By Adrian Worsfold

On Friday 7 March, the small market town of Barton-upon-Humber had a special event. Its now-disused, once Anglican, church was used again, on a one-off basis, to host a Requiem Eucharist for the return (as promised thirty years back) of many human bones dug up for research. They had come back, with skulls downstairs and the rest upstairs, all in individual boxes, resting in an ossuary made where the organ used to be and accessed from where the vestry used to be. The church is historic and has origins in the Anglo-Saxon period, the time when the incoming population that was to become English removed the population that was Celtic, the Celts (crudely speaking) moving to Wales and Cornwall and Cumbria - out of the way.

Until the 1970s the Barton-upon-Humber Anglican congregation oscillated between St Mary's and St Peter's, these two churches being quite close together. Then St Mary's was chosen for all the worship, the organ removed from St Peter's and placed in St. Mary's. English Heritage took over St Peter's and it is now, in effect, a museum to religion and death.

You can read the service on my website, in the Spiritual Area at Anglican Worship, and you can access via my weblog as well. The service was unique, with special permission to use the first English Prayer Book of 1549, but refused for the Eucharist itself, which came from 1662. All of the Bible readings came from 1611, the Authorised Version. All the music was along the lines of plainsong. The altar table used was at the wrong end for a change, the end it would have been at originally; however, prayers to the dead were said near to the bones at the eastern end, and that final altar table received its share of incense too.

There was wide media coverage, and a local arts centre, itself a museum to ropemaking, videotaped the whole service. So a reasonable number of people turned out to the service, and the usual rules were applied to who could communicate (basically of any mainstream Church - in practice, personal conscience).

Three clerics delivered the words of the service in the most professional manner, as did the choir, and all others involved, and the whole entity was smooth. The language was long and involved, but it worked and was, to my mind, more spiritual than Common Worship (2000), which is used for all but Evensongs for liturgical services at St Mary's.

Yet... Despite the fact that it was this full experience, and as good a worship as you could give and receive, and was intended to be (and indeed was) living, it struck me that it was, now, an entirely self-contained museum. It was internally consistent, but was its own self-contained and complete bubble.

I don't dislike Common Worship (2000), the liturgy for now, and St Mary's is able to do a great deal with it. The church has the human resources available to produce high quality worship. Not everywhere can these days - far from it. Yet whilst the language in Common Worship has been brought up to date, it still represents a feudal and agricultural world of some other time. Its thought forms are not updated at all. Indeed because the language is modern, but its world is not, it kind of lives in a limbo of no-time. So whereas the service of 1549, 1611 and 1662 was consistent in itself, the service via Common Worship is a bit of a dog's breakfast of form and meaning.

I came to the view some time back that there probably is no solution to this. I used to be Unitarian and wrote much of my own worship - and I presented worship too. Since being Anglican I have become a participant but rarely design or present anything (I have, but very occasionally). Even in a Unitarian setting, where you could start with a blank sheet, religion was constructed from the objects of glass cases in a museum. All the words with resonances gain a legitimacy and authority from the past. Sociologists call it invented tradition: just like an Anglo Catholicism that gives the impression it has been around forever when in fact it appeared in Victorian times because it wanted to distance itself from the State and the secular thought-world. Another example is neo-Paganism, which even more so reinvents the past as a way of creating a religion for feminism and the symbolic in an age of networks and relative freedom against hierarchy. Much of British royalty is simply a Victorian invention of pageantry that gave it a renewed authority.

Another example was being told that this worship was a thousand years old, and that we would see nothing like it for another thousand years. Well of course it was not a thousand years old, and it was constructed, and its effect was in the present. Who knows what the bones thought of the Lord's Prayer read in Anglo-Saxon and in Latin. The living presumably experienced it not unlike the monoglot English people in Cornwall when the Lord's Prayer was read in Cornish at a service attended by the Archbishop of Canterbury some years back.

