Essential worship

LEONEL L. MITCHELL*

When I was a parish priest, I noted that there were three things that tended to get deeply confused by the parishioners:

1. The faith once delivered to the saints.

2. The Anglican Tradition.

3. The way the Rector Emeritus liked to do things.

Unfortunately this problem is not confined to one parish nor to the Episcopal Church. By and large, we are not very good either at helping others to sort these out, or sorting them out ourselves. We tend to confuse things which we find appealing with the core of Christian worship.

The problem becomes particularly acute when we are dealing not with one eccentric parish, but with the entire problem of cultural relationships. The late Leo Melania, Coordinator of Prayer Book Revision during the preparation of The Book of Common Prayer 1979, told me that, although he had encountered the Anglican Church of Canada in his youth, he had never seriously considered becoming an Anglican, since he was of Syrian, not English, ethnicity.

This may be an extreme example, but it is difficult for those of us who do worship in English even to imagine what it means to be a Francophone or Hispanic or Korean Anglican. How much of what we are accustomed to associate with the worship of the Episcopal Church is it necessary for a Navajo to adopt to be an Episcopalian?

The Core of Christian Worship

Vatican Council II in its seminal Constitution on the Sacred Liturgyl offered these directives, which are, in fact, sage advice worth listening to:

The liturgy is made up of unchangeable elements divinely instituted, and of elements subject to change. These latter not only may be changed but ought to be changed with the passage of time, if they have suffered from the intrusion of anything out of harmony with the inner nature of the liturgy or have become less suitable.2

It went on to speak of "legitimate variations and adaptations to different groups, regions and peoples,"3 and recognized that possibly, "In some places and circumstances. . . an even more radical adaptation of the liturgy is needed."4

In this context we should note two resolutions of the 1988 Lambeth Conference. Resolution 22: Christ and Culture says in part:

This Conference. . . urges the Church everywhere to work at expressing the unchanging Gospel of Christ in words, actions, names, customs, liturgies, which communicate relevantly in each contemporary culture.

Resolution 47: Liturgical Freedom reads:

This Conference resolves that each Province should be free, subject to essential universal norms of worship and to a valuing of traditional liturgical materials to seek that expression of worship which is appropriate to its Christian people in their cultural context.

We might then begin by asking ourselves just what in our liturgical Tradition is of the essence of Christian worship. What is the hard core of Christian liturgy? If our standard is the same as Vatican II, then our list will be very short indeed. Divinely instituted elements in the liturgy include:

1. The proclamation of the gospel,

2. the assembling for worship,

3. the celebration of baptism with water,

4. the celebration of the eucharist with bread and wine,

5. the ministry of reconciliation (in some form), and

6. the praying of the Lord's Prayer.

You may be able to think of something else, but it is a very lean core. I would personally wish to add to that core those elements which have been a part of the Christian tradition of worship since patristic times:

1. The offering of daily prayer,

2. the weekly celebration of the Lord's Day,

3. the observance of at least the major festivals of the church year,

4. and an ordered ministry of Word and Sacrament.

Daily Prayer

The daily offices in the form in which we have them are heavily dependent on Benedictine monasticism, but the idea of daily services of prayer did not begin with the monastics. Cathedrals and large city churches had public services of psalm singing and prayer from the end of the persecutions, and much earlier Christian writers spoke of daily prayers, morning and evening, as a part of Christian life. Presumably this was a part of the Church's inheritance from the synagogue, where the eighteen benedictions were said twice daily, and individuals were obligated to recite the shema three times. This was the context in which the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray, and the Lord's Prayer, in addition to or instead of the shema, became the prayer of Christians.

The Lord's Day

The celebration of the Lord's day, the day of resurrection, on the first day of the week, with the celebration of the Lord's Supper probably goes back to New Testament times. The expressions "Lord's Day" and "Lord's Supper" are related. From at least the time of Justin Martyr in the second century Christians have kept the Lord's Day with a service of Word and Sacrament including the reading and preaching of the Gospel, the offering of prayer, and the celebration of the eucharist.

The Churh Year

By contrast, the liturgical year was rather slow in developing. Easter and Pentecost began to be observed in the second century, and Epiphany shortly thereafter. Lent was in place by the time of the council of Nicea. Christmas, which began in Rome in the third century, spread to the rest of the Church in the fourth. Since then the Church of Scotland in the 16th century was unique among major Christian Churches in abandoning it-and they have brought it back. It is certainly possible to be a Christian without observing the church year-or there were no Christians in the apostolic Church-but it has become a stable part of Christian observance.