CHAPTER 1
The Anglican Way
THE REMARKABLE VARIETY OF LITURGICAL PRACTICES in the Episcopal Church leadsmany observers to assume that most decisions about worship have to do with tasteor personal preference. Subjectivity often rules, and even when planners keepsubjectivity in check, suspicions of subjectivity abound. Parishionersfrequently surmise that the proclivities (and even idiosyncrasies) of theirpriest, more than anything else, set the agenda for the parish worship. Clergyof every sort—evangelicals, anglo-catholics, charismatics, liberals, and evenrubrical fanatics—often presume to have a right, based in the worship canons, tosuperimpose their preferences on a parish, with little or no regard for thetraditions of that worshiping community or the greater Anglican heritage. Doesanyone expect to find a definable core for Anglican liturgical practice beyondthese subjective bases?
Moreover, the aesthetic issues often determine many of the decisions aboutparish liturgy. A passion for "the beauty of holiness" has marked the Anglicanway, but even this norm becomes problematic in an age when a common language fordescribing the good, the beautiful, and the true has collapsed. The worldwidecommunity of Christianity called Anglicanism lacks a consensus when it comes toaesthetic concerns, and this lack of consensus plagues our conversations when wegather to plan our liturgies.
In many parishes the liturgy becomes a focus for pastoral conflicts of everysort, a microcosm of other struggles around issues of authority, taste,propriety, and necessity. Many are the battles fought over music (renewal ortraditional? hymnal or song-book? guitars or tracker organ? choir orcongregation?), ceremonial (restrained or fulsome? modest or elaborate?), andlanguage (Rite I or Rite II? Prayer Book or supplemental texts for inclusivelanguage? or missal? or earlier Prayer Book?). The parish and the wise pastorlearn together to navigate these unsettled waters and even to direct the energyfrom the storm into a kind of creativity. The unwary pastor, ill-prepared orthinking it possible to navigate the waters alone, will sink. Anglican liturgydepends heavily on the priest and pastor having a sense, even a charism, forplanning the liturgy and presiding in it. But Anglican liturgy is more about thepeople than about the presider. From the first Prayer Book in 1549, theliturgical quest of Anglicanism has been to recover worship as truly leit-ourgia,a "work of the people," which is the root meaning of this Greek word.The most recent American Prayer Book invites us to take the next step in thismovement of recovering the liturgy for all God's people, a movement begun inArchbishop Thomas Cranmer's remarkable sixteenth-century reforms, the first stepin this continuing Anglican quest.
One of my assumptions for this work is that the 1979 Book of Common Prayerbrings to fruition some of the fondest ideals of the early reformers. Cranmer'snotions about weekly celebration of eucharist as a norm for worship, forexample, never took root in practice, with but rare exceptions. Morning prayer,litany, and antecommunion comprised the usual routine of Sunday worship untilthe latter part of the nineteenth century, when the weekly celebration ofeucharist became more common (though nowhere universal) in the parishes. BCP1979 recovers Cranmer's assumptions about weekly communion and articulates themmore clearly than any previous Prayer Book, making the implementation morepractical. Now, nearly everywhere in the Episcopal Church, people have agreedthat the chief act of worship on Sunday will be the celebration of theeucharist. This widespread consensus of practice represents not only somethingentirely new but also a reasonable progression from our origins. The practice isthoroughly Anglican.
Another assumption in this work is that the Anglican tradition in worship oftensuggests paths for finding creativity through controversy. Let us admit that thehistory of Prayer Book worship has brought alternating waves of accommodationand serious conflict, showing Anglicans as a contentious lot from time to time.Riots broke out in Cornwall and Devon after the introduction of BCP 1549. One ofthe numerous causes of the English Civil War in the 1640s was the introductionof the ill-fated Scottish Prayer Book of 1637. Physical violence, thankfully,has seldom typified liturgical conflict in Anglicanism, despite these earlyexamples. Still, the conflicts have not been without serious theological andpersonal rancor. Thus we see Richard Hooker's monumental work, Of the Laws ofEcclesiastical Polity, answering the puritan rancor against the Elizabethansettlement and the settlement's liturgical expression in BCP 1559. Ironically,the settlement undertaken by Elizabeth, a firm compromise seeking to make itpossible for the English church to be both catholic and reformed, gave littlesatisfaction to those who thought it went either too far, on the one hand, ornot far enough, on the other. Those who argued that the settlement lacked theappropriate fervor for reformation (the puritans) spoke most loudly andcontentiously against it. But out of this acrimony came the most sublime ofAnglican arguments in favor of Prayer Book worship, Hooker's Book 5 ofEcclesiastical Polity.
