In the 350th Anniversary of the Book of Common Prayer, how does Common Worship continue to shape the life of the Church of England and the wider church? With the rise of fresh expressions of church, is it still relevant and important to have common structures for worship? How can the resources that exist in the tradition be used creatively to enable worship that forms Christian people and communities today in their common endeavour to be the people of God?
These were some of the questions tackled by Graham Cray as one of the keynote speakers at the Diocese of Liverpool Liturgy and Worship day conference on Saturday (25th February 2012). Sharing the platform, and the discussions, was Alison Milbank – Associate Professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies in the University of Nottingham, and Priest Vicar of Southwell Minster.
The event – for Clergy, Readers and anyone interested in liturgy and worship – took place at Liverpool Hope University Conference Centre and Chapel.
You can read Graham Cray's address below or download it at the foot of the page.
Common worship – common mission
I am delighted to be back in the Diocese of Liverpool with its strategic commitment to the mixed economy church and with its own distinctive River and Lake vocabulary. The mixed economy approach sees the whole church as missional and encourages mission through both inherited models of ministry and through the planting of fresh expressions of church. There are 1000 fresh expressions of church in the Church of England according to the 2010 returns. The vast majority of these are new congregations in parishes; a small minority are deanery or diocesan initiatives.
I approach this subject as a missiologist, not as a liturgist, although I have taught some liturgy. I wish to address common worship in relation to common mission.
1. A doctrinal foundation and a practical template
Worship and mission are inseparable. Together they are of the essence of the Church. Each is an outworking of our baptism into Christ. Each is a gift received in Christ, as in two parallel statements by James Torrance.
Worship is the gift of participating through the Spirit in the incarnate Son's communion with the Father.
The mission of the Church is the gift of participating through the Holy Spirit in the Son's mission from the Father to the world.
Each is a gift of participation in Christ by the Spirit. In worship by the Spirit we have Jesus' word 'Abba' on our lips (Romans 8.15, Galatians 4.6) and the risen Jesus commissioned his church to share in his mission, saying, 'As the Father has sent me so I send you. Receive the Holy Spirit' (John 20.21) But these are not two gifts but one gift, Christ by the Spirit in two dimensions. Neither can be addressed apart from its relation to the other. Each is shaped in relation to the other. Each provides evidence of the authenticity of the other.
Authentic worship leads to mission. Worship could rightly be called the sixth mark of mission, as we 'proclaim the Lord's death until he comes' (1 Corinthians 11.26). My colleague in York, David Watson often said
a praising community preaches to answer the questions raised by its praise.
To David Ford and Daniel Hardy,
Evangelism as the horizontal dimension of praise – the content of praise repeated and explained to others so that they can join the community of praise.
My neighbour in Kent, Robin Gill states that,
Worship makes strong demands upon us. It requires no less than we should go out into the world to love, serve and care.
To Archbishop William Temple,
The proper relation in thought between prayer and conduct is not that conduct is supremely important and prayer may help it, but that prayer is supremely important and conduct tests it.
Conduct in mission and other forms of discipleship 'tests' prayer and worship. The reverse also applies. Authentic mission wins worshippers. It involves initiation into the worshipping community, into the body of Christ. But there is a problem. Michael Vasey noted that
in much contemporary evangelism there is no mechanism or context in which the liturgical formation of the individual can take place. The result can be a profound alienation.
The transition, for example, between an Alpha or Emmaus course into the weekly worship of a congregation can be very difficult. Few today help new believers or enquirers to learn the language of faith and worship. A young man attended a baptism with the rest of his extended family.
He took part reverently and joined in as a member of the regular congregation guided him though the service. At the end she asked him, 'How much of that did you understand?' He replied, 'Not a word.'
