If this is true, we have lost something from our worship, for worship must cane fran the heart, and if our hearts are not in tune with our minds, we are like those who "honour God with their lips, but their heart is far away". And certainly there are intangible factors which help us to feel closer to God in our worship: the cadence of the words a familiar tune, an old church building where you can almost feel the company of the people who have worshipped there through the ages. Is the new service book a help with this or a hindrance?
The answer is surely that it can be either, or both. Partly it depends on what we want it to be. Using new words to express old thoughts can be a disturbing experience, but it can also be enlightening, and can focus our minds on what we actually want and need to say.
Sometimes there seems to be something missing in the new words. Indeed, our only serious problem with the music is in the last line of the doxology after the psalms and canticles, where the words "and ever shall be, world without end" have been replaced by the much shorter "and shall be for ever". For me, "world without end" conjured up a powerful image of the timelessness of God's threefold majesty - but does this meaning cane fran the words themselves? Maybe not, and maybe to sane people the words themselves are meaningless.
In other places we have certainly gained in clarity. Some of the expressions in the old 1662 Prayer Book were very archaic. The Lord's Prayer ("which art in Heaven") and the third collect at Morning Prayer ("surely trusting in thy defence") are now in simpler English.
In several cases, too, the meaning of the Psalms has been made much clearer by a more faithful translation of the original text. The Psalms in the Prayer Book were adapted fran a very old translation of the Bible - older than the 1611 Authorized, or King James, version, and made at a time when Hebrew scholarship was in its infancy. The new translation gets the meaning right. Even if "Let us shout in triumph to the rock of our salvation" does not seem much of an improvement on "Let us heartily rejoice in the strength of our salvation", it is at least closer to what the Psalmist intended. We used to "show ourselves glad in him with psalms", whatever that meant. Now we "cry out joyfully to him", and intelligibly too.
So let us see if the new words become a part of our approach to God. And let us remember that words are only an aid to worship: in truth, it is not the quality of the words that reach up to heaven, but the quality of the worship.
HD