Somehow, liturgy is condemned to be out of date, old, and of a mythic past. Out of this comes a sense of transcendence, a mystical, ineffable, sense of floating gift, by which we can come together more and have a new attitude in one's step and underline the ethical way we should reach out to one another.

One of the difficulties in Anglicanism today is that for many this simply is not good enough. It is not good enough to recreate and indulge to release a sense of transcendence. Like early scientism, it all has to be believed as true. The Archbishop of Canterbury in his Advent Letter last year told us there is but one way to read the Bible according to how some Anglican Churches expect of all others - meaning the demands of the most literalist and magic-bound. There is this drive for selective literalism, signs and wonders and all sorts of godly interventions out of the sky. Others, for whom the world is a little more ordinary and regular, are accused of inventing a virtually new religion, as stated by the Rt. Rev. Michael Nazir-Ali, Bishop of Rochester (England) last year.

I've come to the conclusion that I'm probably guilty of this, though many in leadership seem terribly constrained and display their obedience of the boundaries. Many people now on both sides of the pond seem to be frightened. But I don't care. The Sunday following the service to mark the return of the bones was also, for us, a Sunday of readings about bones putting on skin and living, which is ridiculous as any sort of biology or history, and about a person, still bound up, who presumably woke up to the light of a removed stone and waddled his way out of his tomb entrance before others took away all the bindings, which is equally ridiculous to any biology or history and produced - in my head at least - a bizarre imagery. To me this is theological writing of an embellishment linking Jesus's ministry to a central resurrection belief.

I spoke to a Barton lass (all her life in the town), who I've known since 1994, on the afternoon of the big Friday Requiem event. Like so many, she dismissed religion and she also has little time for history. That's why only a reasonable crowd was there. The town did not descend on the event. Somehow religion functions by suggesting a mythic past, using the means of a past world's thought processes, to produce a sense of transcendence and ethics that we can but puzzle about. Most people these days now find (or do not find) their ethics directly, but I suppose I am an odd one out who in my virtual religion prefers to draw on the artistic, the shapely and the reflective in spending a few moments thinking about past worlds and this world in which I live (for a short time) and wondering how I should be in the company of others.

Adrian Worsfold (Pluralist), has a doctorate in sociology and a masters degree in contemporary theology. He lives near Hull, in northeast England and keeps the blog Pluralist Speaks.

By Melody Shobe

There is no question about it; the Episcopal Church has a “lingo.” We have almost as many acronyms as the United States government, from LEM (Lay Eucharistic Minister) to EYC (Episcopal Youth Community). We like to give perfectly ordinary things new and complicated names. The church’s lobby becomes the “narthex.” An ordinary plate, when it is put on the altar, becomes a “paten.” And, let’s be honest, our liturgy has the tendency to get fairly wordy. I doubt that most college graduates could explicate the phrase from our Eucharistic liturgy “…who made there, by his one oblation of himself once offered, a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world…” I have trouble on Sundays reading it aloud without garbling the words, let alone attempting to break apart the syntax and meaning. In fact, we have so many special words and terms that Don Armentrout and Robert Slocum have published a 578-page book of them: An Episcopal Dictionary of the Church, A User Friendly Reference for Episcopalians.

There is a part of me that worries about the impact of all of these words and terms on our identity as a church. Is it helpful to tell a newcomer to the church that there is coffee in the narthex, if they don’t know what a narthex is? Our church websites and printed mission statements may proclaim that we are an “open community” that we “welcome all” or that we “reach out” to those outside our walls, but is that reflected in our language? What does is say about our church that you might need a 578 page dictionary to understand what goes on during worship? How many of the people in our pews week in and week out actually understand many of the words we are using?