Both worship and mission create questions of unity and diversity. How can each express the call of the gospel to people of diverse worldviews and culture, each of which comes to its fullness in Christ, and at the same time demonstrate the power of the Gospel to reconcile and to unite all in Christ in whom all fullness is to be found? In its life on earth the unity of the Church – its demonstration of the reconciliation through Christ, and the length of its reach, to all people with the good news of Christ, has to be held in a creative tension. Neither may exclude the other.
Therefore common worship has to be addressed within the template of creative tension between the demands of worship and mission and of unity and diversity.
Escape the tension and you avoid the issue. This involves local discernment within the diversity within unity of common worship and common mission. Is there also a creative tension between the cure of souls and the commitment to proclaiming the gospel afresh, and the use of services authorised or allowed by canon? Not necessarily, but I will return to this later.
Common worship raises the same creative challenge as catholicity. I love Miroslav Volf's saying,
All churches want to be catholic. Though each in their own way.
According to Paul Avis of the Council for Christian Unity,
Catholicity refers to the universal scope of the Church as a society instituted by God in which all sorts and conditions of humanity, all races, nations and cultures, can find a welcome and a home. Catholicity therefore suggests that the Church has the capacity to embrace diverse ways of believing worshipping, and that this diversity comes about through the 'incarnation' of Christian truth in many different cultural forms which it both critiques and affirms. The catholicity of the Church is actually a mandate for cultural hospitality.'
Note his concern for 'diverse ways of believing worshipping' and for 'cultural hospitality'.
Unless Common Worship means uniformity, rather than diversity in unity, it has to be shaped by the missionary encounter with culture.
2. Worship and culture
At its best, the fresh expressions movement is part of the Churches' current process of learning the practice of inculturation in the UK. There is no evading the encounter between worship and culture. The faith once delivered to the saints always takes a culturally specific form.
Christian faith is embodied faith; Christ takes flesh among those who respond to him in faith. But there is no generalized humanity; incarnation has always to be culture specific.
Andrew Walls
The eternal word only speaks dialect.
Pedro Casaldáliga
The York Statement on ' Liturgical Inculturation in the Anglican Communion' commends,
A willingness in worship to listen to culture, to incorporate what is good and to challenge what is alien to the truth of God. It has to make contact with the deep feelings of people. It can only be achieved through an open-ness to innovation and experimentation, an encouragement of local creativity, and a readiness to reflect critically at each stage of the process – a process which in principle is never ending.
To apply this to some aspects of culture within Britain today: We are a feelings-based society. A society which has turned inward. We have swung from the over-optimistic Enlightenment expectation of a rationally based provable truth that everyone could believe in, to a subjective scepticism that will only trust what we individually feel. Experience is the final authority and offers the only authenticity. This applies equally to spiritual experience. Spirituality in British culture is largely an experience to be had for its own sake, not as a pointer beyond itself. Acts of worship which do not take seriously this quest for experience, and address the loss of transcendence, or which seem merely rationalistic offering no sense of encounter with God will have little effect. The feeling culture also needs challenge. The consistent use of psalms, which, in daily prayer, rarely reflect the mood of the person saying the office, is an important resource.
In 1985 the Faith in the City report said,
A church which has a single highly intellectual style of doctrinal formulation, and which orders even its most contemporary forms of worship by reference to a closely printed book of over a thousand pages, can never hope to bridge the gulf which separates it from ordinary people.
Today, one in six people in the UK struggle with literacy. This means their literacy is below the level expected of an eleven year old:
Almost four million children in the UK do not own a book. The proportion of children without books is increasing. It is now one in three, compared with one in 10 in 2005.
National Literacy Trust
This is a challenge to the cure of souls.
