ViaMedia

Category: Worship

  • ‘Evangelical and Inclusive’ – Renewing the Heart of the Tradition

    by David Runcorn, a convenor of the Inclusive Evangelical network and the author of Love means Love – same-sex relationships and the Bible (2020).

    A collection of studies and stories about evangelical faith and belief will be published on 28 April. Evangelical and Inclusive – a future and a hope is significant because it is written by evangelicals who support the full inclusion of LGBTQ+ people and their relationships in the life of the church. Their purpose is more than a revisiting of the familiar arguments. For the Inclusive Evangelicals (IE) network the present conflicts are laying bare the need for a renewal of evangelical belief and identity and set the debates within the wider picture of evangelical history and its development.

    The book is not a manifesto, campaign statement or systematic study of faith and doctrine. It is telling a story that is still in the making. The approach is broad. Chapters trace the history and development of this tradition, including its global context. The relationship of faith, culture and mission is explored. Issues of scripture and doctrine are illustrated, for example, through a discussion of the theology of the atonement – so central to evangelical faith.

    ‘But are they really evangelical?’

     The book starts with a very familiar question in the evangelical world. ‘If there’s one thing that defines evangelicals’, writes Mark Vasey Saunders, ‘it’s holding strong opinions over who is and isn’t an evangelical!’ This has painful relevance for the growing number of evangelicals who hold inclusive convictions. We are often told we are not (or are no longer) real evangelicals.

    The evangelical wing of the church has grown remarkably over the last fifty years. In the Church of England its influence now extends to all aspects of its life and leadership. There are good gifts in this. However, over the same period, the oversight of its extensive organizations, networks and resources has increasingly fallen under the leadership of its more conservative wing. That is why, in the current debates, the loudest voices from this part of the church have been strongly conservative ones. This gives a misleading impression of what has always been a diverse and developing faith.

    The Church of England Evangelical Council (CEEC) was founded by John Stott in 1960 to represent and co-ordinate the varied expressions of Anglican evangelicalism. However, in 2014 the CEEC changed its constitution to require members to specifically affirm male-female marriage as God’s ‘unchangeable standard’. The evangelical group on the Church of England’s General Synod and Diocesan Evangelical Fellowships fell in line, along with other groups and organisations. This immediately excluded many who call themselves evangelicals by any historic understanding of the name, but who hold inclusive convictions on sexuality. Theological discussion became narrowed. As well as drawing in the boundaries of membership, the change made a certain belief on human sexuality the test of Christian orthodoxy – something completely unknown in the Bible and the historic creeds and councils of the church. We have now reached the point where the deciding factor in almost every decision or appointment in the church is being determined by declared views on this issue.

    The rapid growth of the IE network after its launch two years ago made clear what we already knew – that there is a significant presence within evangelical churches of those with more open convictions, a desire for more exploratory understanding, and a more hospitable and open expression of a faith which had become too centred on the hard binary lines of evangelical/liberal, biblical/unbiblical, right/wrong.

    All of which means that the CEEC (and the related ‘Alliance’ network) cannot claim to be faithfully representing this historic tradition and its life in today’s church. 

    Evangelicals and the Bible

    The debates over sexuality have been challenging evangelicals to re-visit their understanding of how the Bible speaks to us today. The commitment to the scriptures as our unique authority and guide does not mean that views have never changed, nor that our understanding of what is taught there has not developed. Within our tradition, the unsettling process of re-examining, repenting and re-interpreting even long-unquestioned Biblical convictions, under the compelling of the Spirit and in the light of contemporary questions, is a familiar task. Indeed, our own understanding of scripture requires it. Unless we are willing to do this, we risk only reading the Bible in a kind of ancient time warp. Faith becomes inflexible, dogmatic and unable to respond to new contexts.

    Our twenty-first-century church is facing this challenge as we explore the gift of human identity and relationships. Specifically, we need a hermeneutic with which to translate ancient texts, conditions and concepts into the challenges faced in contemporary life. An example is the repeated claim made by those arguing for a traditional understanding of marriage, that the creation story in Genesis chapter two is a ‘definition of marriage’. This imposes on the text of a richly poetic, ancient wisdom story a very modern and quite literal meaning. To claim we read here God’s definite, eternal, universal ordering of human belonging and relating is to fail to attend to the literature before us, and therefore prevents us from faithfully discerning what story is actually being told, then and now.

    Women and Men

    The evangelical world has yet to become a place where women are fully respected and treated unambiguously as equals. ‘The distrust of women’s voices is hard baked into many women’s experience of evangelicalism’, writes Kate Massey in her chapter, Being a woman and evangelical. By contrast, inclusive evangelicals are committed to offering spaces of mutual welcome where, as Kate writes, ‘we practise and develop more equal ways of engaging with one another, thus hearing and better appreciating one another’s struggles and receiving one another’s wisdom’.  (1)

    In his careful critique of the issues raised by the recent abuse scandals that have unsettled the evangelical world (and beyond), Paul Roberts outlines important challenges to male identity and approaches to leadership in what remains a heavily man-centred tradition. He is concerned at the non-consultative style that presently characterises the leadership of parts of this tradition. By contrast, IEs ‘affirm modes of Christian leadership and management of power based on a New Testament model, that is collegial, consultative, diverse and accountable. The inclusion of a diversity of leadership voices, irrespective of sex or sexuality, is crucial in expressing this model in the present day in order to make the church a safer place.’

    Unity and Conflict

    Simon Butler came out fully as gay in a speech in General Synod. For some years he held one of the most senior roles there – an election he accepted ‘to try to keep the Church of England honest about its sexuality in its senior places’. The sexuality debates there changed him. ‘While evangelicals were arguing about ‘first order’ and ‘second order’ issues,’ he writes, ‘I found myself believing more and more that the unity of the church was the central biblical issue at stake. To deny that unity, to refuse to accept a fellow disciple, is a fundamental and grievous sin’. Nikki Groarke agrees. She describes her experience of managing deep conflicts in Synod and in her ministry as an Archdeacon. She challenges the language of ‘fighting for a cause rather than collaboration’, and the extensive use of emotive videos, letter campaigns and threats to withhold money. She calls her present position ‘optimism with a broken heart’ (Nick Cave). The pain of standing in the midst of this disagreement is deep and costly. Inclusive Evangelicals have a high view of unity. We seek to walk alongside, not apart from, those who disagree with us. The gospel teaches us this is not an issue over which to divide.

    Good fruit

    The most significant, challenging and hopeful voices in the book are from those within the LGBTQ+ community.

    A number of writers share their journeys as gay, lesbian or transgender Christians in the evangelical church. The stories of shaming, excluding and harming make for painful and challenging reading, but their message contains remarkable calls to faith.  

    Baptist minister Rachel Humphrey calls her chapter, How being Gay made me a better evangelical. She insists that LGBTQ+ Christians have grown in faith even through adversity and exclusion. ‘When banned from the worship group, or from praying in public, we continued to worship and in that process we discovered that God was with us in this place too, and thus our faith has continued to grow and develop and mature. My faith isn’t the same as it used to be before I came out. It’s better. By every measure people might use – integrity, confidence, mental well-being, effectiveness in getting things done – it’s more meaningful, more honest, more scriptural, and – more evangelical.’ She insists that evangelical churches are the poorer for excluding the gifts, wisdom and faith of these fellow disciples of Christ. Of course this is so, for in the body of Christ ‘the eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you!”’ (1 Corinthians 12.21).

     In Good Fruit Alex Huzzey shares stories of inclusive churches that are growing and flourishing despite opposition and without the benefit of the support and resources readily available within (conservative-led) evangelical networks. ‘In the last few years, a new generation of LGBTQ+ inclusive churches has emerged, retaining recognizably evangelical and charismatic approaches to scripture, worship and evangelism, and most importantly thriving on it.’

    Here is a vision for the renewal of a gifted but much conflicted tradition in the church. This book is written for Christians within the evangelical world who want to understand their own historic tradition better. We have written for those seeking to engage further with the theological and biblical basis for inclusive faith. Evangelical and Inclusive is offered in respect and friendship to evangelicals who, though disagreeing to varying degrees, are open to continuing the conversation. It is offered to those in the wider church who wish to understand better this creative, often perplexingly intransigent, yet life-giving tradition.

    It is offered in faith – for a future and a hope.

    Notes

    1. The issues are explored further in : https://www.inclusiveevangelicals.com/post/male-and-female-he-made-them-celebrating-one-humanity-equal-and-different

     

     

  • When the Music Fades: the Soul Survivor Generation

    by Dr Lucy Sixsmith, Research Fellow in English at St John’s College, Cambridge and author of When the Music Fades

    To understand Soul Survivor, I think you need to know about the shirts. This will sound trivial; I realise that. Soul Survivor, from 1993 until 2019, was an organisation running summer festivals in the charismatic evangelical tradition, for teenagers and young adults. It also became (and still is) a church in Watford. The founder, leader and constant on-stage presence at Soul Survivor festivals was Mike Pilavachi, and you could tell he was Mike Pilavachi by his interesting shirts.

