If you read this magazine regularly, you will know that the Church of England has introduced a new service book, called Common Worship. It came into use in December last year. Because of David's departure and Richard's arrival, we don't have to start using it at once. One of the features of Common Worship is the great variety of prayers and forms of service which it offers.
Variety is something Anglicans have only recently learned to value. Our pews at St Ursula's still contain the Book of Common Prayer, dating from 1662. This prayer book is almost the same as the book written by Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury in 1549 (and revised in 1552). The books were authorized by the English Parliament. The law authorizing them was called the Act of Uniformity. The idea was that there should be one form of service, used everywhere in England and by everyone, every Sunday - and indeed every day.
Uniformity meant that there was no unprepared, extempore prayer. In contrast to many of the other Reformation traditions, the Church of England relied on fixed forms of wording - and thanks to Cranmer's genius with language, the liturgy proclaimed the gospel not only through what the congregation did, but through what they said.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, people questioned whether a book first written 400 years previously was suitable for people who were no longer face to face with the issues of the Reformation, and no longer spoke the same language as Shakespeare. In 1906 a Royal Commission looked at the question of revision, and the church itself produced a revised Book of Common Prayer, with some freedom to omit or change the order of prayers. Parliament in 1927 refused to authorize it (but the church published it the following year, and many people used it!)
The debate at the time awakened a real interest in liturgy - what we do when we come to church. In 1958, the Lambeth Conference started a process of liturgical reform, and experimental forms of service came into use - we still have copies of the so-called Series 3 services, produced in 1971, and our blue service book is taken from the result of these experiments, the Alternative Service Book 1980. 1980 was part of the title, intentionally, and it was stressed that it was a temporary alternative, to be reconsidered after twenty years.
Meanwhile the Roman Catholic church had woken up to what we Anglicans were doing, and, spurred on by their Dutch members (the Netherlands are full of radical thinkers!), and by the Swiss theologian, Hans Küng, had set up their own commission for liturgical reform in 1963 as part of the Second Vatican Council's deliberations. And the Protestant churches started taking a new interest in liturgy, too. The Roman Catholics produced a new service book in 1970, and its revisions in 1975 and 2000 are a sign that all the churches are moving closer together in our vision of how we worship.
One feature of all these modern revisions is the provision for different prayers at the Eucharist. Series 3 offered two, the Alternative Service Book, like the Roman missal, offered four. Common Worship offers eight.
What is new is not always good. Many people felt the services produced in the seventies were lacking in spiritual depth. And now we are using a selection of the new services, to see what you think. The most unfamiliar is marked Prayer H. It has been described as a wonderful participation of the whole community in the Eucharist, it has been described as a return to the way the first Christians would have worshipped, and it has been described as a service written for those in a hurry to catch a bus.
Heaven is unlikely to be uniform. Different people have different needs and are moved by different things. Worship is a foretaste of heaven. We seriously want to know your thoughts on our new services, so that as a church we can move closer to heaven in our worship and in our lives. Nothing is fixed, so let us know your opinions - tell Richard, or Linda, or the wardens, or any council member. For worship is something that in heaven we shall all be offering together.
HD