Admirable Simplicity: Principles for Worship Planning in the Anglican Tradition - Hardcover

Smith, George Wayne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 089869261X ISBN 13: 9780898692617

Verlag: Church Publishing, 1996

Inhaltsangabe

An 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.

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George Wayne Smith is a native of Texas and a graduate of Baylor University. He also holds advanced and professional degrees from Baylor, Nashotah House, and the University of the South. He has chaired liturgy commissions in two dioceses and is a member of the Association of Diocesan Liturgy and Music Commissions. He is the former bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Missouri.

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Admirable Simplicity

Principles for Worship Planning in the Anglican Tradition

By George Wayne Smith

Church Publishing Incorporated

Copyright © 1996 George Wayne Smith
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-89869-261-7

Contents

Preface
Chapter 1: The Anglican Way
Chapter 2: The Daily Office
Chapter 3: Baptism and Confirmation
Chapter 4: The Eucharist
Chapter 5: The Pastoral Offices
Chapter 6: Planning the Liturgy
Bibliography

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...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Church Publishing
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1996
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 089869261X
• ISBN 13: 9780898692617
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 384
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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