    Mike always wore a particular style of multi-coloured shirt at the summer festivals, a West African dashiki rebranded as a trademark shirt for a Greek British youth leader at a substantially white middle-class British summer camp. My youngest brother remembers the shirts being on sale in the Soul Survivor marketplace, not as dashikis, with their own cultural history, but as Mike Pilavachi shirts. There was a Soul Survivor tradition of Mike’s Bad Karaoke; one year he sang ‘I’m too sexy for my shirt’ to ten thousand teenagers. In vulnerable moments, during preaching, he’d sit down on the edge of the stage, like it was just Mike and his youth group, one hand plucking at the patterned central panel that makes a dashiki distinctive.

    In 2023, when survivors came forward and the Church of England’s National Safeguarding Team investigated allegations of emotional abuse, inappropriate relationships, wrestling, and massaging, those shirts must have seemed convenient to the people choosing pictures for news articles. For any story about this latest scandal, there was a picture with an eye-catching shirt.

    Part of what I mean here is that Mike Pilavachi was a persona. A trademark shirt can be like a costume which sets the wearer apart as someone not quite like everyone else, someone likably independent, a bit of a character. A multi-coloured trademark shirt at a Christian summer youth festival belongs to a world which is not quite real. Brighter, warmer, cartoon-like, more fun, more vibrant: the holiday atmosphere of a Christian summer youth festival offered what we used to call a ‘mountaintop experience’ in charismatic circles. Kids looked forward to Soul Survivor partly as a place to have fun and partly as a place to encounter God, and Mike performed the role of lovable overseer, buffoonishly whole-hearted.

    The mythology of Soul Survivor was that everything was done in chaos by faithful amateurs and it only came together because it was God’s idea. Consequently, Mike Pilavachi seemed less like a celebrity and more like everyone’s friend. I didn’t notice that the myth didn’t match the way Soul Survivor had become a model for youth ministry across the country. If it was God, it must be good. So I joined those crowds all through the noughties, from the age of fourteen to twenty-one or so, and always thought of Soul Survivor as a healthy benchmark, a useful compare-and-contrast when other charismatic movements drew out my scepticism.

    In 2023, while the National Safeguarding Team investigated Mike Pilavachi’s immediate relationships with colleagues and interns, I found myself wondering about the whole entire thing. Clearly, there were investigations that needed to be made, stories that needed to be heard or held respectfully, in that smaller circle of direct impact; but there were also questions to think through for those of us who were just there, one among ten thousand, thinking it was all fine. What made us so cheerfully overlook the clues to Mike’s behaviour that seemed plain and obvious with hindsight? If it was God on the move at Soul Survivor, as people were still saying it was, how could it have been God in public and not God in private? Could it be that the public aspect was good while the private aspect was cruelly manipulative, that the one was healthy and the other was not? Was it good for all those thousands of kids to have sat at Mike Pilavachi’s feet?

    And what was I going to do with all the worship songs that now sounded off-key? There were so many songs that came out of Soul Survivor about humility and brokenness, about kneeling at the foot of the cross, about decreasing and bowing down, and I couldn’t sing them any more, having learnt that the songwriters were not just humbling themselves but being humbled by their own mentor, pastor, and employer. Which led to a rather pressing question, if not the most weighty one I was asking: if I couldn’t face singing any worship songs any more, what on earth was I going to play for my own local congregation in the worship time that coming Sunday morning?

    That question—the question of what am I going to do now about all those surrender songs—was the starting point for writing a book called When the Music Fades: Power, Surrender and the Soul Survivor Generation. It is a book about and for all of us who have been confused—for anyone who has been fighting through a process of questioning charismatic evangelical spirituality. If I have needed to find space to think things through, there must be lots of other people out there, similarly perplexed. When the Music Fades is an attempt to provide space, for people who are still in church, people who are now out of church, and people who are somewhere in between.

    Soul Survivor is central to the book, but the book is not just about Soul Survivor. I had questions about charismatic practice, before 2023: about power dynamics, and coercion, and the temptation of putting on a show, and the difference between evangelism and bullying, and false promises, and relentless positivity, and how tiring it all is. The book is about all these things, and especially about navigating these things in teenagerhood, when you have barely learnt how to be a person yet, but you’re all the more eager to take on the duty of sharing Jesus with the world. The news about Soul Survivor, after all, was especially confronting because Soul Survivor was for teenagers. Soul Survivor had seemed so normal, so grounded, a well-balanced alternative to megachurch-style hype. Some charismatic leaders, I started to realise, I’d never trusted in the first place. I just had the habit of looking up to them, wanting their approval. I trusted Soul Survivor.

    For former Soul Survivor kids, I hope, When the Music Fades will be an opportunity to feel heard, even though it’s me doing the talking. Since it’s a book about being in the crowd, it claims that whoever was in the crowd matters. When we are talking about big churches and big movements, somehow the whole is less than the sum of its parts: the story of Soul Survivor, and whether or not Soul Survivor was a ‘God thing’, is not actually as interesting to me as the individual stories of every single person who ever attended Soul Survivor, with all the good things and bad things, the hard times, ordinary day-to-day and moments of hope. We went to Soul Survivor and believed we were supposed to be history makers and a revival generation and all that, and then, probably, we felt bad about not managing it, and then we had to figure out how to do basic adulthood, which is challenging enough.

    My biggest dream for the book is that those former history makers might feel recognised and valued. But I also hope, maybe, that a few church leaders might read it and realise that we took them seriously. We didn’t realise it was just a summer holiday, colourful shirts, a mountaintop. We took them at their word.

    And that had consequences, and it might be worth thinking about, and it might be worth doing things differently next time.

     

    When the Music Fades: Power, Surrender and the Soul Survivor Generation by Lucy Sixsmith (Canterbury Press, £16.99) is available from the Canterbury Press website and all good bookshops.

  • Why Progressive Christians Must Reclaim the Case for Church – Or Face the Consequences

    by Simon Cross, a minister in the United Reformed Church, a writer, and the chair of the Progressive Christianity Network

    [reprinted with permission from http://simonjcross.substack.com/]

    Progressive Christianity has done much to reframe theology – challenging exclusion, reimagining scripture, and putting justice issues at the centre of our worship. But in the enthusiasm to move away from conservatism, we’ve often neglected to reconstruct a compelling case for why church still matters.

    The consequences are striking. Churches that champion progressive theology are shrinking, not because their message lacks depth, but because their communal purpose is unclear. This has various knock-on effects: visible Christianity becomes limited to its more conservative expressions, new leaders are not nurtured, people are cut adrift from supportive communities.

    For centuries now, we’ve critiqued doctrine, questioned hierarchy, and sought to dismantle harmful traditions. But we’ve not always articulated what church is for. Why gather? Why commit? Why return week after week to a community that is imperfect, slow-moving, and sometimes exhausting?

    The hard truth is that if we don’t make the case for church, others will. And often, they’ll make it in ways that reinforce conformity, control, or nostalgia. If we, as progressive Christians, believe in a gospel of liberation, then we must also believe in the power of, and need for communities which embody that liberation – not just in theory, but in practice.

    Church as a School of Compassion

    Church, through a progressive lens, is not just a place to hear sermons, sing hymns or mumble prayers. It’s a dynamic, open space where we learn, together, to be compassionate. Not in abstract terms, but in the messy, embodied reality of shared life. It’s a place where we learn to sit with grief that isn’t ours. We learn to celebrate joy that doesn’t benefit us. We learn what it means to forgive, and to listen.

    This vision of church is profoundly counter-cultural. While contemporary culture prizes individualism and efficiency, wealth and success, church offers a counter-formative rhythm. It slows us down. It asks us to notice. It invites us into relationships that aren’t transactional – or at least aren’t as transactional. Over time, it shapes us into people who can look beyond ourselves.

    Church as a Place of Ritual

    Progressive Christians often shy away from ritual, fearing it will become empty or oppressive. But in my own life, and my own experience of ministry, I have come to recognise that rituals are not the enemy. They are, in some ways, the scaffolding of meaning. (Don’t believe me? Read Ritual by Dimitris Xygalatas).

    In church, we enact rituals of restoration and renewal: communion being the most obvious one. Moments when we stop – recentre, renew. We also enact rituals of resistance – the most notable of which is baptism. In my tradition these two rituals are called ‘sacraments’ – for good reason.

    These rituals remind us who we are and who we’re becoming. They connect us to generations before us and to movements beyond us. They give shape to our longings and language to our hope.

    Church as a Community of Resistance

    Sometimes when I go into a church I find, in effect, a living history museum. A place where a group find comfort. But if church is only a place of comfort, it will not survive.

    At its best, church becomes a community of resistance. A place where we can come together, partly for comfort perhaps, but also to find a way to fight against injustice, against despair, against isolation. The earliest Christians gathered for this reason – they shared resources, they dismantled hierarchies, they cared for each other.

    Progressive churches have the theological tools to be communities of resistance. We speak of inclusion, of equity, of ecological care. But we must also embody these values in our structures, our budgets, our liturgies, and our relationships. Resistance is not just what we preach – it’s how we live together.

    Making the Case

    So how do we make the case for church?