Other turning points in worship—the non-juring controversies, the work of theevangelicals John and Charles Wesley, the freedom of the American church afterthe Revolution and its subsequent divergent liturgical tradition (that is,divergent from the English tradition), the controversies surrounding theritualist movement in the nineteenth century, to name but a few—have comethrough conflict. All this is to say that conflict is no anomaly in ourtradition; in some ways it is our very lifeblood. At times Anglicans havebungled their way through the conflict. Was it necessary, for example, toimprison non-jurors in the seventeenth century or ritualists in the nineteenth?Conflict, nonetheless, forms a part of the Anglican ethos. We hammer out what isimportant to us through conversation-become-controversy. Without allowing it tobecome oppressive or violent, abusive or hurtful, we can learn from the tension.And we should not be surprised when controversy comes our way in the wake ofliturgical change—or through a refusal to change.
The tradition of Anglican worship, shaped as it is by such conflict and change,brings forward to us a substantive, dynamic, never static core of practice.Accordingly, a faithful response to this living tradition shies away from doggedmimicry of the past. Thus, for example, attempts to imitate BCP 1549, its style,its rubrical demands, and its ethos, would lead us astray. No single moment inthe tradition constitutes the norm for Anglicans, and we do harm to our identityand vocation if we romanticize any such moment and try to recapture it. Perhapsthe catholic renewal in nineteenth-century Anglicanism, with all the gifts itbrought to the tradition, erred most clearly in its sometimes exaggeratedattempts to recapture the practices of the late medieval era, a normative periodfor the so-called ritualists. Their looking back to this period made them missthe mark in two regards. First, the ritualists assumed a static rather thandynamic norm for the liturgy. "If the medieval catholic church did it this way,then we should do it also." One immediately wonders, why this period and notanother? This question brings us to the second point. The ritualists typicallyfailed in their attempts to bring forward authentic medieval practices; rather,they often formed their liturgy around what they thought the church did in themiddle ages. Their thinking about the middle ages derived from the spirit oftheir own age, the age of romanticism. And their liturgies often tell us moreabout the aspirations of nineteenth-century England than about the late medievalchurch. The ritualists frequently had more in common with Sir Walter Scott andhis Waverly novels than with actual liturgical practices in English cathedralsduring the middle ages. They thought they were recovering these latter ideals.
The tractarian movement and its successors forced a major turning point in theAnglican tradition of worship. Anyone who worships in a parish where there areeucharistic vestments, candles on the altar, a vested choir, acolytes, andweekly eucharist must acknowledge a heritage from the tractarians. In theEpiscopal Church, we are all heirs of the catholic renewal. I point out thismisjudgment in method taken by the movements of catholic renewal in thenineteenth century to sound a warning to us, not to deride an important sourceof renewal for all of Anglicanism. Any time we try to freeze a moment fromhistory and look to that moment as the norm, we miss the point of continuity andchange within tradition. Tradition is a living organism, and we learn much aboutits current life from examining what has gone before. But the quest to recoverfor the present all the practices and customs of an earlier age results insomething very artificial. We cannot mimic the early church, the medievalchurch, the Reformation church, the colonial church, the Victorian church, orthe church of the BCP 1928. We cannot do that because we are the church of ourage, in our cultural setting, with our knowledge about the Bible and the past,with our peculiar ways of knowing and our limitations. We cannot pretend that weare the Reformation church, fighting the battles fought then. We have our ownbattles to fight. Mimicry of the past may make the church look like those bandsof middle-class folk who dress up in Union or Confederate uniforms on weekendsand "reenact" battles. Such action might be quaint or interesting or evencommendable to those who delight in all the details. The ability to re-enact,however, is not the quest of history, nor is it the passion of a livingtradition. Such a tradition lives to empower people to act in their own age, notto recapture a fleeting moment from the past. Jaroslav Pelikan writeseloquently: "Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is thedead faith of the living."
The Anglican tradition hands over to us riches of great substance, and werightly treasure these riches. But even more, the Anglican tradition shows us amethod, an approach to living the liturgy. BCP 1549 may seem foreign to us,distant, almost in another language, especially if we read it in an editionpreserving the archaic ways of spelling familiar words. Yet even this odd book(odd, that is, to moderns) sets forth principles that continue as hallmarks ofour way of Christian worship and life: worship in the vernacular; a book forpriest and people, not just priest; word and sacrament; simplicity, directness,plain speaking wherever possible; worship as a source for learning how to beChristian; continuity with the past shaped to meet current needs. These broadprinciples more than the details provide insights necessary for shaping Anglicanliturgy in our own day. If we study the early Prayer Book tradition closely, wewill also find further hints of a methodology to inform our current needs andpractices. One example has to do with an approach to the resources of Christianantiquity, as Thomas Cranmer writes in the preface to the first Book of CommonPrayer 1549, a preface included in the section called "Historical Documents" inBCP 1979:
There was neuer anything by the wit of man so well deuised, or so surelyestablished which (in continuace of time) hath not been corrupted: as (emongother thinges) it may plainly appere by the common prayers in the Churche,commonly called diuine seruice: the firste originall and grounde whereof, if amanne woulde searche out by the auncient fathers, he shall finde that the samewas not ordeyned, but of a good purpose, and for a great aduancement ofgodliness.
