Old Things Made New Chapter Two

CHAPTER 2 WORSHIP IN THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH Christians accustomed to more reformed Protestant denominations are often a bit bewildered upon straying into an Episcopal worship service, even a wedding or a funeral. They may recognize few if any hymns. They have difficulty with the “Episcopal aerobics” of standing, kneeling, and sitting. Our book juggling, with prayer book, hymnal, and a sheaf of bulletin pages with inserts, also challenges Protestants, who aren’t accustomed to working so hard in worship. “I don’t see how anyone could get a nap in your church,” lamented one. (Some people do manage.) In recent years, a good deal of diversity has crept into Episcopal worship. You might find anything from a medieval-style, Pontifical high mass in a stone Gothic church with magnificent stained glass windows and mighty pipe organ, to simple, vestment-less celebration in a store-front, with guitar-led, renewal-style singing. We probably should expect even more such variety in the decade or so to come. Even so, we would hope that in any Episcopal church, every visitor would notice several characteristics of Anglican worship that would be identifying markers of our worship anywhere in the world. When the liturgy is done properly, all of these elements should be clearly in place. Use of the Book of Common Prayer, or other approved forms (we have some supplemental liturgies now), means that our worship text is relatively uniform, predictable, and of high quality. Though we now have multiple choices for worship forms, and the prayer books of other national churches vary in details, they are all similar and contain the same elements. This means that Anglicans the world over pray together in pretty much the same way—in common prayer. It also means that we are not at the mercy of our clergy to determine what we pray for and how we pray. And it means that our prayers are composed as carefully and as beautifully as our best writers know how. Anglican worship is orderly. Some would say “formal,” but that need not mean stuffy, as in a stilted dinner party; rather we mean that things happen in a particular order and at an appointed time. The prayer book tradition is biblically centered. Whereas in some Protestant services, the sermon text would be the only scripture read, in our liturgical tradition, it is customary to read an Old Testament lesson, an Epistle reading, and a Gospel passage, with at least one Psalm—in a planned cycle, so that most of the scripture is read in church during a three-year period. For celebrating Eucharist at any