Beyond Common Worship

Anglican Identity and Liturgical Diversity

Mark Earey

• Publisher: SCM Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780334047391
• eBook ISBN: 9780334052012
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Rituals & Practice

The introduction of Common Worship services in the Church of England has gone remarkably smoothly, considering the immensity of the task. But despite its overall success, the sheer variety of material, coupled with the complex rules about what is and is not allowed, have left some parishes, clergy and Readers wondering if this is really the best way to produce good worship.

1 What is the Problem?

What’s wrong with Common Worship? In one sense, nothing. Common Worship has been a great success at fostering both variety and flexibility in Church of England worship. Of course, there are some things that can be improved about the texts, and that is an ongoing project. The production of new Eucharistic Prayers for use with children is one example of this; the current work to produce alternative texts for some parts of the initiation services is another. The fact that after the Common Worship Collects were agreed and published, a further set of additional Collects were deemed to be necessary is a third.

However, it is not the texts of Common Worship that this book is about, and I want to be clear that overall I think CW has been a great gain for the Church of England. It may not be perfect, but I think it has been the best it could have been, given the context in which it has been developed and has to work.

I am looking ‘beyond Common Worship’ not in the sense of ‘What new services or resources do we need next?’, but in the sense of ‘What has the CW approach done to our worship, and what is it doing to it now?’ Most importantly, I want to ask what that approach will do to worship in the future, especially in an era of missional thinking, fresh expressions of church, new monasticism, pioneering approaches, artistic creativity, so-called ‘alt.worship’ and so on.

In this book, then, I am using CW to stand for the whole ‘project’ of liturgical revision and the production of texts which are alternative to The Book of Common Prayer (BCP), a project which has been active since the mid-1960s and had been contemplated for even longer. In some ways, to call this a CW approach is misleading, because CW is simply the inheritor, or latest incarnation, of this post-1960s project. This book could have been called Beyond Alternative Services, because what I am questioning is the particular way the Church of England, since 1965, has held the balance between local decision-making and shared (or ‘common’) forms of worship.

This will involve us considering what makes worship truly ‘Anglican’ and how we can ensure good decisions at local level. It is about the tension between common forms and local needs, between a catholic approach (in the sense of connected with the wider Church, and transcending local cultures) and an inculturated approach, which takes those cultures not only seriously, but as a key starting point in understanding what will make ‘good’ worship.

A hybrid liturgy?

The desire both to provide variety and flexibility and to preserve some commonality has produced a hybrid liturgy which is neither common enough for some, nor flexible enough for others. Some of this problem is as much about changes in the Church more widely as it is about the liturgy itself.

To use a computer analogy, Common Worship has ended up feeling like a sophisticated piece of software being run on a computer whose basic operating system is now many years out of date and was built for running very different programs. The operating system has been updated and ‘patched’, and there are various ‘work arounds’ to help people to do what they want or need the software to do, but the result feels clunky and difficult, and the whole thing frequently crashes, being unable to do what is being asked of it.

The Church of England’s worship ‘operating system’ consists of its canon law. It was designed for a situation in which there was one service book – The Book of Common Prayer. It is designed to protect and preserve that prayer book, but has been ‘patched’ by the Prayer Book (Alternative and Other Services) Measure 1965 and the later Worship and Doctrine Measure of 1974 to allow for authorized alternatives to be used alongside it. Those ‘patches’ have been constantly updated to try to provide ways of allowing greater flexibility, such as the production of ‘commended’ services to use alongside authorized alternatives, and the provision of authorized outline structures to use alongside fully worked-out orders of service. The result is that you can ‘work around’ the operating system, but the ways of doing this are not always (indeed, are rarely) intuitive to users.

What is needed is a new streamlined operating system, designed to allow the software to work at its most efficient. The software program needs to be able to ‘just work’, rather than drawing time, energy and attention to itself.

What this book offers is not ideas about new ‘software’ to supersede Common Worship, but a new operating system – that is, a new way of structuring the Church of England’s way of allowing for flexibility while also keeping a sense of Anglican commonality. In order to do this, we will first look at some of the problems or difficulties raised by users of Common Worship in the hope that this will help us to see the potential structural solutions.

