parish on a very tough estate, where most people had a non-book culture. Processes for forming liturgy in the Church, including Synod, are heavily geared towards middle class, educated, and mostly white – hardly representative of the nation as a whole. The original set of collects for CW were particularly impenetrable, but I found the liturgy as a whole generally didn’t reflect the concerns of the people I was working among. I think that would be true of many working class, post-industrial, or heavily ethnic minority areas. At least that was the experience… Read more »
My most entertaining (if that’s the word) experience with intercommunion was on the Camino de Santiago. It was one of the traditional starting points, so many were gathered at Mass for the first time.
The President welcomed us all in (if I remember rightly) Spanish, German, English and French. He then went on to explain that only Catholics (sic) could receive the sacrament. This he said only in Spanish….
Given that non-Catholics are thin on the ground in Spain, the letter of the law was kept quite neatly I thought. If the guy wasn’t a Jesuit, he should have been!
I am another Anglican who from time to time has received RC Communion with the knowledge of the priest.
ASB was never all that popular with our congregations but having invested in around 100 books in 1980 there was reluctance to spend more money, which we could hardly afford, so we decided to look at the new options in CW as a church, see where we wanted to be and then produce our own service booklet. Once we had our booklet we stayed with it week in week out. It became familiar in just a few weeks, newcomers easily pick it up. Working in what is sometimes called a ‘non-book’ culture I have found familiarity with texts works well,… Read more »
I think its gone beyond tweaking and tinkering in some places SimonR.I sense a rejection of liturgical forms in some places. Hauled out of retirement to do 3 yrs of POT I was surprised how few of the newly ordained saw liturgy in your sense as formational at all. Several saw it as an impediment to mission, along with too much holy communion.
‘Only the unmarried man in the Vatican, who make the rules, believe they should be obeyed.’
I suggest that you read up a little on the way the Catholic Church actually operates before making such sweeping generalisations.
In the wake of the ACNS report on the opening of the Gafcon Conference in Jerusalem, one couldn’t help thinking about the consequences for worldwide Anglicanism when the Gafcon Primates are in the process of encouraging delegates from other countries to set up rival Churches to those they have left behind in their home countries. Of course, there are supporters of sexism and active homophobic reaction in every part of the civilised world – some even living in relatively civilised Aotearoa/New Zealand. In fact, some of them are now present at the Gafcon conference in Jerusalem – the site of… Read more »
” on the grounds of ritual purity ” whatever one may think of GAFCON I suggest this sounds more like Trumpian analysis. Try hard to be less disgusted…maybe it would help with your proclamation of an interest in Unity…or is that as selective as you accuse others of Ron?
Although the Prayer Book preface uses standardisation as justification for Cranmer’s reforms, if uniformity was his true motivation then he could have achieved it simply by combining the usages of Sarum, Bangor, York, Hereford and Lincoln in some way. The justification for alternative services, including Common Worship is the very opposite of uniformity. The Prayer Book is the only permanent liturgy, it alone is normative and doctrinally definitive. But Common Worship provides a plethora of alternatives. Common Worship cannot be other than locally determined since using it at all constitutes a local and temporary decision not to use the standard… Read more »
Simon R, the process of compiling CW was collegial – but it was a pretty selective college. General Synod has a heavy preponderance of middle class, older, mainly white members, so is not really representative of the Church as a whole – let alone the whole nation. The first set of collects were particularly impenetrable and I stopped using them (I used the excellent ‘Opening Prayers’ from ICEL instead). I had to work hard to put together services which my people felt reflected the lives they led. This was the general experience among my fellow members of the diocesan Urban… Read more »
Perry Butler I agree with you. That is my experience too – particularly candidates from evangelical/charismatic churches. The irony of course is that evangelicals were hugely involved in the very liturgical revision processes that many are now sitting light too.
