We have started to mark the second Sunday of each month by holding a "Service of the Word". Those of you who come from other traditions may wonder what the difference is between this and a "normal" service. If you come from the Anglican tradition, you may wonder what this strange creature is that has come to occupy a quarter of our main service schedule.
We only have the roughest of ideas about how the Church worshipped in New Testament times. Meetings centred around a meal, the commemoration of the Last Supper. They were enriched with prayers, songs, and at times with readings, with prophecies and explanations. Over the next four hundred years, this worship developed into a set of forms that we would recognize as similar to our own Eucharist today.
"There was never any thing by the wit of man so well devised, or so sure established, which in continuance of time hath not been corrupted," wrote Thomas Cranmer in the preface to the 1549 Prayer Book (moved in 1662 and renamed "Concerning the Service of the Church"). This happened with church services. The prayers became formalized, people stopped joining in the communion meal, and nobody made any attempt to rewrite the service. Only the activities and rituals, and the sermon (if there was one) were comprehensible and in a language that normal people could understand.
Over the centuries, other services grew up. Monasteries developed services of prayers, readings, songs and psalms, to use every three hours throughout the day. There were services for special occasions, and litanies of prayers to ward off plague, war or other disasters.
At the Reformation, there was great debate about what form worship should take. Some leaders, like John Knox in Geneva, wanted to make a clean sweep - his "Book of Common Order" offered few "set services", and made the main Sunday assembly an occasion for reading and explaining scripture, confessing sins, a psalm "in a plain tune", a sermon, a long intercessory prayer, a second psalm and a blessing.
The Church of England tried to "keep the mean between the two extremes" (that's from the 1662 preface!), and created services which were developed from the monastic offices (our present Morning and Evening Prayer) and from the western eucharistic service.
It took four hundred years to realize that Morning and Evening Prayer, two services based on the prayers of monks and developed for daily use by English clergy, did not fit all the needs of people coming to church on Sundays. Encouraged by the success of some of the Free Churches, some clergy experimented with freer forms, but the Book of Common Prayer was a straitjacket, and the Alternative Service Book introduced in 1980 did nothing to change things.
People continued to experiment, though, and in 1989 the Liturgical Commission published a book called Patterns for Worship, which was a resource book of additional and alternative material which could be used in services. And then in 1993, General Synod authorized A Service of the Word, which now has a place in the new book of Common Worship.
A Service of the Word is unusual because there are hardly any set words, just a list of eleven parts. The service starts with a greeting, possibly with prayers of penitence, possibly with a hymn, song or set of responses, and with the day's prayer, the Collect. After this preparation, the Liturgy of the Word follows, with a Bible reading or readings, a psalm or scriptural song, a sermon and a creed or statement of faith. Prayers of intercession and thanksgiving come next, and the Lord's Prayer. The service can incorporate a celebration of Holy Communion at this point. The service concludes with "a blessing, dismissal or other liturgical ending."
From this, it is clear that the format is very free. There are brief notes which reinforce this freedom. The notes draw attention to the possible use of periods of silence, and emphasize that a "reading" may be dramatized, sung or read responsively. And that a sermon may include the use of drama, interviews, discussion and audio-visual presentations, and may come in several parts, interspersed with hymns or other parts of the service.
With all this freedom, there is room to find something which meets our own needs here at St Ursula's. But knowing if we have done so requires your participation too, telling those who lead the worship what parts you are enthusiastic about, and those which leave you cold. For the aim of the service, like the aim of all worship, is to draw us all closer to God and to the heavenly worship of the angels.
HD