    Perhaps we start by telling the truth, to ourselves and to one another: church is hard. It’s slow. It’s full of people who disappoint us. But it’s also one of the few places where we commit to one another not because we agree with each other (we don’t), but because we belong.

    Then maybe we tell stories – stories of meals shared, of burdens carried, of prayers whispered in hospital rooms. We name the ways that church has saved us by being present to us.

    We invite people not to consume church, but to co-create it. To bring their gifts, their questions, their wounds. To help shape a community that reflects the gospel we believe in.

    And we remind ourselves that church is not a building or a brand. It’s a practice. A discipline. A way of being in the world that says: we are not alone, and we are not powerless.

    Mostly, though, we simply need to understand the case for church in ourselves – we need to internalise it. We need to recognise that ‘this’ is why its worth being part of.

    A Progressive Future

    If progressive Christianity is to thrive, it must reclaim church. It must cultivate it, and tend to it. We must actively make the case for gathering together, and we must ensure our spaces are such that genuine discipleship can happen in them. We can’t really afford to just keep going through the motions.

    Church can be a place where justice is not just preached, but practised. Where compassion is not just felt, but formed. Where resistance is not just imagined, but enacted. We all know it – just as we know it can be the opposite. We need to make the case for church.

  • The Ten Parish Eucharistic Benefice

    by Michael Hampson, a published author devoting his early retirement from parish ministry to producing practical resources for busy clergy and lay-led congregations, beginning with the weekly lectionary resource Sunday Scriptures for Reading Aloud, ssra.uk

    The Ten Parish benefice is coming – and it is sustainable. All it needs is people, and liturgy. We have both. All we lack is a decent liturgy book. So let’s make one.

    Oh, and there’s that word ‘eucharistic’. Let’s talk about that too. Spoiler: no lay presidency involved.

    Let’s start in Wales

    In the middle of a piece in Church Times nine days ago, surrounded by all the obvious and noisy things that people want to say about the new Archbishop of Wales, the three paragraphs that really matter are sitting quietly, waiting for their moment. “Between 2020 and 2023, Monmouth diocese underwent the pastoral reorganisation of 121 parishes into 16 ministry areas.” That’s an average of 7.5 parishes per Ministry Area. It’s page 2 in the print edition, or at this link online (where the three paragraphs are split into five).

    The Ten Parish Benefice – with a single priest – is coming. Wales has been honest about it, and made it explicit. But it’s coming in England too, in cities, towns and villages alike. Most people just haven’t admitted it yet.

    To quote very roughly – twice – from the gospel reading (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2012.49-56&version=NRSVA) that followed two days later, this is where we really should be reading the signs of the times. And it might be divisive, rather than peaceful, to say so. But if we take a deep breath and actually prepare for it – rather than turning a blind eye, or running around in ever-decreasing circles – we really can stop being so afraid.

    The Ten Parish Benefice has existed in corners of England already for well over a decade. Almost everyone’s trying to deny it. Save the Parish (www.savetheparish.com) can see it coming, but think that empowering parishes with information about legal rights, and trying to wrestle money from the powerful to the weak, will stop it happening. We can wish, but sadly, while justice may be on their side, I don’t think justice is going to prevail over the vested interests of the powerful. The Five-Ten-Fifteen-Twenty Parish Benefice is coming regardless. But Christ is Risen and the Holy Spirit is amongst the people, and that’s on top of God the Father being God the Father, and from time to time there’s even a priest in the benefice, so what exactly is supposed to be the problem?

    It was easier when we had some resources. When there was a Book of Common Prayer (BCP) in every parish church in every village (and a King James Bible and a bell, wasn’t that the official minimum list?) the churchwardens could keep the show on the road perfectly well in the absence of a priest; indeed that was both their right and their duty, and we trust was also their joy. Problem solved – even in a ten-parish benefice. Until the end of 1999, the Alternative Service Book (ASB) was just as comprehensive, better laid out and in (fairly) modern language – the entire Church of England in one hand – and the same principle applied: anyone could open it and keep the show on the road. And now, just when we need it the most, we have nothing. Common Worship (CW) is a scattering of loose papers that have blown away in the wind. Even most clergy (and *cough* most bishops) can’t find their way around the main volume, and most of what you need isn’t in there anyway. And the Ten Parish Benefice is coming. But don’t panic. It can be done.

    To the north of England

    When I started in a four-parish benefice in 2012, I maintained a pattern of services in every parish every Sunday, and very soon even persuaded three of the four to ensure that the service was at the same time every Sunday. With help from retired clergy, the vast majority of services were eucharistic. I did persuade myself that four was the limit, and five would be impossible. Six years later, I was actively negotiating to combine the four-parish benefice with the neighbouring benefice of six churches, to form a combined united benefice of ten, and for this I had the agreement in principle of all four parishes, and the departing half-time incumbent of the six, in order to proactively secure the future of the benefice before any less-considered alternative was imposed upon us. So what had we learned during those years that made the impossible seem possible, not only to me, but to four contented, and indeed enthusiastic, PCCs?

    Those paragraphs in the Church Times article conclude, “It wasn’t possible for every church to have their own vicar, because we don’t have enough vicars.” But all four parishes in that four-parish benefice knew they had a vicar, because they had learned how to make the model work.

    A vicar in every parish

    I ran PCC meetings like they were house-groups. In the smaller parishes the PCC was like a full congregation meeting anyway. After a year or two, I realised “minutes and matters arising” could bog down the meeting early on, so I put “mission and ministry” as a standing agenda item before “minutes and matters arising”. I now realise the agenda was similar to those parishes that have a short service before PCC, except that we were having a short house-group meeting first, to discuss where we were up to as a parish, that month. They knew they had a parish priest. They knew they were cared for. And they knew it would continue the same, even if they were one of ten. I prioritised this as the heart of my ministry. It was the way I kept in touch with all the key lay folks. I held the larger churches’ PCCs monthly (so they would only take an hour, which delighted everyone); the others every six or eight weeks. The people are the resource: a PCC run like this is where you meet the people, and help keep the church joyful, focussed, and full of life.

    A weekly Sunday service in every parish

    BCP provided a straightforward model that made a weekly Sunday service sustainable in every parish even in the absence of the vicar: it mandated that the layfolk (specifically the churchwardens) would lead the service; and within its covers, it provided everything they would need to do so; ASB was just as comprehensive. Mandating, encouraging, and supporting the layfolk to lead the service should be just as straightforward in 2025 as it was in 1662; the only tragedy is that we haven’t had a decent practical liturgy book for the last 25 years.

    Making the liturgy sustainable across four parishes began with the Sunday morning readings. BCP gave us collect, epistle and gospel for every Sunday, clearly set out, easy to find, but in archaic language and in solid blocks of text. ASB gave us the same, with improvements to layout, and readings in a mixture of RSV and three paraphrases: the Jerusalem Bible, the New English Bible, and the Good News Bible (under its earlier name Today’s English Version, TEV). Common Worship gives us nothing. Every lay person in the church is dependent on the vicar, and every vicar is dependent on a paid subscription, and even then has to choose week by week from a bewildering list of unexplained (and to most, incomprehensible) options, and then choose a translation, and then source the readings, and then print them out, and then distribute them to the lay folks, and then… what on earth have we done?

    I have spoken to two of the people involved in compiling the programme: one about the multiple errors I had spotted (which Synod later had to correct – it turned out that they knew about them but angrily blamed others in the group on a partisan basis); and one who was blissfully unaware that CW deviates at all from Revised Common Lectionary, when CW actually deviates from RCL more than any other implementation of the three-year cycle anywhere in Christendom.

    When I started, the four parishes were subscribing to the independently-produced Redemptorist Anglican Mass Sheets, but those didn’t have our patronal festivals or harvests, and more and more often I was producing sheets locally to replace the ones that arrived from Redemptorist, and ssra.uk began to evolve: ultimately an all-new implementation of the three-year lectionary, in an all-new translation; first just for us, now for the whole church.

    I added to this a locally-produced service book, and placed one in every church, with just the parts you need, but all the parts you need, including a good selection of triple-kyrie confessions, all the collects, introductions to the Peace, seasonal prefaces, eucharistic and post-communion prayers, seasonal blessings; 55 pages in all, including all our local patronals and harvests, in a user-friendly format and a top-quality binding. Other clergy look at it jealously. I would like to offer something similar to the wider church. I wrote a week ago by email to the relevant copyright holders; I await acknowledgements and replies.

    Power to the people…

    This service book made my job easier from week to week, but the question hanging in the air is how it became empowering for the laity. And here lies the final element in making the Ten Parish Benefice sustainable. We can make the resources. We also have to let the people use them.

    There are two realistic options for a meaningful weekly liturgical Sunday service in every parish in the absence of a priest: antecommunion, and Holy Communion by Extension. People often don’t want to gather at a different time or on a different day. So the lay-folks can read antecommunion – that’s the communion service as far as the Peace. It qualifies as “a service of the word”. It maintains continuity with the liturgy of the benefice, and the worldwide church both catholic and ecumenical. It’s a substantial biblical and prayerful liturgy, sustaining for regulars, and welcoming for newcomers. Every parish can do this. All they need is a decent lectionary (ssra.uk) and a decent liturgy book (watch this space).