We are a highly visual culture in which the screen is usurping the dominance of the book. A form of society is emerging which combines some aspects of oral pre-printing culture with post-printing electronic culture. The screen culture does continue to present linear rational argument to a degree, but the emphasis has moved to the image rather than the concept, to the small extract without context rather than the whole picture. The screen culture is unlike the old oral culture in that it does not demand the power of memory. It also continually reinforces a pluralist and relativist view of truth as people are daily bombarded with images and fragments from a wide variety of cultures, eras and world views. All this has a variety of consequences for the culture of worship. The logical sequential sermons some of us were trained to preach will be increasingly hard for people to follow. We need an emphasis on narrative, and the identification of appropriate traditional and contemporary symbols to interpret our words.
Simple memorised liturgy, which requires neither books nor screens, will be of great value. Comprehensible credal statements are essential, as a check against the pick and mix tendency of contemporary approaches to truth.
Many people today are deeply suspicious of power and of institutional authority (including that of the Church of England). Our culture lives with an extraordinary tension between a tendency to make everything look the same everywhere (look at our town centres) and a rejection of everything centrally imposed in favour of the local. The creation of an Anglican liturgy which carries the national Church's family likeness yet which not only allows but empowers considerable local choice, diversity and creativity is urgent.
The diversity and fragmentation of our culture presents Christian worship and mission with its most difficult task. The gospel is God's basis for human reconciliation (Ephesians 2.11ff) and provides in Christ the unity in which human diversity finds its true context (Ephesians 4.1ff). But this does not demand a uniform church in a diverse culture! The assumption that every member of a parish church should be at home at the 'main' Sunday service has rarely been sustained and risks the reduction of worship to a lowest common denominator that pleases no-one and dishonours God. Unity is essential, but the struggle to realize locally the unity which is given us in Christ, should not be focused entirely on worship. Other forms of community, from parties, to prayer gatherings to days of serving the local community together, can build relationships between those who worship in different styles. We are a community in Christ not just a regular worship gathering.
The York statement concluded,
Our lack of inculturation has fostered both the cultural alienation of some Christians, and an over-ready willingness of others to live in two cultures, one of their religion and the other of their everyday life.
There is a need both to make greater effort to teach new believers and enquirers our language, and to translate our language so that it engages with the everyday lives of those for whom we have the cure of souls. Catechesis and inculturation are equally necessary.
3. Common Worship today
Common Worship gives the church both coherence and a principled diversity.
The history of liturgical revision from Series 2 to Common Worship was not only about the necessity of more contemporary language, but substantially about bridging the considerable divide between Evangelicals and Anglo Catholics. The worship of many parishes had been as much about what they were making it clear they were not saying, as what was positively professed! Liturgical revision has given the Church of England a greater liturgical cohesion, but this was the fruit of a concern for internal unity, not so much for the call of mission.
In his key chapter for the Liturgical Commission's introductory volume 'The Renewal of Common Prayer – Unity and Diversity in Church of England Worship' in 1993 Michael Vasey introduced the principles by which the Commission now understood Common Worship or Common Prayer.
(There will always be those churches which see the liturgical text as the whole liturgy and those who see it as the framework which allows space for other elements.)
The new approach has three main components: An emphasis on the shape, flow and 'deep structures' of each rite, a common and evolving core of nationally shared material, and a wide range of seasonal and other material for contextual use. The common core would contain some items because of their doctrinal sensitivity – eucharistic prayers and baptismal vows for example – and other items by more popular assent – the collect for purity, the post communion collect etc. This is the situation today, and I believe it serves the mission of the Church well, supplemented, through Canon B5, by permission for local creativity in new contexts, which will allow the local work of inculturation which the varied context of mission increasingly requires.
But the use made of the diversity within unity, which the Church of England now encourages, needs to be informed by a clear understanding of the role of worship in formation and discipleship.
4. Worship and Formation
This section has to begin with a word of caution. The focus of worship is the glory and praise of Almighty God not the benefit that worshippers might gain from the exercise. The moment the worship of God becomes instrumental for some other primary purpose, it ceases to be the worship of God.
Paradoxically it is when we lay aside concern for ourselves that we benefit, as a side effect of the main purpose.