Why is it all so complicated?

In 2011 I wrote a book called Finding Your Way Around Common Worship: A Simple Guide.1 It was designed not to reflect on Common Worship, but to help people to use it. The title tells you everything. It is only things that are not simple that need simple guides to help people to use them. The need for a book like that raises an important question about Common Worship. The tragedy is that Common Worship has become for many a byword for confusion, complication and complexity. Here is an example:

[St Columba’s Retreat Centre, Woking] have a sophisticated new toaster which has to be mastered if you want breakfast. Beside it is a placard with operating instructions as complicated as the preface to the Common Worship Lectionary.2

When Common Worship has begun to be used as a yardstick for complexity, we should hear alarm bells.

Case Study

Confusion about Daily Prayer

The other day I had a conversation with an ordinand who was struggling with Common Worship and the rules for a weekday service of Morning Prayer. She was aware of Common Worship: Daily Prayer, but finding it hard to work out how to discover what the Collect, psalm and readings were and how to find the right form of the service for the date she was due to be leading. I showed her how to find these things and pointed her to A Service of the Word and the requirements it sets out for what has to be included.

At the end of an hour’s conversation, she said: ‘It all seems so exclusive, as if you have to belong to some elite club to be able to have the secret key to unlock this stuff.’

Was she right? Is this stuff ‘secret knowledge’ or just professional knowledge? Are these simply the tools of the job? And if they are tools for the professional, does her experience still suggest that worship leading is not for amateurs?

How has a Church which says liturgy is so important ended up in this situation? The answer itself is complicated. Partly it is simply about the sheer amount of material and the number of volumes – the more rich you make the choices the more complex it starts to look. The Alternative Service Book 1980 (ASB) may have been a big step for the Church of England, but it was still just one book, like the Prayer Book. It was certainly a thicker book, but in essence everything was in it – not just resources for Sunday worship but also funerals, marriage, baptism, confirmation and so on.

However, it was not long before this big but unitary book was being supplemented. The cry went up, not just from liturgists, but from those in ordinary churches and chaplaincy contexts for more material, and especially material which brought more variety. The model of ‘one size fits all’ was already beginning to feel outdated. In particular, two sorts of variety were sought – seasonal variety and variety of provision for different contexts. Almost as soon as the ASB was published there followed a series of further materials, some official, some unofficial, but all responding to the felt need for more. For example, within 15 years of the ASB the following had appeared:

• First off the mark was the booklet Ministry to the Sick in 1983, which reflected a recognition that the ASB did not make sufficient provision for the liturgical ministry of healing. It included forms of service for Holy Communion (or the distribution of Communion) following both Rite A and Rite B for use in homes or hospitals (‘in the presence of the sick’ as it rather prosaically called it), forms for prayer with laying on of hands and anointing, a Commendation at the Time of Death, and Prayers for Use with the Sick.
• Lent, Holy Week, Easter, which came out as a report in 1984 and was published for liturgical use in 1986, proved to be the first of a series of seasonal resource volumes.
• Promise of His Glory followed in 1991, providing seasonal resources for Advent to Epiphany.
• Enriching the Christian Year provided further resources in 1993. It filled in some of the gaps, particularly for saints’ days and other festivals and also for ‘topics’ such as ‘Creation’ and ‘Justice and Peace’. Unlike the other two seasonal volumes, it was not ‘commended’ by the House of Bishops, but was produced by members of the Liturgical Commission and so came with an aura of officialdom about it.
• The Liturgical Commission report Making Women Visible came out as a Gene...

Table of contents

• Beyond Common Worship
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations Used in this Book
• Introduction
• 1 What is the Problem?
• 2 Some Possible Solutions
• 3 A New Approach and a Different Solution
• 4 What Makes Worship ‘Anglican’?
• 5 Some Implications of a Centred-Set Approach
• 6 Conclusion
• Appendix 1 Some Examples of Worship Guidelines
• Appendix 2 Some Sample Canons, Applying the New Approach
• Select Bibliography