Liturgy on the Edge

Pastoral and attractional worship

Samuel Wells

• Publisher: Canterbury Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781786220394
• eBook ISBN: 9781786220417
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Rituals & Practice

This practical companion to creating pastoral liturgies arises from the vibrant ministry of St Martin-in-the-Fields and is designed to aid local ministry teams in devising forms of worship outside and beyond the scope of authorised church liturgy, yet in sympathy with its purposes and structures. It includes outline liturgies for: • regular pastoral services, such as an informal Eucharist, worship for small groups or for a church away-day, a dementia-friendly service, a healing service, interfaith ceremonies. • acute pastoral needs, such as services for communities affected by local tragedy, those experiencing loss through violence. • outreach services in the open air or welcoming people into sacred space.• special services though the year for Homelessness Sunday, Prisoners Week, Holy Week, Harvest, Remembrance, a community carol service and more. Each section is introduced with a reflection on theory and practice, and each item has a commentary on theological, liturgical and pastoral choices made with the aim of enabling practitioners to adapt and create liturgies for their own contexts.

1. On the Edge of Faith: Outreach Services

Introduction

We can talk about three broad kinds of conventional evangelism: (1) where the church wants to share something that the culture more generally doesn’t think it wants or needs, but the church seeks to offer it in an attractive manner anyway; (2) where the church has something that a particular group knows it wants or needs but is not used to finding in the conventional patterns, practices and programmes of the church; (3) where the church observes something people clearly want or need and identifies ways to make that thing available but gently and respectfully seeks to offer a great deal more besides. The examples in this chapter fall into the second and third categories.

In the second category we find Start:Stop, which perceives that many people living pressured lives and working in intense environments long for a moment of peace, beauty and reflection. Such people invariably only have a few minutes to set aside, so Start:Stop seeks to offer them something deep and helpful – something that some find in a podcast listened to on bus or tube, but is so much more significant when experienced live and tangibly. In similar vein we find Sacred Space, which serves those who have a longer period of reflective time once or twice a month, but who want to be given the opportunity to rest in their own contemplation rather than have their prayer structured by conventional liturgical expectations. Likewise here we explore the ministry of healing, conceived as an outreach event appealing to people who really want help and prayer and identify with the words of Romans 8.26: ‘Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.’ Such people often don’t want the baggage of church that comes with such prayer, so here we suggest a service that gives them what they know they need.

In the third category we present Great Sacred Music, a hugely successful programme running since 2013, which starts with people’s enjoyment of popular classical music but gives them reasons for the joy they find there – thus achieving as much music as a concert but as much theological reflection as a crafted sermon, yet all in a playful and unthreatening spirit. And there is an account of our midweek informal evening Eucharist, which attracts those who are drawn to a sacramental life but want to participate directly in liturgy and feel less like spectators.

Great Sacred Music

Samuel Wells

I lived for seven years in North Carolina, a part of the USA comparatively well served for public broadcasting. North Carolina has a classical station, not so different from the UK’s Classic FM, and on a Sunday, this being the American South, a good deal of airtime reflects the listeners’ devotional, largely Christian, interests. As I would step out of the shower on a Sunday morning I would hear a trailer for the 8–10 a.m. programme. It would begin, ingenuously, ‘Did you know that a great deal of the classical music that we enjoy has religious origins …?’ – as if it had happened upon a remarkable, profound and little-known truth. I never took the trailer seriously. But I never forgot it.

I became vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields in 2012. Besides engaging with homelessness and destitution, what St Martin’s is most famous for is classical music. St Martin’s, besides being the busiest choral and orchestral concert venue in the country, is the only major classical music home that makes a commercial profit, rather than relying on grant support. It successfully offers popular revenue-generating concerts alongside more specialist aspirational events. When I joined St Martin’s, two things about this drew my attention. One was that all the best-attended concerts were franchised to external promoters: this meant the principal creative live interface between the public and St Martin’s was one in which St Martin’s congregation, clergy and staff were communicating little or nothing about their own convictions and vision of the world. The concert programme was seen largely, though not wholly, as a form of income generation; no time was being spent nurturing and highlighting our own professional performers – leaving aside the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, an entirely separate but cordially related organization. The other concern was that there was no cross-fertilization between the public-facing concert programme and the congregation-facing liturgical programme. They were run by different people and happened at different times.

Thus in 2013 we combined the concert and liturgical music departments and sought to strengthen both the liturgical and the performance programmes by integrating them. What St Martin’s was trying to do was to identify its classical music more closely with its core identity as an agent of renewal in church, world and Kingdom. Given it was famous for classical music, it wanted to offer clearer messages through that fame that spoke of the mission of the whole organization.

The intention has been to retain the balance between worship and performance, professional and voluntary, aspirational and popular, Christian and people of all traditions, entertainment and challenge, pastoral and prophetic. The first result of this was the idea of creating a hybrid event that took the intensity and spoken content of a worship service and blended it with the accessibility and popular appeal of a classical concert. And this was the moment when I recalled that unforgettable trailer from the North Carolina classical music radio station. And so Great Sacred Music was born.

What we have noticed is that many concert-goers see classical music as a significant aspect of their spiritual quest, and/or eagerly wish to discover more about the origin of much classical music in its theological themes and commitments. Thus we have begun to explore ways in which clergy and musicians can present events that provide both musical delight and enriching commentary on the intent and texture of anthems and hymns. These ‘crossover’ events, which are both concerts and worship services, and at the same time neither of the above, are developing a large and enthusiastic following. One visitor, on departing from Great Sacred Music, and seeing two or three hundred people gathered, said, referring to the internationally known and hugely influential introduction to the faith run by the charismatic West London Anglican church, Holy Trinity Brompton, ‘This is your Alpha course.’

