Out with the old, in with the new
On a recent visit back to my “home town” we visited the parish church we used to attend many years ago. Back then we went to Evensong every Sunday evening, and the church was always packed to over-flowing. It is true that we had an extremely popular Vicar, a wonderful orator whose sermons everyone appeared to enjoy, and he was certainly a strong draw-card.
I particularly loved the music, the full choir and swelling organ recitals, and the wonderful sung psalms in the old Gothic stone church with its oak beams and pews, and the beautiful stained glass windows. It was magic!
We decided to go again, for old time’s sake, since this Service had meant so much to us. They still have it every Sunday evening at 7.00 pm, but this time we were left feeling terribly sad. From a congregation in the past of well over 300, this time there were only 8 parishioners plus the 3 in our little group. The music and beauty of the church remained, but where did everyone go? Those 8 folk were all elderly, and were all who remained. This is such a beautiful Service, the 1662 revision of Archbishop Cranmer’s BCP (Book of Common Prayer) Evensong, that I feel very sad it now happens so infrequently and is so under-attended. Why, when it used to be so popular?
Running concurrently with Evensong was another Service, also beginning at 7.00 pm, and called “the Antioch Service”. I understand it was designed more for the younger folk who preferred contemporary music and a different type of worship altogether. It was lead by another member of the clergy and was held in the adjacent church hall. I did not get to see how many people attended that Service but did note that there were not that many cars parked around the church. It used to be hard to find a park within several blocks back in those “olden days” of 300+ in the congregation!
Not just the demise of Evensong saddens me, but that worship has moved away from singing the Psalms as was done so prominently in that form of Service. Psalms are such wonderful God-inspired prayers and are a real treasure that comes at great cost to ignore. If you wish to learn how to pray, commit to memory as many verses of the Psalms as you can and then draw on them in your prayer life to enrich it immeasurably. We are losing a lot that is of real value by abandoning the BCP and not raising younger folk to appreciate these liturgies, thus denying them the pleasure that can derive from that kind of worship.
Am I really becoming an old fogey? Oh horrors!
I have been offered a number of reasons for this demise and the abandoning of our choral tradition. One was the greater competition on a Sunday for church attendances, including more entertainment options and commitments to other activities. That meant church needed to be made “more relevant” and something new, far more creative and dynamic, had to be found. The choral tradition and the words of the BCP were considered to belong to a culturally elitist group (the elderly?) and no longer grounded and authentic as a form of worship for modern generations. The formal liturgies of the BCP were considered traditions that no longer sustained, evidenced obviously by the lack of attendees. Someone suggested that people didn’t like going out in cold winter evenings… er, but may do so if Bingo and Karaoke are on offer. To worship God corporately is a privilege (as well as a duty) and such a weak excuse is quite shameful. “Sorry God, I’d rather keep warm by my fire… even though Jesus suffered horrific torture and death on the cross for me.” So much for the measure of our faith these days. What wimps we’ve become if that is the case. I hope not!
But if the church offers Evensong and only a tiny handful of people turn up, is it sensible to continue offering that kind of Service? A very good question, and it is quite reasonable to say that something needs to change. But the next question… what is it that has to change? Is it the Worship Service… or is it the people, the church, the body of Christ? This is worth thinking about.
The BCP liturgies have been increasingly dropped by the church in the most recent generation as the church strives to appeal to youth (mainly) through their own secular culture. The youth are not being taught to love what already exists, but to develop their own separate way of doing things - and that is a modern trend that works against the continuation of previous forms of worship. The church is seeking after youth, rather than the youth believe they have any rightful business with the church that existed long before they were born. The church will pander to secular culture or argue that, not doing so, it will die. And people point to Evensong and the few elderly attenders to “prove” such a statement, calling it sentimental nostalgia rather than authentic worship. BCP Evensong lasted from the time of Archbishop Cranmer (the 16th century) until a generation ago, and now, within this one generation, it has gone down the gurgler. So now we flip-flop among a variety of experimental formats, searching for this something new, creative and dynamic. The church has to run after people to make them want to attend. Why, in this generation, have people stopped learning to love the worship of the church which many generations before have done?
I was not born liking the choral tradition, nor the BCP Evensong, but at the time I started going to church that was what was on offer. That was how we worshipped. Nobody thought that I, or any other young person, should object and insist on it being done some other way (in order to be enticed to attend). I simply learnt to like it, which after a while I did. But now that we apparently must change what had been established in order to entice people to come and worship, I am wondering where is the sense of privilege (let alone duty!) to do so. People have to be lured into coming. They have to “like” the worship, and have it done their own way - not learn an already accepted way of doing things. Scripture informs the BCP which is very rich in its presentation, and the music is not subversive of the Word - those sung psalms are embedded in my brain as the music soars in my soul. And now, in the space of one generation, this worship history is being abandoned and wiped out by a culturally modern replacement (if an evening service is being offered at all) devised by just anyone. It may well be their own best, which I don’t deny also has merit, but it comes at the cost of losing several centuries of glorious praise and exaltation far better than most of us can offer by ourselves.
