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Presidential Address as delivered by the Bishop
of Lichfield,
Before her Coronation the Queen sent round an order of service for the
Sunday beforehand to be read and used in all the churches, to pray for her and her ministry. It was an early sign of how very
important the Christian faith is to our Queen and it revealed her sense that her devotion to her people would only be effective
and a good society could only come about if based on devotion to Christ. That is the Queen that we have.
Last
month someone showed me a printed copy of the actual service sheet the Queen had prepared for all the churches on that Sunday
in 1952 and of course the service was Prayer Book Mattins, as it would have been for any time in the previous 400 years. Her Majesty will no doubt have a Christian, not “religious”,
but a Christian service, and lots of them, as an important part of her Diamond Jubilee celebrations next year and all our
parishes, I guess, will want to say special prayers to give thanks for her reign. And we will want to put on special parish
parties, street parties and so on. But of the special services, I
wonder how many of them will be Prayer Book Mattins? I’m not
a member of the Prayer Book Society, although I get their stuff regularly. And I’m not, because I remember the bafflement
of my teenage contemporaries when faced with all the “thees” and “thous” of the Authorised Version.
And few Anglicans I think regret making the Eucharist the main Sunday morning service. Somehow it seems closer to those New
Testament Christians who would break bread together on the first day of the week. But some of our churches don’t have a weekly Communion at 10 o’clock. And I think that even the
greatest enthusiast would admit that there have been losses as well as gains in this great change which has happened over
the last 60 years. The first loss is length. Morning Prayer used
to last 50 minutes with a good sermon; Family Services only 45 minutes. But a sung Eucharist can take anything from an hour
and a quarter to an hour and a half – especially if there is a Confirmation added in. Sometimes I find myself thinking
that this is a good way of saying “Go away” to young people who come to visit us. The second loss is simplicity. I like Common Worship but you do feel sometimes as if you need a couple of
extra fingers with all the markers just to find your way round the services. And you notice the acres of forest that get sacrificed
to the service sheets that you have to have every week. We clergy spend more time at our computers sorting out liturgies than
perhaps is good for us. The third loss, I think, is exclusion. We
don’t have Eucharists at Induction and Licensing services normally, because we like to invite lots of civic guests to
those services and it is a bit difficult to invite people to a celebration and then exclude them from the eating together
at the climax of the worship. One of the reasons for our recent decline
is that we have stopped creating a fringe, and one reason for a declining fringe is that you have got to be quite tough to
come to some of our services if you are not a regular attender. Mattins, for all its difficulties, allowed the people who
didn’t think of themselves as signed up believers to come from time to time and thus, frequently, to be warmed up, gradually. It’s for this same reason of course that the American Episcopal
Church has got into its current mess of inviting all to receive Communion, even the unbaptized. They too have no services
except Eucharists on a normal Sunday. My fourth loss is that we lose
the contribution of lay ministers in an exclusively Eucharistic set-up. Many of our Lay Readers and other licensed ministers
feel quite disinherited because they used to lead Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer or a Service of the Word, and these have
often disappeared. So the Reader just adds a bit of colour in the sanctuary or, worse still, just does things which members
of the congregation could and should do, and the services somehow ignore their gifts to lead us. Readers began as evangelists out in the market place and there is a need for evangelists or “Good News
People” in our very changes circumstances once more. A feature
of some churches is of lay leaders presiding at Eucharists using the reserved sacrament. Strictly speaking, I suppose, this
is illegal. The reserved sacrament is intended for the sick or in an emergency, not for a whole interregnum or even longer.
I think that what should be happening is an increase of lay people taking Services of the Word at least until we can raise
up more priestly vocations. Anglicans are actually very good indeed
at devising non-Eucharistic services at certain times and seasons: Harvest, Remembrance, Crib Services, Carol Services, and
so on. Then there is the Family Service phenomenon (which we can’t find any politically correct term for these days,
but never mind), Taizé services, Messy Church and all sorts of things which build up a fringe of occasional worshippers. I well remember a Roman Catholic bishop remarking wistfully that he
wished Catholics had such a variety in their store cupboard; only to have Eucharists, he said, was a bit limiting. What I notice about these special services is that far more people come to
them. They work because they put the thoughts and feelings of ordinary people into words that connect their lives with God.
It is as if these services are for the whole community, like those funerals when soldiers from Afghanistan come home in coffins.
That is one of the reasons why there is a Church of England – to serve the 75% of the population who call themselves
Christians; and even beyond. But, we say, sometimes a bit condescendingly,
about the sort of people who come to Mothering Sunday and Harvest family services: “When will they grow up and come
to proper church?” But Jesus said: “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst.”
Couldn’t that be proper too? Perhaps the truth is that we Christians
like Eucharists and we like them too much to make concessions to others. Paul had to rebuke the Corinthians for eating
the Eucharistic bread and drinking the wine without thinking of their poor neighbours. Perhaps that is a little like us devising
more and more intricate and beautiful services for our own use – and forgetting those who might come if we made things
simpler for them to start with. This was underlined for me at a meeting
of our health care chaplains this last week. Some of them were commenting on the odd fact that most patients are glad
to see the chaplain and want their services. They are glad to be prayed for and listened to. But many members of management
can’t understand at all why chaplaincy is important in a modern, scientific hospital. Until, that is, I was told, until
they can be persuaded to shadow a chaplain, on call, at night, in a dimly lit ward, helping parents say goodbye to a dying
child. If there were no chaplains, who would do this work? Please
don’t hear me as saying that the weekly Holy Communion is second best. Of course not. I certainly don’t buy into
the argument of some who speak about the parish Communion Movement as creating a small exclusive Eucharistic Sect. Nor can
we simply go back to the past. But there is work for us all to do
if we are going to raise our game and ask how different age groups who don’t normally come; and different sorts of people
who don’t normally come; how they might be enabled to put their worship of God into words that make sense in this generation. And we can look at our regular pattern of worship from the point of
view of those who might come and try us out; but as yet don’t come. Let’s provide a welcome for the outsiders
and the occasional people as well as the regulars. And perhaps the
Queen’s Jubilee can act as a stimulus to us to create imaginative special services that we can invite the Mayor and
MP, the lollipop lady and the scouts, the schools and the colleges too.
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