    …for the Ten Parish Eucharistic Benefice

    Cherry Vann, the new Archbishop of Wales, says, “at least with [the Monmouth] model every church gets a eucharist at least once a month, some of them get twice a month, some of them get four times a month.”

    If they can have a priest that often, that’s great; and they should. But there’s absolutely no reason why they shouldn’t have communion every Sunday in between as well.

    That’s the point of Holy Communion by Extension.

    If you read the official 2001 House of Bishops statement on Communion by Extension, it is clear that it took a lot to get anything at all past a group encompassing bishops with eucharistic theology doggedly protestant – almost anti-eucharistic – as well as sky-high catholic. But churches throughout the land keep the reserved sacrament. Using the reserved sacrament to give communion to the people when the parish priest is away is normal practice in the Roman Catholic church, and quite probably therefore in many Roman-rite parishes in the Church of England as well, courtesy of the infinite elasticity of Canon B5, under which every Roman-rite parish, and every totally non-liturgical charismatic-evangelical parish, survives.

    The model envisaged in 2001 – that some poor soul has to go to early communion somewhere and rush fresh sacrament to the Communion-by-Extension parish (as if nobody else owns a car or an alarm clock) is bizarre and surely undignified in comparison to giving the people communion from the reserved sacrament. In the four-parish benefice, the two parishes that had never reserved before immediately understood the etiquette to be kept around reserving the sacrament and worked out an appropriately dignified regime.

    Most liturgies of Communion by Extension go to great lengths to ensure that no part of the service looks like what might clumsily be called ‘the consecration’, lest the laity become ‘confused’. The House of Bishops 2001 text allows a version of the institution narrative to be read at the beginning of the service only, and one other vaguely-eucharistic bible passage to be chosen, to be read later, in place of the eucharist prayer. This is like replacing a joyful hymn of praise, and centuries of carefully-crafted expression of all that surrounds the eucharistic mystery, with some sparse early draft jottings on the subject, ‘lest the laity become confused’ by what they see and hear. I say, don’t be so utterly patronising. The laity will most certainly not be ‘confused’ by a simple explanation such as this, at the offertory: “In the absence of our vicar (who is leading a service elsewhere this morning), we bring gifts of bread and wine which have already been present on the altar at an earlier service of holy communion led by our vicar. We remind ourselves now of the words which will have been used at that earlier service.” Our Anglican theology rightly acknowledges the eucharist to be a mystery, and best expresses that mystery in the words that we have agreed to use together, from the Book of Common Prayer to Common Worship. What better than to remind ourselves of those words as we participate in the very particular mystery that is Communion by Extension, a service that expresses our unity with our benefice and our parish priest, as well as each other and the worldwide and eternal church; not ‘saying’ those words in the particular way that the president said them, just – um – reminding ourselves of what was said. The eucharist is a mystery anyway; the laity understand that Holy Communion by Extension is somehow different, but somehow also participating in one and the same. Feel free to go sit in an ivory tower and tie yourself in a knot over this, while one ten-parish benefice crumbles, and this one thrives. Our laity are not confused; they are prayerful, grateful, and fully understand that they are in the presence of the profound mystery of the eucharist.

    Whether any part of our vast, powerful, and wealthy church hierarchy will capture any part of this vision, I simply cannot know. Our bishops, our General Synod, our liturgical commission, and our diocesan offices, have brought us to where we are. A challenge lies ahead, and it isn’t clear that the needs of ordinary parishes are high on the agenda; they just get combined into ever-larger benefices, and left to sink or swim. So lobby where you can; and in the meantime, maybe take Canon B5, and the fact that nobody’s looking, and step out and do what needs to be done. SSRA.uk is there to help – promote it where you can. Perhaps a liturgy book will follow soon; and in the meantime, for collects at least – handy tip – it’s page 268 onwards in Canada.

    The Ten Parish Eucharistic Benefice is possible. As far as I can tell, so far, it’s either this, or it’s nine (or ten) empty churches. Which will it be?

     

     

     

  • No First Reading – Four Circumcisions Instead

    by Michael Hampson, a published author devoting his early retirement from parish ministry to producing practical resources for busy clergy and lay-led congregations, beginning with the weekly lectionary resource Sunday Scriptures for Reading Aloud, ssra.uk

    Yesterday morning at church, we had four circumcisions. Plus a weird growth on a ligament. This all happened where the first reading should have been.

    It didn’t matter who was there. Young families. First time visitors. People who had been coming for a month or two. Gen Z students who expect trigger warnings. Suddenly, without warning, there it was: four circumcisions and a weird growth on a ligament. There was all manner of weird physiological stuff following on from the four circumcisions, actually. In an ordinary church, on an ordinary Sunday morning.

    They weren’t actual circumcisions, obviously. Just a polite elderly reader at the lectern who might as well have gone to the lectern and said ‘penis’, ‘foreskin’, and ‘ritual genital mutilation’. Four times. With no context and without warning. Why do we put up with this?

    I have spent so long in the SSRA lectionary and translation (Sunday Scriptures for Reading Aloud, ssra.uk) that I have forgotten how simply dreadful, and unfit for purpose, are the Common Worship (CW) lectionary, and the regular translations (in this case NRSV), compared to the enormous (and almost universally untapped) potential that the three-year Sunday lectionary actually holds.

    A small percentage of churchgoers may be so used to the word ‘circumcised’ that they only heard ‘Hebrew as opposed to Gentile’ when they heard it yesterday; or perhaps 75% of them are so bored by the standard of the public reading of scripture in their church that they can be relied upon not to be listening at all. But it’s no excuse. This will not do. We should not be using this word in public worship any more than we should be using the words penis, foreskin, or ritual genital mutilation in regular Sunday worship. There is no excuse. SSRA is not the first scripture translation to euphemise this word; and the precedent of avoiding passages that address the first-century Christian circumcision controversy directly in contemporary lectionaries has already been set (you will not find any version of the Sunday three-year cycle that includes Saint Paul’s frustrated wish that circumcision enthusiasts recircumcise themselves and accidentally castrate themselves in the process [Galatians 5.12]). The question of whether the ritual surgical removal of the foreskin from the penis is necessary for Christian salvation is not one that was worrying people in the pews of the average Church of England church yesterday morning; neither does the unnecessary surgical removal of the foreskin from the penis serve effectively, for most contemporary listeners, as a touchingly beautiful metaphor for salvation in Christ. It is time to select a different passage of scripture for the lectionary – there are only so many slots available – or find a different way of translating this one. As for preaching about the first-century controversy around keeping the Mosaic law: the controversy was also expressed around the food laws, also well-documented in the lectionary, and these are surely a more appropriate example for use on a Sunday morning. In 2025, you need to prepare well when approaching the circumcision texts even for a small bible study session; you don’t know what personal issues people bring, what surgical history or personal trauma surrounds the specific issue, that you just don’t know about – and why is the penis suddenly a legitimate subject for discussion anyway, and can we move on quickly now please, before I call the safeguarding officer. Seriously.

    If you want to remind yourself just how dreadful yesterday’s reading was, it’s here. I still can’t easily parse verse 15, ending in ‘it’, or verse 17 (what substance?). I know I could if I tried, but this was supposed to be a text read aloud from the lectern to a mixed congregation, not a written comprehension exercise for a year 11 class.

    Circumcision made a brief appearance three weeks ago, when the original catholic version of the three-year lectionary (Lectionary for Mass, LFM) hinted at Saint Paul’s frustration, by saying that circumcision is irrelevant (Gal 6.14-18). Revised Common Lectionary (RCL), and the CW lectionary based on RCL, demanded the whole explicit chapter. SSRA opted to start Colossians a week early instead.

    This juggling of epistles is not unusual. RCL/CW epistle and Old Testament readings are quite typically two or three times the length of the equivalent LFM readings. As a consequence, the RCL/CW epistle is often a week or two out of sync with the LFM epistle. And as another consequence – an unintended consequence – almost all RCL/CW churches choose to have only two readings instead of three. The RCL editors had hoped that, by making the readings longer, they would ensure that people heard more scripture; the actual consequence is that people in RCL/CW churches have a much poorer diet of scripture than they would have had otherwise. SSRA corrects that error, with a classically Anglican approach, taking the best of the catholic original and the best of the RCL (protestant) adaptations – far too many details to list here – but click through the last two or three weeks (start at https://ssra.uk/?20250727) and you find readings from Colossians, that instead of sounding culturally alien and incomprehensible (or even offensive or triggering), are as attractive and accessible to readers and hearers alike as any that you will find anywhere in scripture. It’s just a case of paying attention to the context.

    “Where other translations are offered primarily as study texts, or to be read alone at home, the SSRA translation is offered specifically for reading aloud… [The hearer should be] drawn in by the reading – without needing a printed text – even on first hearing. …aims to deliver the full meaning of each passage in language which is clear, timeless, dignified, and, where appropriate, even poetic.”