These are important questions that remind us of the need to continually reexamine our words, and see which of them are inviting and which are exclusionary. And yet, while I wonder about the impact our sometimes obtuse language might have on visitors, I also have a deep attachment to our exalted language and wordy liturgy. I am, without question, a word person. I love the way that some of the beautiful words of our liturgy embrace mystery and poetry. The words of this church, for all the baggage that they might carry, are a vehicle through which I experience the holy. Somehow, if I let them, words like “salvation,” “incarnation,” “grace,” and “hospitality” speak a truth of my soul that can’t be captured any other way. As Kathleen Norris said in her book Amazing Grace, “our words are wiser than we are.”

Words are not idle things, especially not in Christianity. We believe in a God who came to us as “the Word made flesh;” a God who empowers and indwells the words that we use in ways beyond our comprehension. And thus I think that the answer to our vocabulary difficulty is not to eschew the words of our faith that are difficult or confusing, but to explore them. As individuals and as a community, we need to take the time to sink in to our words, to see what they say for and about us.

The Rev. Melody Shobe is Assistant Rector at a church in the Diocese of Texas. She is a graduate of Virginia Theological Seminary and is married to fellow priest The Rev. Casey Shobe.

By Margret Hjalmarson

At St. Anne’s Episcopal Church in Reston, Va., we are pretty proud of being a welcoming, inclusive community. To that end, we’ve created a diverse portfolio of services to accommodate a variety of tastes, generations, and time slots. We have a 7:45 a. m. Rite I with no music service, a 9:00 a. m. Rite II service, and a 5:00 p. m. contemporary, Come as You Are service.

Sunday School for the kids happens around the 9:00 a. m. and the service includes a mix of
traditional hymns, gospel and contemporary music. We have just been re-vamping our 11:15 a. m. service to add more traditional Anglican music (think chanting, a professional
organist, and choir robes). All this diversity means we have a wide range of age groups
and people represented on any given Sunday.

For a few years, the 11:15 didn’t have much music. Attendance was waning. Energy was
lacking. But, we noticed that we got a lot of newcomers at 11:15 and then they moved to
9:00 (where the all the action was in the morning). So, we struggled for a long time
about what to do. We talked about reggae, jazz, theme services, and folk services.

The rector wrestled with what to do with 11:15 and the need for an identity for the service. I began to call it “7:45 for people who like to read the newspaper and drink a cappuccino on Sunday before church.” It was definitely quieter than 9:00 where all the kids were. It was filling a need, but we had some trouble pinning down how to capitalize on what people wanted from 11:15 to keep them coming to it. We also know that we are an exciting, dynamic church and the service was not giving that impression to newcomers.

Then, the music director got energized at a conference over the summer about doing
traditional Anglican music. When the rector first told me this was the plan, I said
something like “we’ve been hearing that people think 11:15 is boring so we’re adding stuffy music and chanting?” with a quizzical raise of the eyebrows.

However, I’m now convinced this was the right choice because it rounds out the portfolio. A few people have said to me, “You know we got started in a coffee house in the 1970s and people would have left the church a few years ago if we had purchased choir robes.” I then quote Bob Dylan and say “the times they are a-changin.’” The 11:15 has been re-energized. This is particularly important since it is the entry point for many of our newcomers including folks who want something a little more peaceful and reflective with music. By going back to our Anglican roots, we are going forward. If we believe that diversity is good in terms of the people who come in the door, then we need diverse ways for those people to worship.

Can we keep what was good about the coffee house and still have choir robes? Yes. We can. Inclusion means not just welcoming all people, but welcoming new ways of doing things. We’ve welcomed a new way of worship (for us) back into the Sunday line-up. We still have a coffee house feel at 5:00 where the sermon is a dialogue, communion happens in a circle around the altar, and the jazz trio plays after the service during wine and cheese hour. But, we can also be a church that has Rite I and Anglican chanting. These are all ways we encounter God and worship together on a Sunday. More importantly, we are expanding our opportunities for inclusion and recognizing the opportunities that diversity brings.