And the field testing, @Janet Fife? Did none of that take place in tough estate parishes in the North (I know of three) and in parishes that are not majority white, middle aged and middle class? Yes, of course, I get where you are coming from; but there seems to be a bold assumption underscoring your stance. Taking your point about Collects as an example (and reflecting on @Bill Broadhead’s comment on this thread) do we ever give people the chance to ponder more deeply the demanding texts (as much from scripture as the liturgy)? Or do we as white,… Read more »
The irony is that the more liturgy is ‘contextualised’ and tailor-made to suit the needs (preferences?) of a local congregation, the less it appears as the liturgy of the whole church. All very well if people stay rooted in their own villages and never move (as doubtless in the Middle Ages, when that did not happen), but in today’s mobile society it is a recipe for confusion. I take all the points about Common Worship being over-influenced by white middle class culture and all that, but at least there is a core of liturgy that we can all accept as… Read more »
OK William. Would you prefer that “the unmarried Magisterium” makes the rules and everyone else ignores them?
RS, can you please cut this out? Jesus Christ died, 1) by his own willful intention, as all the Gospels make clear, 2) because he claimed he was God, and so provoked a central internal Jewish debate, continuing to this day, so as to fulfill the promises of Abraham, the Law and the Prophets, and 3) because Pilate had the power to substitute Barabbas and the entire crowd asked otherwise. Pilate wouldn’t have bothered to hear the case and would have had Jesus flogged with beach towels on your scenario. More Pascal, more Luther, more Aquinas and Augustine, more Cranmer,… Read more »
Re: “right-wing appropriating Christ” In another act of shame, the US Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, actually quoted the Bible to justify the separation of children from their families at the US border with Mexico. It turns out that the United Methodist Church is bringing a case against Sessions for that, over 600 UMC clergy signed a petition to support that action. Sessions is a Methodist and Sunday School teacher. Also, TEC Presiding Bishop Michael Curry and numerous other Episcopal (TEC) and Catholic bishops opposed the practice on TV and whatnot. And every American with a conscience kept the phones of… Read more »
To live like monks for a WHOLE YEAR?!
That’s half what the average novitiate would be, just the introductory period to learn the life and its lessons.
@Simon R and @David Emmott get to the crux of the issue. It struck me powerfully at an ordination, recently. The ordinands were asked “Will you faithfully minister the doctrine and sacraments of Christ as the Church of England has received them, so that the people committed to your charge may be defended against error and flourish in the faith”? The primary way of doing this in the Church of England is through the liturgy. Once we start imposing cultural perceptions and personal preferences on what the Church has agreed will be its doctrinal standards, our worship is diminished –… Read more »
Alas Will Liturgical discipline in the C of E is weak and liturgical formation not great. AngloCs often use the Roman rite entire or bits of including the calendar, evangelicals sit light to liturgical forms and lectionary now, unlike their forbears, often using little of the Xian Year. “What’s epiphany?”asked one of my POT group. We don’t wear fancy dress said another. And CW itself? At a recent conference replying to +Coventry, Mgr Andrew Burnham detected 2 or 3 contradictory theologies in the eucharistic prayers. I fear LexOrandi isn’t going to be much help in defining Anglican identity in the… Read more »
Andrew Burnham may have had an axe to grind in that conversation. When we put those prayers through Synod he had the chance to object and did not.
So Rod Gillis, do you remain silent or cross your fingers when you say the Creed? And, given your comment, which challenges the Creedal affirmations, how is it that you commend the Creed for people/to people week by week? Where is the integrity in that?
To my various critics: a) as I said earlier, I did not make all the decisions myself, let alone impose my ‘middle class’ (my family is working class) perceptions on the parish. We made collegiate decisions. b). We were using the pattern from Common Worship, and its texts (mostly) and operating within the latitude it permits. No diluting of doctrine there. So yes, we did use the acceptable, if not ideal, common core of liturgy. c) We had in mind not only regular worshippers who would know churchy words and be familiar with churchy concepts, but also those from the… Read more »
“RS, can you please cut this out? Jesus Christ died, 1) by his own willful intention, as all the Gospels make clear”
Christ’s destiny was strong. He fulfilled that destiny with grace in the knowledge of the meaning His death would have but that is subtly – but importantly – different to the suggestion that He had wilful intent to die.