    And the original listed aims: “encourages more confident participation in the public reading of scripture by more readers; encourages a greater appreciation of the public reading of scripture by more hearers; offers all three readings, to establish familiarity with more than 400 key passages of scripture across a three-year cycle, for an investment of just five minutes of the Sunday gathering each week; compatible with thousands of lectionary-based resources in print and online for sermons, prayers, children’s work and more; a complete Sunday lectionary solution for busy clergy and lay-led congregations; ideal for ordinary local churches on ordinary Sunday mornings; takes all the hard work out of finding, choosing, printing and distributing the Sunday morning scripture readings.”

    There has been a nagging condemnation of SSRA’s inclusive language policy on the Church Times letters page for the last few weeks, specifically the way SSRA avoids calling the Holy Spirit ‘he’. A writer this week asserts that while the Holy Spirit is indeed not male, unless we continue to refer to the Holy Spirit as ‘he’, we all risk committing the heresy of representing the Holy Spirit as a mere impersonal force, so apparently the pronoun ‘he’ for the Holy Spirit must remain in consistent use regardless. I stand corrected! But there will always be a reason not to change. There will always be a reason to do nothing, a reason to turn down the invitation to the banquet, a reason to pass by on the other side, a reason to say that doing nothing is somehow safer, wiser, more sensible, less trouble. But sometimes, the time has come to do something; the time has come to make things better. The church is in a mess in so many ways. I just thought: let’s at least get the bible readings sorted out. I had the right mix, at the right time, of pastoral experience, technical skills, opportunity, motivation, and academic background (psychology, philosophy, linguistics, theology), and here’s the result. Click, share, use.

    The three-year print editions of SSRA were released this spring. The Home Paperback edition is already in its third printing. All three editions are now available on Amazon, but it is cheaper to buy direct at ssra.uk/shop. You can see SSRA in use at Llandaff Cathedral here: https://www.youtube.com/live/gPHxNLZqG0k?t=1615s

     

     

  • Liturgical Business? Canon B2, the Calendar, and Prayers of Love and Faith

    Sammi Tooze is a member of General Synod, a member of the Liturgical Commission, and the diocesan contact for Together in York Diocese

    When General Synod meets later this week, we find ourselves dipping into the canonical waters of Liturgical Business. This will be the first piece of formal Liturgical Business many of us will have participated in, as it’s the first occasion this Quinquennium that it’s found itself on our agenda. The proposal before Synod will be to add two entries to our Common Worship Calendar: a Festival of God the Creator and a Commemoration of the Twenty-One Martyrs of Libya.

    But why the Calendar, and why only two additions? One of the treasures of our Calendar is the framework it offers us for spiritual journeying, a pilgrimage of heart and mind through the spiral of the liturgical year. As we follow the cycle, we encounter God and God’s story, and are changed by it. In the Calendar, we also encounter the stories of saints – days intentionally set aside to remember holy people who have gone before us in faith. On their appointed days, we not only recall their names but reflect on how their journey of faith, in all its joys and challenges and messiness, inspires and shapes our own lived-faith today.

    So who decides which holy people appear in our Calendar? Roughly every ten years, the House of Bishops requests that the Liturgical Commission reviews and revises the Calendar. It is widely recognised that at this point in time, the Calendar is ready for revision, in part to review gender and racial balance, but also to discern any people who have departed this life long enough to now be considered. In order to be included in the Calendar, a person must have died at least 50 years previously – unless they are a martyr – which is why people like Florence Li Tim-Oi, Desmond Tutu and the late Queen are unable to be considered under the current rules. Having said that, the guidance issued in February 2025 under GS Misc 1409 reminds us of the flexibility we have with local commemorations, offering opportunity for each of us to integrate people such as these locally to enrich the spiritual lives of our communities.

    Back to July’s Synod. GS 2408 notes that

    The Commission resolved in May 2023 that … preparatory work is undertaken to enable a substantial revision of the Common Worship Calendar in the next synodical quinquennium

    and:

    Another part of this preparatory work for a more in-depth revision of the Calendar is the current ‘pilot’ item of liturgical business … This item will reintroduce Synod to the procedures of liturgical business after a period of ten years, which will be in itself a helpful learning exercise.

    Why is this a “learning exercise”? Because, ever since the Common Worship Calendar was created as an alternative to the Calendar in the Book of Common Prayer, any revision must be done as Liturgical Business under Canon B2. This Canon is used for any liturgical material created where an alternative provision already exists, and the current Synod has not been exposed to such a situation.

    And it’s this which is the key distinguishing point between what we will be doing with the revision of the Calendar, and the Prayers of Love and Faith (PLF). In the case of the PLF, this is a new resource, created specifically because no alternative material exists. It therefore doesn’t need to go through a B2 process in the same way as the Calendar, simply because it is not being offered as an alternative to existing liturgical material. There simply aren’t existing worship materials to which the PLF are an ‘alternative’.

    In the early stages of developing the PLF, there were many canonical routes presented as options to either ‘authorise’, ‘commend’ or ‘approve’ the PLF material. It was concluded that the House of Bishops would commend the material under Canon B5, initially to be used within existing regular acts of worship. So, when the House of Bishops commended this material for use across the Church of England, this was a clear statement that they do not present us with a departure from Doctrine.

    The use of B5 rather than B2 is important, because under a B5 process there is no requirement for a two-thirds majority vote in the three Houses of Synod. To amend the Common Worship Calendar, B2 is needed, and so we need those majorities and therefore that full synodical process of Liturgical Business.

    Synod has voted for the PLF also to be used in ‘bespoke’ or ‘standalone’ services – in fact, the suggestion of bespoke services was made after the original LLF vote took place, at a point when Synod was of the understanding that this vote would enable the resources to be used in their entirety. One objection being raised is whether a bespoke service may ‘look’ more like a wedding. Would that make it be a departure from Doctrine, requiring a B2 process and thus a two-thirds majority vote in all three Houses? It is worth reminding ourselves of one key thing here. Neither the existing commended PLF resources, nor the proposed bespoke services, have any rubrics relating to these aesthetics – what people ought to wear, who to invite, how the church may be decorated, whether bells are rung or flowers held. This means that the suggestion that a bespoke service may ‘look’ different to a regular act of worship incorporating PLF is difficult to understand as a reasoned argument, as even in a regular act of worship a couple may invite friends to celebrate with them, and may choose to dress in a certain way. And, of course, the prayers themselves are just the same; the material for a bespoke service simply offers a structure by which the already commended material can be used. Theologically these blessings are the same; it’s just that one is pre-timetabled, and the other isn’t. In itself, a bespoke service does not suggest anything more of a departure from doctrine than does a regular service where the PLF are used.

    With this in mind, with the material already commended demonstrating that it is not a departure from Doctrine, we can be confident too that bespoke services will meet the same requirements. So, noting that they are not offering an alternative to an existing resource, we do not need to use precious synodical time and resource to put them through a Canon B2 process. Synod has voted for the PLF to be used in ‘bespoke’ services too, and they can continue to be offered under Canon B5 as commended material by the House of Bishops.

     

     

     

  • We used to Have Liturgy: Now we Have Bureaucracy

    by Michael Hampson, a published author devoting his early retirement from parish ministry to producing practical resources for busy clergy and lay-led congregations, beginning with the weekly lectionary resource Sunday Scriptures for Reading Aloud, ssra.uk

    From the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549, the Church of England was a church defined by its liturgy.

    The legislative arguments over PLF continue as though that’s still the case. But it isn’t.

    We are no longer a church defined by liturgy. Out in the real world – in the parishes – we haven’t had a common liturgy for years.

    What dominates the life of the parishes – and makes us all Anglicans – is not a shared liturgy, but a shared bureaucracy.

    For hundreds of years, the Book of Common Prayer defined the Church of England. You could hold it in your hand (less than one inch thick, less than A6 in size) and know that you had the entire Church of England right there, in your hand: the catechism, the calendar, morning and evening prayer, the eucharist, baptism, confirmation, marriage, ordination (bishops, priests and deacons), the burial of the dead, the 39 Articles, the full text of the readings for the Sunday eucharist, and even oddments like prayers for use at sea, and for the anniversary of the accession of the sovereign; the entire church, in one small book.

    It needed updating. 1928 was a wrong turn: archaic language, too internally political, too verbose. But the Second Vatican Council (1962 to 1965) set a new tone, internationally and ecumenically. The 1973 English-language Roman missal gave us a fresh new language for liturgy, and the foundations for the Church of England’s experimental services Series 3, published the same year. After many years of careful real-life testing and feedback, and supplemented by pieces commissioned from actual poets that are still amongst the best-loved pieces of poetic liturgy today (“Father of all, we give you thanks and praise…”), ASB 1980 replicated the high ambitions of BCP 1662: the entire Church of England, defined by its liturgy, renewed, in one book. The pages were slightly larger, the book was now thicker, but the layout and the language were fresh and accessible, and everything was there, from the complete text of the Sunday lectionary to the ordination of bishops, priests and deacons, via the eucharist for every season, baptism for every context, and morning prayer, evening prayer and eucharist for every day of the year; the entire Church of England, in one small book. Anyone could hold it in their hand. It belonged to all of us, to everyone. Hundreds of thousands of copies were bought by the parishes. Gold-edged copies, bound in white leather, were presented at baptisms and confirmations. A church, defined by its liturgy.