Since 2013 Great Sacred Music has taken place at St Martin-in-the-Fields every Thursday between 1 and 1.35 p.m., usually led by me and performed by the St Martin’s Voices conducted by Andrew Earis. It follows a regular pattern: it begins with an anthem; then comes a two-minute introduction followed by a hymn; then a commentary followed by two anthems, and another commentary followed by one or two anthems; then a short introduction to the second hymn; finally, there are advertisements to other parts of the church’s programme and a short concluding word followed by a final anthem. In between I offer theological, historical and anecdotal commentary on the music, its origins, references and significance. We work hard to ensure it’s not an act of worship in any conventional sense: there are no prayers, the hymns are sung seated, God is spoken about but not spoken to, there are no vestments or processions, there is no especial air of reverence. But it still feels different to a concert – not just because there are four or five interruptions to the music, each with three or four minutes of spoken words, but because those words are designed to highlight the dimensions of the notes and lyrics that have existential significance; some people report having an experience of worship, others sense they are involved in an educational programme, others again regard it as just a more engaging form of concert. One regular attender, noting the humour, the critical engagement with faith, and the playful storytelling, said, ‘You have introduced me to a more generous form of Christianity.’ What’s happening is that churchgoers who want to discover the real significance of the music they know mingle with music-lovers who are intrigued by the theological approach that takes their diverse standpoints of faith, other faith or no faith seriously.

The tendency in the classical music world is either to scorn Classic FM as ‘Radio 3 lite’ or slyly to admire it for making classical music mainstream and profitable. Our approach is not only to see the commercial potential of Classic FM and what it represents, but to see it as indicating a deeper search for meaning, understanding and depth, which St Martin’s is well placed to feed and reward. The secret is not to look for a particular outcome, but to ensure every gathering is stylish, professional, light-hearted, probing, surprising, informative and fun. There are usually salacious details about the composers’ real lives, a provocative observation about why a hymn, though popular, is problematic, and a pause to dwell on a sublime turn of word or tune and what makes it so special.

Why are people, who in many cases know very little about composition or theology, nonetheless so often moved by classical music that, in the words of that Carolinian trailer, ‘has religious origins’? The answer, we have come to believe, is that they are deeply searching for meaning and truth, and, through disillusionment or habit, have in many cases lost the will or desire to seek a fulfilment of that quest in institutionally shaped conventional religion – yet may be drawn to such depths by music that opens doors, asks questions and addresses longings. All Great Sacred Music does is to take that quest seriously and point out the ways that composers of words and tunes were asking similar questions and addressing comparable yearnings.

As Great Sacred Music has become popular, we have sought to adapt it to different settings. One that has proved successful is an evening concert series we call ‘Great Sacred Choral Classics’. This is an hour-long format without hymns that takes a theme or composer and offers around 38 minutes of music and 22 minutes of speech. That amount of speech gives ample opportunity to develop a theme in some depth. Thus, for Mozart’s Requiem, familiar choral pieces were interspersed with five-minute addresses on Death, Heaven, Hell and Purgatory. For Haydn’s Creation a similar format allowed for addresses on Haydn, creation, science and ecology. For ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’ there were addresses on Bach, Jesus, joy and desire.

Another successful spin-off we call ‘Making My Heart Sing’. This is a blend of the BBC Radio 4 classics Desert Island Discs and With Great Pleasure. A celebrity is invited to choose around eight favourite choral pieces and then is interviewed in a conversation that explores their life and convictions about faith while linking together the eight choral pieces, each of which is performed live. Again it lasts one hour.

Example outline – International Women’s Day

Anthem 1: O virtus Sapientiae (Hildegard von Bingen)

Welcome and brief remarks about:

• Hildegard of Bingen
• International Women’s Day
• three kinds of feminism found within the Church and theological thinking
• Bernadette Farrell, author of the first hymn

(choir standing, everyone else seated)

Hymn 1: ‘O God you search me and you know me’

Brief remarks (largely about the connection between Anglo-Catholicism and the women’s suffrage movement, as featured in anthem 3)

Anthem 2: Jesus Christ the Apple Tree (Elisabeth Poston)

Anthem 3: Sanctus from Mass in D (Ethel Smyth)

Brief remarks (about Edith Cavell’s faith and life)

Anthem 4: Standing as I do before God (Cecilia McDowell)

Brief remarks (about Irish Anglo-Catholic hymn-writer and social activist Cecil Frances Alexander)

Hymn 2: ‘All things bright and beautiful’

Closing remarks and announcements (concerning Amy Grant, known as the Queen of Christian Pop)

Anthem 5: Thy Word (Amy Grant)

(35 minutes in total)

Start:Stop

Jonathan Evens

St Stephen Walbr...

Table of contents

• Copyright information
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. On the Edge of Faith: Outreach Services
• Great Sacred Music
• Start:Stop
• Sacred Space
• Prayer for Healing and Laying-on of Hands
• Informal Eucharist
• 2. On the Edge of Life: Acute Pastoral Services
• Those Affected by Homicide
• Those Affected by Suicide
• Those who have Died Homeless
• Those who are Missing
• Where Love and Sorrow Meet
• 3. On the Edge of the Year: Annual Special Services
• Community Carol Service
• Christmas Crib Service
• Palm Sunday
• St Luke’s Day
• Patronal Festival
• 4. On the Edge of the World: Broadcasting
• Broadcasting
• Webcasting
• Podcasting
• 5. Liturgy on the Edge
• How to Welcome
• How to Confess Sin
• How to Sing
• How to Intercede
• How to Celebrate Gifts
• How to Give Thanks
• How to Give Notices
• How to Send Out