RG, forgive me if I prefer the NT and the tradition to opinions of NT scholarship in some odd quarters in recent vintage. I may have opinions but I know the difference between them and the NT as such.
Janet Fife: I suppose a lot depends on personal experience as well as personality per se. But as a teenager with virtually no Christian background (apart from the vague awareness of being in a more-or-less Christian culture) my first real experience of worship was of BCP Holy Communion in a middle-of-the-road parish church. And I was hooked, not by the language as such, but by the sense of mystery and difference. The specialness of the time and place (8 o’clock on a Sunday morning was not ‘normal’ life!); the candles, the vestments, the sense of reverence. And then certain phrases… Read more »
It is very reassuring that we don’t need the experts—I am one—to be the discerners of the ‘real truth’ behind NT testimony. We have the truth. It is called apostolic witness. Brown’s reticence is neither here nor there but it is more laudable than whatever RS was purveying.
I suggest you read the literature recently appearing–Bauckham, Hurtado, Gathercole, et al et al–on divine identity and the pressure of OT depiction of God’s personal life on NT and early Christian reflection. My essay in the OUP volume on the Trinity is not long. The point isn’t penetrating the self-consciousness of Jesus, a specially modern fascination. And something the NT closes down on, content with the statements of intention we find in the synoptics and John (see also Frei, the Identity of Jesus Christ). It is rather that Jesus’ death entailed perceptions about who he was vis-a-vis the Lord–the handy… Read more »
PS–you might find the Jewish rebuttal of your position–widely presupposed but wrong–regarding the character of Jewish ‘monotheism,’ in Daniel Boyarin and recent SBL discussions useful. ‘Monotheism’ is a term without any real sustainable utility when it comes to the OT and Judaism. Again, my OUP essay is hopefully useful on this issue.
The Bultmann, Brown, Vermes, Kung material is now quite dated.
This isn’t about claiming to be God but rethinking what is meant by monotheism.
Have a good read.
Kung, Vermes, Lemaire, Bultmann and Brown are of course work from an earlier generation/or two.
This isn’t about being God. It is about re-conceptualizing what is meant by ‘monotheism.’ The discussion uses the term ‘Earliest High Christology.’
Eyewitnesses is a different book altogether than his work to which I was referring (God Crucified) on ‘monotheism.’
(I reviewed Eyewitnesses in IJST and indicate my form-critical objections to that work).
Bauckham, Gathercole, Dunn, Boyarin, Bates, Hurtado, my own work are the relevant texts for reconceptualizing soi disant ‘monotheism’ — a placeholder for an otherwise very imprecise notion.
I don’t agree with Boyarin. I have stated my own position in Elder Testament (2018). I mention because he belongs in this coin de discussion. I like to think my memory is failing because it holds too much, but in any event, my review of God Crucified is in IJST. I wrote an article on Eyewitness. It is found in: “The Old Testament as Eyewitness,” Nova et Vetera, English Edition,Vol. 6, No. 3 (2008): 513–522. I do not list individual peer-reviewed articles or chapters in books in the WIKI account generated in my name. Only my books are listed. I… Read more »
“I do hope that my work will lead in some ways to different places for conversation: for instance, acknowledging that the Trinity and incarnation are not some crazy, pagan influences on Christianity, but rather that they lie at the deepest roots of the Jewish heart of the Jesus movement.” Exactly. And to return to the reason this has come up on this thread, ahem, at the heart of incarnation and the reason Christ was crucified. “He was all in favor of love and fought discrimination and Judiasm and its Law and prejudices, etc.” Boyarin gets how banal and unworthy of… Read more »
The contributors who responded to my remark about communion at RC churches provided a healthy balance to my experience. I’m grateful to them. Exclusion by some RCs is insignificant compared to the experience of sisters and brothers who are excluded because of their identity or their vulnerability.