I am also left wondering what else is going to be changed (in generations to come) because it is not liked, and I see it already happening where people don’t like to hear about sin, and the eternal consequences of sin, and about obedience and God’s holiness and their own lack of it, etc. Some will even veer towards Biblical revisionism to avoid it. And while I think of it, who remembers the 39 Articles (and the others that Cranmer first came up with) these days? Lose some of these things and we are losing part of the Anglican tradition that will indeed come at a cost.
I was also told that the language of the BCP was an obstacle for many, that it is Elizabethan English which people don’t use nor understand these days. After all, if I wanted to be truly authentic, I should be recommending that we worship in Hebrew or Greek (the languages of the Old and New Testaments) or even in Latin. No, I agree with Martin Luther… the written word of God needs to be heard in the vernacular, and our worship must be understood by the worshippers. Hebrew and Greek are entirely different languages, but Elizabethan English is no further removed from today’s English than is that which is used to txt like a teen. Didn’t we learn to read Shakespeare at school? The “Elizabethan English” of the BCP is very mildly such compared with Shakespeare. I can understand both ends of that language continuum well enough to appreciate the right doctrine that Cranmer was keen for his clergy to teach (and congregation to understand) and communicate effectively with my young son on the end of his cell phone. Is that so unusual? Perhaps it is.
For myself, the BCP is most certainly not “merely a set of nice sounding words which are sort of comforting in an unthinking kind of way” (as was also suggested to me) although I do understand that there is a danger of it becoming so for those who “rote learn” without being mindful of what they are saying, or don’t wish to understand the right doctrine which is embodied by the words spoken or sung. People are more impatient these days, wanting things instantly without applying effort to learn, and so we must bend to them rather than have them bend themselves. The church service itself is seen as the missional outreach, rather than the home of worship from which the church members then go outside the walls to spread the gospel and draw new believers into the pews. Discipleship is being done as part of worship, rather than as something else again and done by all the church outside those times of worship. However, I thought worship was directed towards God, the One whom we worship, ourselves offering ourselves to Him with praise, thanksgiving and prayers of supplication, and songs of joy, etc. But that, I know, is a narrow view of worship when it is expected that a church service itself must encompass other functions, such as mission.
Virtue Online (the Voice for Global Orthodox Anglicanism) very recently (25 May, 2010) posted an article by Robin Jordan concerning a booklet published by the Latimer Foundation on the subject of “Praying with Understanding: Explanations of Words and Passages in the Book of Common Prayer”… I quote a small excerpt here, but the whole article may be read here, or the booklet itself downloaded from here.
One of the greatest failures of the church in recent years has been the failure to teach. So much so, that lay people today are often crying out for teaching, but the clergy (whether through uncertainty, mistaken priorities or sheer overwork) are still not supplying the need.
The services which are used every Sunday are an obvious subject for teaching, yet it has often been taken for granted that people know why they use them and fully understand what they mean. Much, of course, can be learned about them simply by thoughtful use of them, but certain things cannot.
Then, when the church enters an era of revolution, as at present, it is possible for the revolutionaries to decry the traditional services as ‘unintelligible’, simply because they contain some things hard to understand, which nobody troubles to make clear.
. . . .
A hundred years after his work [Archbishop Cranmer's BCP] had been done, the 1662 revisers tell us in their ‘Preface’ that they had found certain words and phrases which had fallen out of use or changed their meaning in the meantime, and that they had therefore substituted others.
Today, three hundred years later again, it is not surprising if the same situation has arisen once more; and, in any revision carried out on the modest principles of the 1662 revisers, a sprinkling of words and phrases might well need to be changed for the same reasons. But that is all.
The number of such words and phrases is not great, and it would be no more necessary today, in the cause of intelligibility, to change the whole substance and style of the Prayer Book, than it was in the seventeenth century. The text, as the 1662 revisers left it, was essentially Cranmer’s text, and a modern revision carried out on the same principles would again leave us with a text that was quite recognisably Cranmer’s.
The ‘invisible mending’ would hardly show. It would not be in everyday speech, and would include some harmless antiquarianisms like ‘thou’, ‘thee’ and ‘thy’; but then the Prayer Book never was in everyday speech - rather, it was in a finer form of speech, which sometimes differed from everyday speech chiefly in being simpler and clearer.
An unusual way of speaking is quite a different thing from an unintelligible way of speaking, though today they are so regularly supposed the same. To change words and phrases which have fallen out of use or altered their meaning would remove all trace of unintelligibility, while leaving a nobly unique text which was still unmistakably Cranmer’s own.
In the meantime, such words and phrases can at least be explained. The clergy can, of course, explain them by word of mouth, and one of the aims of the present booklet is to show clergy how easily this teaching gap can be bridged. However, in parishes where this is not as yet being done, it may help to have the explanation available for laity also in brief written form.
No doubt the clergy are overworked (the ones I know certainly are!) but perhaps the rest of the church - we, the congregation - have a responsibility in terms of mission: sharing, teaching and discipling? But I guess it is human nature to reinvent the wheel, presuming that it is not quite round enough for a new generation, and anything more modern must always be better.
Oops, I’m sounding like an old fogey well before my time!