The principal object of liturgy is to worship God. Values that are generated in the process are a consequence of worship and not its object.
Robin Gill
But 'worship is a subversive act' – as Marva Dawn has said. It plays a vital part in Christian formation, precisely because it turns our concern away from ourselves. If in my section on liturgical inculturation I seemed too kind to contemporary culture, now let me turn to countercultural transformation. Too much Christian practice is shaped by an individualistic consumer ethos. Dave Walker has a cartoon which shows a line of people leaving a church because 'they don't like the way things are done here'. They are being replaced by another line who are arriving because they 'don't like the way things are done somewhere else'.
Christian faith and Christian worship is not about 'me'. It is about God rather than about me. It is about 'us' rather than about me, because Christianity is essentially corporate. The church is a community to which I belong, in Christ, not an event that I attend if it suits my tastes. And Church is not about 'me' or 'us'. It is about 'them' all those in the locality, be it neighbourhood or network, for whom Christ died. Newbigin wrote that, properly understood,
The character of the local church will not be determined primarily by the character, tastes, dispositions,etc., of its members, but by those of the society in which and for which it lives – seen in the light of God's redemptive purpose revealed in Jesus Christ for all.
But most local churches I know are shaped precisely by the character, tastes and dispositions of those who attend. Decisions about the practice of worship should not be made on this basis alone. The missionary calling influences the shape of worship.
This is where the deep structures, the shape of a rite, and simplicity with godly repetition help to form Christian character and a Christian worldview. The local church needs to be understood as a lifelong catechumenate, a learning community in the way of Jesus. Christian character grows through godly habit and requires corporate habits as well as personal spiritual disciplines.
Describing the centuries before Constantine, Alan Krieder says,
The church did not grow because its worship was attractive. The reason is simple: from the mid-first century onwards pagans were not admitted to Christian worship services. But worship, to which pagans were denied admission, was all important in the spread of the church. It was important not because it was attractive, but because its rites and practices… made differences in the lives and communities of the worshippers. It performed the function of re-forming those pagans who joined the church into Christians, into distinctive people who lived in a way that was recognisably in the tradition of Jesus Christ.
Contemporary culture values heritage but not rootedness, and has little hope for the future beyond a better today. Christian worship functions to establish a worldview and way of life which connects past, present and future through Christ. This is the function of the whole Biblical story, but above all the eucharist is:
…the appointed place at which the past, present and future of God's dealings with humanity in Christ come to clear, concrete and climatic expression.
Christopher Cocksworth
In the Eucharist we are celebrating the Lord's death in the past, but we do so in his risen presence and in anticipation of his return. Christians claim that what God has done in Christ restores both a rootedness in the past and a hope for the future. Both are necessary for any sense of meaning in life beyond the here and now:
…in order to have a sense of who we are, we have to have a notion of how we have become, and of where we are going.
Charles Taylor
Tradition is not a term taken seriously by those raised to seek continually after the latest fashionable experience, but
…to live in tradition is about living an authentic life in which our present is given coherence from our past and hope from our future.
Kenneth Stevenson
The regular practice of worship forms us in the Christian story and reshapes our choices and perspectives in its light. Pattern and repetition play an essential part.
If a local church is to be, not only a sign and instrument, but also a foretaste of the kingdom. Its worship will be a vital component in shaping its life as an imperfect anticipation of the future which Christ has secured. The danger of some liturgical traditions, which represent a sort of liturgical archaeology – if it was good enough for Hippolytus it's good enough for me and it's mandatory on everyone else – is that they totally lack this element of a prophetic anticipation and they only seem to point back. This is a fundamental failure in inculturation.
We have given too much attention to church as a passing on of the inheritance of the past and too little to church as an anticipation of God's future.