    How we got to where we are today is a story for another day; write your own version. But look at us now. Common Worship is not a book, or even a bookshelf, or even a bookshop, but a boundary-less concept, consisting of mismatched publications in different formats, corrections and revisions and supplements to those publications only ever issued as General Synod documents, some in PDF format, others in DOCX or HTML, plus various sections of different websites, apps, annual publications, and more besides if you want to try Google. Fine, if you have the time to spare. What are lay people, or enquirers on the brink of coming to faith, supposed to make of it all? We used to have liturgy; now we have bureaucracy. On Sunday at church, expect a photocopied leaflet; or possibly no liturgy at all. Even bishops don’t know where it begins and ends. Churchwardens haven’t a hope.

    But it’s more than just the loss of our liturgy. Where liturgy once held the Church of England together, something else holds the Church of England together instead; and that’s a huge bureaucracy. For every two-and-a-half full-time parish clergy, there’s a full-time-equivalent diocesan post: someone beavering away doing something at the regional office. All these huge, enormously expensive diocesan operations have emerged from nowhere over the last sixty years. Perhaps they are all doing valuable Christian work by some definition, but they are often hugely partisan, and only very weakly related – if at all – to a church once defined by its parishes and its liturgy. And having emerged from nowhere, these powerful partisan bureaucracies, linked to the national institutions, are now the only thing holding us together.

    At the end of the year 2000 – as the authorisation of ASB 1980 expired – the Church Times carried a cartoon, presumably intended to mock the Prayer Book Society, or at least to mock the idea of nostalgia in general. The caption ran: In 2295AD, the annual meeting of the ASB Society was held on one of Jupiter’s moons. But I think that’s me. Because ASB was replaced by nothing, nothing at all. Someone in clergy chapter pointed out at the time that ASB morning and evening prayer had technically become unauthorised without being replaced, so legally BCP was the only option (or perhaps Patterns for Worship?). I thought of him as a pedant; he was actually the canary in the mine, warning of a future where nobody in authority, or anywhere else, cared about common liturgy any more. Four and a half centuries of a church defined by its liturgy were over. They were over that day – the day that ASB’s authorisation expired – and he was the only one that both noticed and cared.

    Amongst the many losses, when ASB 1980 expired, was the use of adventurous bible translations. The set readings for Sunday’s Holy Communion, printed out in full in ASB, included readings from translations like The Jerusalem Bible, The New English Bible, and The Good News Bible (credited as TEV, Today’s English Version) – whichever the compilers thought best for the particular passage. Common Worship provides no texts and gives no guidance. Two editions of Common Worship’s adaptation of the widely-adopted Three-Year Lectionary were published independently, one in NRSV and one in NIV, both rather clunky study translations compared to JB, NEB and TEV, neither of them always ideal for reading out-loud at length from the lectern. Both the NRSV edition and the NIV edition are now long out-of-print. And the English language moves on: just as ASB 1980 was behind the times in terms of appropriate inclusive language for the human race almost as soon as it was published, so even the latest revised editions of NRSV and NIV are behind the times in terms of appropriate inclusive language for the divine. We are left with no common liturgy, and not even a decent bible. Sign me up for the team to work on ASB 2030. We’ll include a marriage service that works without reference to the gender of the partners. And choose which of these versions of this coming Trinity Sunday’s Gospel reading we might prefer (Year C, John 16.12-15):

    ‘I still have many things to say to you – more than you can know. But the Spirit of Truth will come to you, and guide you into all truth; honouring me, by taking what is mine, and making it known to you; disclosing to you the things that are to come. All that the Father has is mine; and the Spirit of Truth will take what is mine, and make it known to you.’ [ssra.uk]

    ‘I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. He will glorify me because it is from me that he will receive what he will make known to you. All that belongs to the Father is mine. That is why I said the Spirit will receive from me what he will make known to you.’ [NIV – 11 male pronouns]

    ‘I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.’ [NRSV – 8 male pronouns]

    (For reference, the word pneuma here, in the original Greek, translated Spirit, has no gender.)

    Meanwhile, the battle over PLF continues, using bureaucratic legislation as if we were still a church defined by liturgy. But take a look around, out in the real world, in the parishes. We haven’t been a church with a common liturgy for the whole of this century. And the PLF texts themselves are unworthy: there are better ones already in use in Wales, or available from scratch in seconds on ChatGPT. So the argument is not even about liturgy, in reality; the argument is about who can control that huge bureaucracy.

    If we can step back from the ongoing argument, the real question is: who are we, really? That’s the energy that’s powering the argument. I have spent my entire ministry, from ordination at the age of 24 to early retirement at 54, under the ‘promise’ that the recognition and blessing of same-sex relationships in the Church of England was/is effectively just months away. A report, commissioned by the House of Bishops, recommending exactly that, was suppressed by the same House of Bishops that commissioned it, while I was at theological college. That’s effectively my entire adult life. The real argument isn’t about authorising a few dreadful unusable prayers; it’s about ‘who we are, really’. That’s why my personal choice has been to devote my early retirement not to fighting the bureaucracy, but to crafting good liturgy; and to beginning at the very heart of it, with scripture. In standing back to take a breath, I realise that in the SSRA Complete Three-Year Lectionary, newly (beautifully) printed and published, we have something we haven’t had since ASB 1980: a complete lectionary with texts, printed out in full, specifically intended for reading aloud; except that this time they are also well laid out on the page, and of course in a properly inclusive-language translation – unlike even the very latest versions of NIV and NRSV. Our bureaucratic church hasn’t paid attention to such things for 45 years. The grand short-lived renewal schemes that come out of our regional and national bureaucracies with seasonal regularity tragically have this one thing in common: they never have anything to say about Sunday liturgy, which is still where ordinary Christian people (remarkably, and perhaps defiantly!) commit, week by week, to learning and growing in faith.

    So maybe I’m quietly working on an ASB 2030 just because nobody else is, and having SSRA in print and online is a major start. You might want to use its Gospel reading on Trinity Sunday. And then why not stick with it for the summer and beyond. Good Sunday liturgies, good words, even well-printed books: they matter. Once they’re in place, they’re just there, dependable and reliable. And they dependably and reliably both welcome and sustain.

     

    (Sunday Scriptures for Reading Aloud: The Complete Three Year Lectionary is available in three print editions, and free online, here)

     

  • What Have the Bishops Done?

    by Revd Canon Neil Patterson, Vice-Dean of Bristol Cathedral and Chair of Together for the Church of England

    Where do we find the doctrine of the C of E? One answer to that question is: in our liturgy. That is why huge significance has been placed on liturgical texts which have been, or may be, authorised as part of Living in Love & Faith. The claim is often dignified by repetition of the phrase, lex orandi, lex credendi (‘the law of praying is the law of believing’) but this is not found in any formally authoritative source. The situation is in reality a bit more complicated. It might seem to an innocent observer that the 39 Articles of Religion (1571) are a statement of the Church of England’s doctrine. But by the later 20th century it was recognised that these were the product of a particular time and concerns. So, instead, the Worship and Doctrine Measure 1974 enabled the adoption of the Declaration of Assent used at every clergy licensing. This recognises the Articles (alongside the Prayer Book and Ordinal) as ‘witness’ to the faith found in Scripture and set out in the Creeds, and requires the new minister to recognise them as ‘inspiration and guidance’ – but no longer as a decisive statement of faith in every one of their details. It is this understanding which has been recognised in the law of the Church of England by the Court of Arches.[1]

    This absence of a straightforward statement of doctrine, and the reality that an appeal to Scripture only generates competing interpretations, has meant looking to approved liturgical texts as evidence for what the Church does or does not believe, a pattern encouraged by the 19th century era of litigation around liturgical controversy. This is reinforced by the circular theological position set out in the liturgical part of the 1974 measure and the Canons; that various bodies (Synod, Convocations, ordinaries) may authorise liturgical texts which “are neither contrary to, nor indicative of any departure from, the doctrine of the Church of England in any essential matter.” In the absence of any clear test of what that doctrine is, and the lack of any workable legal means to apply a test, the authorisation of a text is effectively evidence that its content does conform to the doctrine of the Church.

    Curiously, many of those opposed to change have argued at various points that, because any change to the Church’s teaching on marriage and sexuality would be a change in doctrine, this would require the use of the full Synodical process for approving liturgy under Canon B2. This is similar to the legislative process with first, revision, and final stages, and two-thirds majorities required in each House. This was what happened, for example, when the new Eucharistic texts in Common Worship were agreed in the late 1990s, as these are alternatives to the Prayer Book service of Holy Communion. However, all that Canon B2 provides is a mechanism for Synod to approve texts which are (in its opinion) “neither contrary to, nor indicative of any departure from, the doctrine of the Church of England in any essential matter” – the test referred to above. The Canons do not include a concept that the doctrine of the Church of England ever actually changes in any essential matter, only that it is expressed differently. So neither the ordination of women as priests and bishops in 1994 and 2014 respectively, nor acceptance of the remarriage of divorcees from 2002, were a change in doctrine (which would imply, perhaps, rewriting the Creeds or redefining the canon of Scripture) but merely reorderings of our common life. Even if Synod were to endorse same-sex marriage, this would only confirm that it was “neither contrary to…..” (you know the rest!)