Margret Hjalmarson is senior warden at St. Anne’s, Reston. She is an assistant professor in mathematics education at George Mason University, and blogs at Progressive Pragmatist.

By Donald Schell

For two wonderful days at the beginning of this month, I helped lead a workshop on Music that Makes Community at St. Paul’s Chapel of Trinity Church Wall Street, the colonial church that fronts on Broadway and whose churchyard faces the World Trade Center/Ground Zero site. Sunday after the workshop I sat in the congregation at St. Paul’s for their 10 a.m. liturgy. It was one of the most powerful experiences of our church’s work and worship I have ever had. The murmur of visitors, the impossibility of handling four to five hundred pilgrims an hour with greeters, the pilgrims themselves finding their own way and having their own private reasons for their visit all destroyed any hope that the church could be a place of seclusion, refuge or pious meditation. This was the great work of the church, the public work of liturgy.

When I first visited St. Paul’s in the late 1960’s, it was essentially a museum, George Washington’s Church in New York City. The stunning human losses of 9/11 changed that beyond recognition. When Trinity’s staff saw that St. Paul’s Chapel was undamaged by the fiery collapse of the twin towers next door, they boldly chose to dedicate the historic chapel for the duration of demolition and recovery as a holy place of hospitality to the New York firemen, police, and construction workers at the Ground Zero site. Trinity staff and hundreds of volunteer chaplains from around the country offered rest, comfort, counsel and help for those whose brutal work was combing through hot rubble for genetically identifiable fragments of the dead that grieving family members might bury.

Trinity’s hospitality to a nation’s heroes made St. Paul’s a pilgrimage site. Something like a million and a half visitors a year - imagine an unbroken stream of 400 strangers an hour - wander through to remember, see and reflect on 9/11 displays. As at the Viet Nam Memorial in Washington D.C., some do come to pray, but few kneel or make any outward show. Others seem to be tourists, muted tourists who want to include this bit of history in their trip and tell people at home, ‘I was there.’

For any who remember the pre- 9/11 St. Paul’s and haven’t been there recently, I should add that less than a year ago, Stuart Hoke and the other Trinity staff took another bold step to make the chapel’s welcome more evident – hoping to gather people into a circle of prayer, they removed the long forward-facing pews from the 1960’s to make space for a barrier-free oval of chairs around a central altar. St. Paul’s website has a good slide show picturing the changes and giving its rationale at http://www.saintpaulschapel.org/

Twenty of us, clergy and church music leaders from around the country gathered in this open space round the table for our workshop to talk, and reflect and make music, specifically developing a practice of the most traditional and modern kind of church music – singing we learn by ear and by heart, singing without books. All day our workshop sessions, our worship and even our mid-day meal was at the center of a swirling sea of people, all of America, the world. When we were singing we could feel the music touch them (and sometimes we forgot they were there and lost ourselves in music-making and praise). Sometimes we saw curiosity, joy or even healing on people’s faces. It came in swells, both for us and in their response. Sometimes they walked with their backs to us, continuing their quiet murmur of background conversation as they surveyed the 9/11 displays and the story of workers and a city who turned the terrorist attack into a sign of mutual support and courage. Then a piece of sacred song, something hearty or haunting, maybe some improvised bluesy jazz on a text from the Bible, or even our laughter at a shared discovery, something drew their attention and they were with us in church – both the community of people and the place of worship. So it went all day, hundreds of people an hour and flashes of grace and glory as our little group joined our Public Work to Trinity’s.

In the evening I thought of how strangely intimate and public the days were. Trying to describe our experience on the phone to my wife, I said it felt like street preaching on Times Square, or maybe like participating in a life drawing class with a nude model in the main rotunda of the Metropolitan Museum. We were aiming for truthfulness and Gospel, but we were unequivocally doing intimate, heart work, speaking and singing our faith, in a very public place. The work itself guided us from our fear and self-consciousness.