Cranmer sets forth in this first substantive paragraph in his first Prayer Bookwhat would become a crucial approach in the Prayer Book tradition—the need to"searche out by the auncient fathers." But Cranmer cites the ancients not forthe sake of mimicry but that he might join his purpose to theirs, that is, thathe might ordain the liturgy for "good purpose" and especially for "a greataduancement of godliness." And indeed, Cranmer did draw on sources fromantiquity, insofar as they were available to him, but his quest was for theliveliness of the church in England, not for a point-by-point correspondence tothe practices of the ancients.
Following the same approach, we might look to the ancients for insights around acrucial and timely issue such as the renewal of the rites of baptism. Theancients (Justin, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Cyril, Ambrose, and many others) writeabout a means of Christian formation called the catechumenate, a lengthy andcomplex process leading to baptism. Hippolytus in particular assumes acatechumenate lasting perhaps three years, and the movement of the processeffectively sets the believer apart—radically apart—from the surrounding andincreasingly hostile world of the Roman empire in about the year 215. We,perhaps sensing a culture growing less hospitable to Christian living, mightlook to Hippolytus and the others for insights about living through such times.But in our cultural setting, it might not be appropriate to insist on a processculminating in a radical setting-apart from the world. An assumption about athree-year period for the process of formation might also be misplaced in thecontemporary setting. Similarly, post-baptismal sermons of the sort preached byCyril and Ambrose—ponderous, lengthy, and high-flown in rhetoric—would soundodd, if not boring, in twentieth-century America. Nonetheless, the ancients'general approach may suggest a template for our needs in "a great aduancement ofgodliness." Perhaps there is, from Hippolytus, the possibility of a serious andprofound liturgical progression culminating in baptism; perhaps, from Cyril andAmbrose, there is a template for substantive post-baptismal formation of somesort. A three-year process and lofty rhetorical flourishes do not meet the needsof the church now. But perhaps the methodology does, and it is the methodologythat has been adapted pastorally in the catechumenal processes available to usin The Book of Occasional Services.
Purpose and Sources
The purpose in writing this work is two-fold. My first design is to ferret outand describe broad principles from the Anglican tradition that might enlivenordinary parish worship in the Episcopal Church today. The second, related tothe first, is to provide for planners (clergy, musicians, and members of worshipcommittees) an introduction to the peculiarly Anglican tradition from whichtheir decisions about the liturgy must arise. I do not intend to list answersfrom the tradition, as if to suggest simplistically that there is a "right" wayand a "wrong" way, but I hope that a basic familiarity with the Anglicanheritage will help planners know the various options before them and (mostimportant) the necessary questions to ask. Three sources inform this endeavor.The first and most important is the most recent Prayer Book, BCP 1979. This bookprovides a liturgical norm for the Episcopal Church in the United States ofAmerica. Yet this norm itself is evolving, leaning toward a next Book ofCommon Prayer. And if we continue in the Anglican heritage, we must assume thatthere will be a next one. The preface to BCP 1662 reads:
The particular Forms of divine Worship, and the Rites and Ceremonies appointedto be vsed therein, being things in their own nature indifferent, and alterable,and so acknowledged: it is but reasonable that vpon waighty and importantconsiderations, according to the various exigency of times and occasions, suchchanges and alterations should be made therein as to those that are in place ofAuthority, should from time to time seem either necessary or expedient.
BCP 1979 is a thoroughly Anglican book. Its departure from Cranmerian languagein Rite II in no way undercuts this Anglican identity. This book represents butthe most recent distillation of the very ideals held dear by Cranmer and theother reformers. The practices of BCP 1979 define the norm for the EpiscopalChurch, for the book represents a consensus for the time being wrought throughcontroversy. New controversies no doubt will test the margins of the currentbook and require a new consensus. But for now, BCP 1979 gives the EpiscopalChurch the definitive core for its worship. The Prayer Book, then, deserves ourrespect (although not our undying allegiance, which becomes uncomfortably akinto idolatry) not simply because of its liturgical merit, rich in its own right,but most of all because respect to the Prayer Book becomes a way of respectingbrothers and sisters whose consensus and assent the Prayer Book represents. Inreality, it is not the Prayer Book to which we owe respect; instead, our respectis rightly directed toward the larger community, the Episcopal Church, fromwhich the Prayer Book takes its current expression.
A second procession of sources comes in the historic Prayer Books, from 1549 to1928. These books—in their similarities and differences and (especially) in adeeper underlying purpose that cuts across the entire history of Anglicanworship—inform our understanding of the Anglican way. The structures of meaningfrom the Prayer Book tradition give us a provisional norm, always accountable tothe current Prayer Book and its expressions.