    I am writing whilst the LLF process is still very much underway, and it is increasingly clear following the Archbishop of Canterbury’s recent podcast interview that it will help everyone if the House of Bishops could achieve some more clarity about what they believe they are doing. Contrary to what it may seem, however, they have done more than argue and procrastinate. Last December they commended the Prayers of Love & Faith as resources for use in regular services, together with a statement denying that these constituted any change in doctrine, or of teaching on sex. I agree that they are not a change in doctrine, but they are a change. In response to the legalisation of civil partnerships in 2005, the then House of Bishops declared that “clergy…should not provide services of blessing for those who register a civil partnership”[2] and on the introduction of same-sex marriage in 2014, repeated the instruction, “Services of blessing should not be provided.[3] Whereas now they have very clearly commended a set of prayers that may be used with those who have formed a civil partnership or same-sex marriage.

    Officially, of course, there is some hairsplitting, that the Prayers do not provide ‘services of blessing’ and so somehow this is not a contradiction. I don’t think anyone is convinced. Even when they are simply used in existing services, the PLF invite a minister to name the specific couple involved, and there are prayers asking God to bless them. And ironically the inclusion of different prayers for covenanted friendships clarifies the matter – because covenanted friendships are explicitly stated to be non-sexual and non-exclusive, that makes it clear that the main Prayers are for what we might try to gloss as one’s ‘central personal relationship.’ The associated Guidance fortunately makes it clear that it is not appropriate, with the PLF as with marriage couples, to ask intrusive questions about the intimate expression of any such relationships.  The Guidance also includes warnings that services should not imitate Holy Matrimony, whilst wisely noting that particular dress and associated trimmings are varied and subject to a range of cultural assumptions.  Since the distinctive mark of Holy Matrimony (as opposed to legal marriage in England today) is that it is between a man and a woman, we do not really need this warning, as the PLF are explicitly for same-sex couples.

    I shall return to the question of what sort of movement in the teaching of the Church on personal relationships this represents below, but first want to be clear about the status of the texts. They are commended by the House of Bishops for use by ministers in their discretion under Canon B5, meaning that the House has determined that they are (guess what!?) “neither contrary to nor &c.” This formula of commendation was devised in the 1980s to introduce new seasonal liturgical material in Lent, Holy Week & Easter (1986), The Promise of His Glory (1991) and much more since, on the basis that if a specific text had been approved under either Canon B2 or B4, that would have become the only permitted text, and stifled the liturgical freedom to devise seasonal services according to local need and custom. I have seen the argument both that this was different from the Prayers of Love & Faith, because it was not controversial, and that texts commended by the House of Bishops have no particular standing in law. Neither of these is true.

    Both Lent, Holy Week & Easter and The Promise of His Glory were presented to General Synod in the form of drafts in reports from the Liturgical Commission, for a ‘take note’ debate. In both cases the motion was passed by show of hands (meaning the level of support was not recorded) and it is possible that there was only modest interest from Synod (in the latter debate someone successfully challenged whether the House of Bishops was quorate!) Nonetheless, elements of the proposed texts were resisted and, more significantly, on both occasions speakers rose to object directly to the proposed method of commendation by the House, arguing that as the new books restored ceremonies which had been deliberately abolished at the Reformation, a full canonical process of approval should be followed. The ‘take note’ format also allowed the Liturgical Commission to go away and revise the texts including responding to comments in Synod, and the texts were then published without Synod having any opportunity to express a view on the final version. Though even then sex was more exciting than liturgy (as in the Higton debate of 1987) it was not without differences of opinion on both content and process. As for the standing of the texts from a legal viewpoint, both have been cited in faculty judgments in support of the acquisition of e.g. processional candlesticks and incense apparatus, as these are envisaged by their rubrics.[4] Although the exact impact of the decision must remain unclear until tested in court, the Prayers of Love & Faith commended by the House of Bishops do say something, as much reaction seems to confirm, even if we are still trying to work out what.

    Allow me a diversion. Readers who are familiar with Yes, Prime Minister may remember the episode in which Prime Minister Jim Hacker is manipulated into appointing a don from Sir Humphrey’s old college as Bishop of Bury St Edmunds in order to ease the latter’s retirement plans. At one point he is presented with an alternative candidate who has strong opinions on matters of public morality – abortion, teenage pregnancy, gambling. Hacker protests that those are matters about which he is trying not to have a policy (by implication, because they are too difficult and controversial) and Bernard Woolley, the Private Secretary, pedantically responds, “Yes, he is against your no-policy-policy” and so he is ruled out, and Sir Humphrey’s plan advances another step.

    It seems to me that perhaps there is some hope that the Church of England is moving, more perhaps by accident than design, to something of a ‘no-policy-policy’ on sexual relationships, in spite of the strong voices who oppose this. Besides anything else, any clear policy is going to have to draw some uncomfortably explicit lines around particular sexual acts, and it is difficult to imagine this turning out anything other than laughable. In other words, it might be that we reach a position where the Church responds to particular circumstances, both locally on an individual basis and commenting on national trends, but finally gives up pretending that the public role of Christianity is to define who is allowed to have sex with whom, as if anyone were really listening to that any more. And this would then be much like our wise resistance to absolute rules on war and peace, or how people spend their money, or the benefits and risks of the AI revolution. And we could get on with worshipping and serving the God who redeemed us in Christ, and whose world needs his love so much.

    References:

    [1] In the case of in Re St Alkmund, Duffield [2013] Fam 158, paras 24(a)-26

    [2] House of Bishops statement on civil partnerships, https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2017-11/house-of-bishops-statement-on-civil-partnerships-2005.pdf, §17

    [3] House of Bishops Pastoral Guidance on Same-sex Marriage, https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2017-11/house-of-bishops-pastoral-guidance-on-same-sex-marriage.pdf §21

    [4] In Re. St John the Evangelist, Chopwell [1995] Fam 254 and subsequent judgments adopting Chancellor Bursell’s reasoning.

     

  • The Magic Money Tree for Work with Children and Young People: Good News?

    by Pete Ward, Professor of Practical Theology at Durham University

    In the last few years, the Church of England has developed a Vision Strategy for ministry and mission in the Church. Work among children and young people forms a major element in this strategy, and the announced aim to grow a younger Church includes the ambition to train 30,000 youth ministers in the next ten years. Of these, it is anticipated that 10% will be employed either part-time or full-time. To achieve this aim, tens of millions have been set aside and the first grants to pilot training projects have already been allocated.

    This is extraordinarily good news for those of us who have been working in this sector for the last 40 years. Yet the fact that this is happening should make us pause and think. This investment in youth ministry is not because of our amazing success record. Rather, the Church has been panicked into spending its historic resources because we have an ever-decreasing number of children and young people. Anecdotally, Churches who want to hire a full-time or part-time youth minister find recruitment extremely difficult because there are currently very few trained youth ministers out there. Hence the Church of England’s decision to develop a strategy to turn things around by training a whole new cohort of youth ministers, both voluntary and paid.

    I want to raise one simple question: what is the theological underpinning for what is now proposed? I think a significant part of the calling of the International Association for the Study of Youth Ministry is to reflect deeply on the experience of the Church and on the lives of young people, both those in the Church and those outside. Reflection, if it is to be worth anything, needs to be costly and to dig deep. It needs to ask awkward questions and we need to be honest with ourselves and with others. In particular, how have we got things wrong? Why have we not made the impact that previous funding hoped for?

    It is perfectly possible that, even where we have done things that have been filled with the work of God, such activities have also been the cause of our present problems. Even as we have seen amazing youth ministry stuff happen, we have also been causing our own downfall.

    In 2002 I wrote a book called Liquid Church (Paternoster Press). My central argument was that all denominations seem to see Church as a meeting; a gathering of people in the same room (sometimes, now, an online room), to do the same things. How might Christians instead engage with the spiritual life and practices that are outside the Church and see these as a missiological starting point for ministry? In my earlier book, Youthwork and the Mission of God (1997), I suggested that there were two approaches to youth ministry: one based on gathering young Christians and Church kids into groups that would be attractional, the other based on a more missional, relationship-based ministry that starts anywhere that young people are naturally present.

    In Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (1989), the missiologist Lamin Sanneh distinguished complementary ways of doing mission: through diffusion and by means of translation. Translation sees the Church expressing itself in context, in the vernacular, and taking new forms. But diffusion, drawing on what feels familiar, assumes that Church as we know it is the right response, and in the Church of England it was this option that was seen as more attractive and more effective. Church Planting, investing millions of pounds in developing ‘Resource Churches’ on the model of HTB, is essentially a form of diffusion.

    The ‘Church Youth Group’ model draws on gathering a group of young people who are already connected to the Church with the expectation that they will draw in others. While there has been a growth in schools-based ministry and school chaplaincy, here again the base line of the work remains the Church Youth Group.

    But sticking with the Youth Group model meant the writing was on the wall. Young people are like butterflies. They are with us for a while but soon they move on because they grow up. This makes youth ministry a rather unstable environment; something that is a huge success at one point can, in a relatively short time, struggle to keep the doors open. The logic of the Church Youth Groups rests on a steady flow of young people coming primarily from Christian parents. Many of those in our youth groups do not go on to be adult members of the congregation. That means fewer young adults in the Church, and in turn it means fewer children and young people who might in turn form the basis of future youth groups.