Mission-Shaped Church
Two things are required – one is worship which challenges and relativises the apparent inevitability and durability of contemporary Western ways of life, apart from Christ. The worship in the book of Revelation provided such 'prophetic counter images' (Richard Bauckham) pointing out the true reality and inevitable fall of the dominant Roman culture of its day. The second is a visible foretaste, anticipations, of a believable alternative future in Christ, experienced in worship, congregational life and mission in the locality.
I want to make it clear that neither the pedantic use of authorised texts, nor the deliberate hanging loose to them, guarantees this sort of transformation. But such transformation should be the focused, disciplined intention of every missionally minded parish priest or pioneer minister. The development of a mission focused new monasticism among some fresh expressions of church is a particularly promising development.
5. Developing worship in a fresh expression of church
Grace meets people where they are, but never veils the costly call of Christ. Inculturation and fresh expressions of church are not about 'church lite', but about 'deep church' (C.S. Lewis) at the right time, in the right place, at a cost – the comfort and convenience of those who plant them, because they are not for the planters but for the cure of souls.
Best practice in planting a fresh expression of church does not begin with a new gathering for worship. It begins with a period of prayerful discernment, takes initial form through practical service, the gospel in deeds before the gospel in words, and starts to form a community and explore discipleship, before establishing a pattern of public worship. That worship can then be shaped by both the traditions of the church and by local knowledge and new relationships.
Many fresh expressions of church begin at a catechumenate stage. They are potential congregations at the start, exploring faith. It is inappropriate to put credal words on their lips, until they have some understanding of them and consent to them. But it is appropriate to give then first tastes of Christian worship and introduce them to the Christian story. 34% of adults in England have had no significant engagement with any church in their lifetime and there is an increasing ignorance of the Bible and the story of God in Christ. Telling and applying the Christian story to everyday life is central. The ministry of the word often preparing the way for sacramental worship at a later stage.
In an increasingly post-Christian culture people do not automatically know how to worship. Many Britons have hardly ever used their capacity to express and explore transcendence, although it is seen in little shrines of flowers anywhere there is a tragic death. They need help to develop what Ann Morrisy calls 'apt liturgy'.
Sacramental life properly begins with rites of initiation. If the plan is to develop the fresh expression as a long term congregation then baptism, the renewal of baptismal vows and conformation are best located at the fresh expression's usual time and meeting place, not relocated elsewhere for convenience.
There is no church apart from baptism and eucharist. Some fresh expressions will introduce a eucharistic celebration at an early stage, other will recognise a need to create an understanding and hunger for the central act if Christian worship, that a matter of contextual discernment, but all sustainable Anglican fresh expressions will be eucharistic. It is incumbent on parish, deanery and diocese to ensue that this is not impeded by the unavailability of priests or Eucharistic ministers who have been appropriately trained.
The worship of a fresh expression should combine both patterned consistency – attention to the shape of a rite – and creativity. Its structure should not be different every week. Overall I am very impressed by the creative contextual mission and worship, which is developing across the church. Patterns of prayer, with the use, for example, of prayer stations, and interactive forms of the ministry of the word, show greater creativity and liturgical sense than in some traditional parish ministry. One aspect of this is well documented in Mary Gray-Reeves and Michael Perham's book 'The Hospitality of God' and in 'Curating Worship' by Jonny Baker. At the same time fresh expressions are a recent development and many leaders are new to the task, so supportive training should be available in each diocese. Help can also be found on the Fresh Expressions website at www.freshexpressions.org.uk.
Conclusion
To conclude I highlight:
- Common worship cannot be properly addressed apart from Common Mission. The importance of Common Worship, as it is now understood in the Church of England, is to give unity within a principled, mission focused, diversity.
- More attention needs to be given to both teaching and translating the language of faith and worship.
- Weekly worship should intentionally emphasize the formation of disciples for mission in everyday life and be careful that it does not inadvertently encourage withdrawal into a separate religious sphere.
- Parishes, deaneries and dioceses should recognize the missionary nature of fresh expressions of church, and the necessary stages of development in their worship.