Even two full days of our workshop didn’t prepare me for the joyful wonder of 10 a.m. liturgy in this place of pilgrimage. I sat in the third or fourth row of the oval seats so I could both join in and watch the congregation and the pilgrims on the perimeter. The busses don’t stop just because it’s Sunday, and as a worshipper and part of a larger, more diffuse group, I felt the strangeness (and joy) of it very strongly. We were a hundred or so people, a solid, diverse congregation, and we were together in faith, in prayer as publicly as if we’d made our circle in Grand Central Station.

Marilyn Haskel, the musician, offered us welcome, guided us through the service leaflet, got us singing with piano and a capella and encouraged us. The Rev. Mark Bozzuti-Jones, a Jamaican Anglican priest new to Trinity’s staff presided and preached his first liturgy at St. Paul’s. His sermon and the way he engaged us all was breath taking, bold and comforting, confrontive and sweet. And even as he drew our hearts into the center of the circle to hold one another in our reflection on scripture, he might generously, and without the least notice, lob a word or prayers over our heads to the sea of pilgrims.

The liturgy was an even stronger magnet than the music workshop. Strangers slipped into the circle to join us. Many stopped to listen and pray and seemed to wish they could linger longer. A few seemed perplexed to hear a Gospel of such forgiveness, inclusion and challenge. Many blessed themselves with a touch of water from the front.

I wish everyone thinking about inclusion and welcome in our church could spend a Sunday with St. Paul’s, Manhattan. Having experienced it as a blessed and unequivocal Public Work, I don’t think our liturgy will ever look the same to me again.

Public work, as it turns out, may be a better translation of ‘liturgy’ than the ‘public work’ I learned in seminary in the 1960’s. In the 1960’s and 70’s our church was beginning to make our liturgy shared, collaborative work in new ways. ‘The work of the people’ was a useful etymology. It turned our attention to from the priest’s performance to what WE were making together.

Now friends who teach liturgics and history have been telling us that leitourgia (‘liturgy’) in the first century Mediterranean world was ‘public work,’ more like we think of with a DPT, Department of Public Works making or fixing a road or a bridge. In fact in the ancient world public work often referred to the generous works of public-minded rich people, like the medieval queen of Spain who built a bridge at Puente la Reyna for the pilgrims walking to Santiago or like Andrew Carnegie building libraries across America.

Today in 2007, we’ve found enough shared authority in liturgy-making to begin recovering this other, earlier sense of liturgy as work for or on behalf of the people. What we have to offer is holy, vibrant, and flexible enough that it can truly be public work. At St. Paul’s the ‘public work’ made very good sense. For me every question we can frame about welcoming strangers to liturgy will look different to me after three days of singing and praying at St. Paul’s Chapel.

The Rev. Donald Schell is founder St. Gregory's Episcopal Church, San Francisco and consultant and creative director of All Saints Company, San Francisco.

By Derek Olsen

As a student of how the Scriptures have been interpreted through the ages, the reconstruction of early medieval liturgies is one of my tasks. And this task is much more complicated than it might first seem. One of my constant concerns arises from the basic technology of manuscripts—hand-written texts. The process of copying is never a simple one and scribes are sometimes known to be creative in curious ways… To make a long story short, the reality of copied manuscripts means that we can never properly speak in generalities about medieval this or that—we can only talk in terms of particulars. This is what the texts show us was done at a given place and a given time.

The manuscript technology problem wouldn’t be so bad were it not for the division of our sources. I’m never just trying to find one book. When I pull together the pieces of a tenth-century Mass, I need to collect materials from at least five different books! And, if I intend to construct a reasonable picture of the lengthy Night Office where the most liturgical exposure to Scripture occurred, I must consult no less than eight different kinds of sources, hoping and praying that I can draw together materials from roughly the same time and place that exist within the same strand of liturgical tradition.