    In the late 1990’s and into the 2000s, the language changed, but little else. While ‘relational youth ministry’ became the ‘in’ way of talking and everyone started to find ways to connect with schools or other places young people were to be found, this was used as an add-on to Church groups. The focus inevitably remained on Christian young people and those with whom they socialised.

    And it was worship that became the main event; the assumption was that we meet God through sung worship. Recent revelations at Soul Survivor, Hillsong and elsewhere have led many of us, not just in the youth ministry academic community, to start asking questions about these developments: how do we understand what has happened? The worship revolution powerfully reinforced the idea that a meeting in a large auditorium was the basis for mission, to the extent that this has now become the assumed theology of most youth ministry people in the UK.  In previous generations, groups were smaller, meeting in someone’s home; the main event was Bible study and prayer, perhaps with a few songs to get us all feeling good. The large worship event told us instead that, if we really wanted to meet God, we did it by singing these songs. If we were to doubt the power of worship, all we had to do was look around us at the way God was moving so amazingly in and through these kinds of events. There are now several generations of young Christian leaders who cannot imagine any other way of meeting God than through worship songs.

    The use of the word ‘Church’ to describe missional work among young people also brought problems. The Church of England reacted to missional innovation by developing a culture of surveillance. Check lists were constructed and dioceses were surveyed to decide when an activity was a Church and when it was not a Church. Church leaders began to develop a scepticism of certain kinds of missional project if they did not conform to what was expected of a ‘Church’. These developments together have meant that forms of missional and contextual ministry were often sidelined.

    And then there are the questions around training and employing youth ministers. As various dedicated courses and schemes have closed down, youth ministry training risks becoming too generic, without enough connection between those who are innovating on the ground and those who are being trained. Practitioners need to support, and learn from, each other. The Church has also failed to offer the kind of terms and conditions of employment that can sustain a career. Low pay (and the sense that clergy will always carry more status in the organisation) eroded the confidence of those we had trained and, after one or two jobs, most moved on.

    I do not believe that the prevailing pattern of youth ministry based on Church groups and worship events will deliver what is required. It may continue to give energy and life to some, but it is a model that has diminishing returns built into it. My own Diocese of Durham is a warning. If you have no children and young people already linked to the Church and your congregations are aging and declining, then a method that starts by gathering Christian young people is pointless. The larger worship events that we have seen – quite apart from concerns around abuse, money, and power – while they offer life to many, ultimately only serve to cover over the true extent of the problem.

    Our dominant existing model of Church Youth Groups and Worship Events makes too many assumptions about how young people meet with God, and shapes what that encounter should look like. Our practice carries a theology and speaks of what we understand God to be and how God might work. Contextualisation puts these assumed theological certainties into the mixer. Adopting a missional approach to youth ministry is effectively the pursuit of a new understanding of how God might be at work and indeed what the social, ethical, and personal implications of meeting God in new ways might be.

    The Church of England, as well as having large amounts of money to throw at these problems, has another very significant asset in its network of Church Schools. Several within the central organisation of the Church have started to grasp that, while Churches may have very few if any young people, there are thousands coming every day to the schools that are linked to the Church. This is clearly a wonderful situation and working out how to responsibly, and ethically, share faith and grow disciples, in and through the connection between Churches and Schools, represents the most exciting of prospects.

    But here too the model of what ‘Church’ is can be a danger. My own experience has been that many young people are open to experiencing faith and exploring spirituality but what they are less willing to do is join a Church. Where this problem has been overcome, reaching out to young people involves a significant reorientation of congregational life. In other words, contextualisation becomes a key factor in reshaping not simply faith among young people but also the wider life of the congregation. Where the Church is able and willing to change, I think there is hope.

    So there is a risk that this last hurrah for youth ministry may be a lost cause unless we are willing to spend some time reflecting upon the problems and shortcomings of everything that has been done to develop youth ministry in this country. I argue for more missional and contextual approaches to work with young people to be developed.

     

  • Bodies at Prayer

    by Dr Karen O’Donnell, Director of Studies at Westcott House Cambridge where she teaches Worship and Liturgy. She also teaches Gender and Christian Theology for the Divinity Faculty, University of Cambridge. She has published widely in trauma and feminist theologies.

    As I’m writing this, I’m recovering from surgery on my spine to relieve a herniated disc that has been causing me serious problems for the last year or so. I’m conscious of my body in ways that are not usual to me; of the slight ache at the bottom of my back and that I’ll need to get up and stretch soon. I’m also conscious of the way in which this relatively minor injury has impacted my ability to pray. Just before Easter, as term was coming to an end, I entered Westcott’s chapel toward the end of a day for Evening Prayer. It’s a ritual I enjoy as it marks the end of my working day and helps me transition into the evening with my family. On this particular evening, my back was really painful. I hobbled down to the chapel and sat down in my usual seat. This evening, however, I found that I just couldn’t sit on the hard pew. I couldn’t stand for any length of time and I couldn’t sit down either. My body was in too much pain to pray.

    It is at times like this that we notice the place of our bodies at prayer: when they struggle to conform to our expectations, or when they are in pain. The rest of the time, we’re quite good at ignoring our bodies when we pray. Unlike our Muslim sisters and brothers, we do not have a set pattern of bodily movements to engage in when we pray. It is easy for prayer to become a cerebral thing –something that happens in our heads. Our bodies are (or can seem to be, at least!) largely superfluous.

    This isn’t new and is, I argue, a long-lasting result of the influence of Greek philosophy in the early church. The brilliant Hillary McBride charts the development of this thought in Christianity like this:

    We did not find our way to a disembodied existence on our own: we had millennia of help. Western philosophy and Gnostic religious thought influenced a popular line of thinking that goes something like this: The soul and the mind are distinct from the body (that’s Plato). The mind is where the truth is, but the body has needs, desires, and limitations (that’s Descartes, and some translations of the apostle Paul). Around the same time as Descartes lived, the Christian Reformation happened, which emphasized our mind’s ability to grasp the who and what of God: feminist and liberation theologians have written that this put the body in the straitjacket. (1)

    The result of this understanding of the body is that the body has been feared and distrusted and it is something that many spiritual seekers across the centuries have felt they have to transcend and subdue in order to make spiritual progress. When we bring our bodies to worship it is often as a problem that needs to be solved – a body that needs to be healed, a body that has accessibility requirements, a body that is in some way different to the other bodies around it. What might it mean to come into prayer recognising that we are our bodies, our bodies are not neutral, and that our bodies are not problems that need to be solved before we can really pray?

    In his new book, A Body of Praise: Understanding the Role of our Physical Bodies in Worship, W. David O. Taylor takes these questions seriously as he explores the ways in which our physical bodies engage in worship (2).  Christian liturgy – corporate, public acts of worship – is disposed to engaging the body. Not only does liturgy require our bodies in order to engage with worship (indeed, our bodies are the entrances into worship and sacrament), but Christian liturgy has great opportunity for embodied engagement.

    I used to be part of a very charismatic evangelical church and, as a youth leader, would regularly attend youth camps/festivals that included highly produced times of worship – a large rock band, lights, images, projections – all of which were, at times, accused of being manipulative. Perhaps these components were, but more traditional aspects of Christian worship do similar things. Yes, material things like incense, flowers, candles, art, architecture, the sharing of the Peace, participation in the Eucharist all have richly symbolic theological meanings but they also serve to make our worship distinctly sensory. Our senses are deeply connected to our memories, meaning that the way in which we encounter worship in our bodies can be profound. In our olfactory senses, for example, “odors take a direct route to the limbic system, including the amygdala and the hippocampus, the regions related to emotion and memory” (3).  The smell of incense, for me, is the smell of the divine.

    In a culture that has a curious relationship to bodies, sometimes acting as if completely disembodied, sometimes treating the body as something to be subdued and tamed, sometimes celebrating bodies, sometimes ignoring them completely, it is important that our spiritual encounters – both individual and corporate – attend positively to our bodies. It is important that we remember that it is only through our bodies that we encounter and come into relationship with God. It is through our bodies that we enter into prayer and liturgy. It’s not manipulative to engage the senses in worship but rather a mode of curating embodied encounter with God. It is important in our worshipping lives that we don’t replicate the dualistic ideologies of Greek philosophy but rather recognise the sense of whole being that is being human. Our bodies are not problems to solve in order that our minds or souls might be able to pray. Rather our bodies are how we pray; the very places in which we meet God.

    Notes
    (1) Hillary L. McBride, The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Healing, Wholeness, and Connection through Embodied Living (Brazos Press, 2021), 215.
    (2) W. David O. Taylor, A Body of Praise: Understanding the Role of Our Physical Bodies in Worship (Baker Books, 2023).
    (3) Colleen Walsh, “How Scent, Emotion, and Memory Are Intertwined — and Exploited,” Harvard Gazette (blog), February 27, 2020, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/02/how-scent-emotion-and-memory-are-intertwined-and-exploited/.