Do we need common prayer?
Over at Living Church building, the US Episcopal Church website, they have been hosting a give-and-take virtually liturgy and unity prompted by the prospect of revision of the 1979 Prayer Book. Andrew Pearson, dean of the Cathedral Church of the Advent, Birmingham, Alabama, questions whether doctrinal unity (such as it is) should be maintained through notional commitment to a common class of liturgy—of whether the diversity of the Church building should exist recognised in various use of unlike liturgies.
In our context, nosotros accept elected to use the eucharistic prayer from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, which has no epiclesis. Every bit a congregation that identifies itself as Protestant and evangelical, this was a welcome change, a change that places our congregation with the majority of Anglican Communion…
The issue is not one of liturgy, but doctrine. Because we do not have an agreed upon doctrine, we have varied liturgical practices in our church. The Manufactures of Religion relegated to "Historical Documents" still have a place in articulating Anglican doctrine. That being the example, it seems (in the words of Dean Michell) that nearly every Episcopal ordinand must have "their fingers crossed" when the give-and-takedoctrine is uttered in the ordination service.
What if doctrine and liturgy are in conflict, as they are in our church building? What is the authority that nosotros appeal to? Bishops? Canons? Convention resolutions? The Bible?
Diversity in liturgy is the reality of our Anglican Communion. One need but expect at the rest of the Communion to run into that liturgical conformity emanates just from North America. The Church of England has a wide range of liturgical diversity on Sunday mornings. From Pusey Business firm to All Souls, Langham Place, to Westminster Abbey to Southwark Cathedral, yous volition see it all. And, nearly likely, you will find the 1662 Book of Common Prayer Holy Communion service beingness used only at 7:30 a.m., if at all.
I was invited to contribute a response from the perspective of the Church of England, and this is what I offered.
What do you do with a diverse church which is supposed to accept Common Prayer? Is it amend to change the Prayer to become as various as the reality on the ground, or should nosotros try and police force the reality in society to make information technology conform to the commonality of the forms of prayer? Or is at that place a third possibility?
Andrew Pearson is right to observe not just the diversity of liturgical do in the Anglican Communion but too the diversity in the Church of England itself. I am quite convinced that the ecumenical challenge we face hither is less to do with our relations with other churches, and more to practice with our relationships with one another. At that place is, arguably, more diversity in the C of E than whatsoever other member of the Communion, with influences non only from both the Oxford Movement and radical liberalism from the by, simply also from the New Calvinism and the Vineyard movement in more recent years. It would be incommunicable to enforce precise uniformity of practice beyond these theological traditions in the Church, but abandoning the idea of a grade of common prayer would be even more than disastrous. The dissimilar elements would spin off in their ain management without any hope of shared commitments.
And those shared commitments do exist and do indeed bear fruit. In examining i of the theological colleges, I take just read about a fresh expression of church, influenced by Vineyard, animate new life into a struggling church from the Oxford Motion tradition. And depression church building student ministries are realising the attraction to young people of ritual and liturgy in providing stability and sanctuary in a changing world. Unless you have Common Prayer, you do non have a footing for conversation. Our liturgy (forth with our canons) actually specifies what we believe, and forms the basis for discussion about both diversity and change. At that place is a common delivery even if this does non lead to uniformity of do.
I am not convinced that Common Worship offered the best direction for this. Nosotros now have about a million dissimilar texts to which we are supposed to adhere without difference; it would take been a better strategy to offer a smaller number of cadre texts which are used with best-selling flexibility, which is what happens in practice. But without a common liturgical middle, nosotros take no shared signal of reference in discussing our points of difference.
There is, of course, a price to pay for this style of living together in the process of revision of common prayer. For us, information technology hijacked what was supposed to be a Decade of Evangelism and replaced it with a Decade of Liturgical Revision. Some of the conversation was painful as nosotros engaged with a wide range of concerns. And we insisted on continuity, for the sake of both historical integrity and ecclesial unity: all modern liturgy is strictly an alternative to the 1662 BCP which remains our official liturgy. And it ways that every tradition in the church has to accept seriously the process of revision and be fully involved to exist fully represented.
Just despite the challenges, nosotros recall this has been a price worth paying to express our shared behavior in common prayer.
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