It’s a complicated task: sacramentaries and tropers, antiphoners and collectors, each book having its own materials, its own internal logic and—quite often—no sign of how they are intended to relate one to another. As the liturgies proceed, sometimes a word or two scribbled in a margin will give me an indication of how a scribe thought the next portion of the liturgy will start, so I constantly scan the sides of pages looking, hoping, for clues. I breathe a sigh of relief as I move to later sources. Especially when dealing with materials from cathedrals or other communities of canons (non-monastic priests who lived in groups) the more I move into the eleventh century and beyond the more I find the fore-runners of today’s breviaries and missals where all of the texts are conveniently gathered into one place. It makes my job so much easier—but at the same time, I feel a note of sadness.

Why the multiplication of books? Why so many different pieces to juggle? The answer is actually quite simple. According to the early medieval scheme, each set of participants had their own book that contained the material they needed. So the celebrant would have his sacramentary, the cantor would have his troper, the choir, their gradual, the deacon his Gospel-book, and so on and so forth. Unlike me in my modern pew juggling a Book of Common Prayer, a hymnal or two, a service leaflet, (and a preschooler) trying to follow all of the parts at once, the liturgy flowed from part and section—going now to the cantor, then to the halves of the choir, passing to the celebrant, then to the choir once again—each liturgical actor having only the pieces they needed to perform their role in the grand dance of the liturgy.

And that’s why the breviaries and the missals make me sad.

They show a shift in the liturgical culture, a movement away from this vision of the whole community gathered in prayer together. The culture and piety of the eleventh and twelfth centuries began to move to individual priests praying masses and offices on their own. Architecturally, altars proliferated in cathedral sanctuaries and side-chapels, each a niche for a priest on his own. And, in so doing, something of the notion of “common prayer” was thereby diminished. Because, from that point, we had to remember rather than see one of the great truths about Christian liturgy.

One of the great liturgical truths is that when we pray, we never pray alone. Even when we are physically alone, our prayer is never solitary but is woven into the greater garland of unceasing prayer that surrounds the throne of God and of the Lamb, the chorus of—as the Book of Revelation shows us—the four living creatures, the twenty-four elders, the choirs of angels, the great throng that none could number and, ultimately, every creature in heaven, on earth, under the earth, and in the seas.

Speaking truthfully, our prayer, our praise, our worship, doesn’t truly begin or end; rather we simply rejoin ourselves to the hymn without end. Like the medieval books, all prayer is local prayer rooted in a particular time, a particular place, yet these prayers are the threads of sound in a greater tapestry that ascends to the Father of Lights, an offering of joy, of pain, of sorrow, and of hope. When I juggle my books in the sanctuary, when I sit with my daughters at bedtime, even when I sit in the early morning with breviary and Raisin Bran, I know I join in the greater liturgy even if I have to strain my eyes and tune my ears to hear it.

Sometimes I forget. Sometimes I need reminding—and the reminders are there. Sprinkled here and there in the liturgies themselves I find the reminders that even when I sing in the car on my commute I never sing alone. The Te Deum reminds me of the “the glorious company of the apostles,” “the goodly fellowship of the prophets,” “the noble army of martyrs” and I recollect and find myself in “the holy Church throughout all the world acclaiming.” Or I locate myself among the mountains and hills, the fruit trees and cedars, the creeping things and wingèd birds of the Psalter.

This is part of what the communion of saints communicates to me: the breadth, the depth, of our praise and worship of the ineffable, the Holy God. It’s what I find in the dusty books of monasteries long since perished and in the parishes down the street from my house. On the lips of my children, and scratched in rusty ink from stylus long since lain down. And the words of Fr. Franz’s hymn come back to my mind: “And from morn to set of sun/ Through the Church the song goes on…”

Derek Olsen is in the final stretch of completing a Ph.D. in New Testament (with a healthy side of Homiletics) at Emory University. His reflections on life, liturgical spirituality, and being a Gen-X dad appear at Haligweorc.