In my previous post I disputed the teaching of an Anglican clergyman, the rector of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, USA.
Well, you might think that an Anglican clergyman would know what he is talking about, but this one seems to be making it up as he goes along. These ideas need more than just a few squirts from the can of bs repellent… or else a disclaimer that they are not to be found in the Bible as stated.
Today I picked up and began reading, for the first time, the 3-volume set entitled “The Rational Biblical Theology of Jonathon Edwards” by Dr John H. Gerstner. That is almost 2,000 pages of information that will surely have my friends over on the British Anglican Mainstream Forum despair of me ever settling down as comfortable “pew fodder” in an Anglican church.
The Lambeth Conference wades on while Down Here I read what I can find to read, and none of it is looking very good. My own little hunch is that they have the wrong agenda. Rather than trying to find a way to hold together that which does not properly fit together, the discussions need to be on how to separate with the least amount of acrimony possible. In other words… it is over, in all but name.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has finally said it!
Two things happened recently, separately, but on the same day. Coming together their impact was more pronounced than either would have been on their own.
Archbishop Tutu is causing a stir!

In my Journal entry earlier this month, 


There gets to be a point where, no matter what one says, the other clearly does not want to know. I have had that demonstrated to me often by my son, teenagers being so much smarter, better informed, more “with it” and certainly more wise to the world than a silly old Mum who has clearly “lost it” somewhere inside her assumed senile decay. My brain worked well enough when the little tyke was smaller than me, but now that I am smaller than him, it seems to have no knowledge of any worth at all - a kind of directly inverse relationship of sorts. The empty park bench here represents it very well, my son would expect you to believe. Certainly any useful information has long been leached out of it by the ravages of parenthood. Yes, there are usually perfectly good reasons such as these just mentioned to warrant not listening when one doesn’t wish to hear. And in the end, as youngsters reach adulthood, they must take responsibility for their own lives which includes the decisions they make, wise or not, and the consequences that those bring. The parent, wise or not, may or may not be heard, and thus the world moves on.


The Apostle Paul cautioned the Thessalonians to “Test everything. Hold on to the good. Avoid every kind of evil”. (1Thessalonians 5:21-22)
A priest of the Church of England has told how he had, for many years, assumed a traditional conservative Christian world view. Then he came across two lesbians living together in a loving sexual relationship. They were both Christians and upset that their lifestyle, which they believed to be hugely loving, was condemned by the conservative Christians who claimed Scripture taught it was sinful. As he described the caring nature of their relationship I could see how one could compare it with many other relationships where far less attention and concern for each other was evident, and have difficulty in claiming that it was not as caring and healing as the two involved insisted it was. As Christians they felt it was natural, and that God condoned their relationship, and had blessed them with a fruitful ministry to others. There were parts of their relationship that could be said to match that of any two people who cared greatly for each other - sisters perhaps, or brothers, or best friends of either gender - but this was also a sexual relationship, and their love spilled over into sexual expression and gratification. The question posed was… at what point was their relationship sinful, if it was sinful at all?





This is the eve of the ordination of three new deacons to the Church of England diocese of Dunedin, New Zealand.
Recently the Archbishop of Canterbury hopped off the fence where he had been perching for quite some time and landed with his feet on the side of “inclusiveness is not a Christian virtue”.
Four years ago now, which is still comparatively recent on many time scales, a leading organization in the field of national and international religious research and statistics was commissioned to conduct a survey on the beliefs of clergy of the Church of England.


This is the church that 





