I went to Israel last year as a staff member at an Anglican Consultative Council meeting. On a free day a number of us went to Galilee for a hurried but unforgettable day trip. Among our many stops was the supposed site of the feeding of the multitude (the most-told story in the New Testament) and with, for me, unmistakable eucharistic and liturgical implications.
A Byzantine church had been built at the entrance to the area. A later structure has succeeded its ruin, but parts of its floor remain with beautiful and intricate mosaics. I used up my time looking at the mosaics, but one of my colleagues ventured further, down to the grassy slope where the miraculous extension of the loaves and fishes is supposed by some to have occurred. There he found a sign that said, No picnics.
I tell this story because it is not uncommon for innovation and reform to result in a new rigidity that quite distorts their intent. Jesus ate and drank across economic, religious, and social boundaries, perhaps even on a dramatically large scale, and a later generation of tidy park-keepers have placed the putative location of his gesture off-limits to those who would eat and drink together.
In the eighth century the Carolingians imported the austere and succinct Roman rite to northern Europe as part of their policy of unification of a new and holy Roman Empire. Local practices, with their variety and ornamentation, were suppressed. But two centuries later when the Roman church had become decadent and the Ottonians sought to restore it from northern models, what came back to Rome was filled with Gallican intrusions, many of which were not cleaned out until the Second Vatican Council in the middle of this century.
Anglicans have not been immune to this pattern. The rubrics of the first Prayer Book of 1549 take for granted the continuation of the eucharist as the principal act of worship on Sundays, but with a communicating congregation of all clergy present and representatives (at least) of the laity. They also infer a return (where necessary) to a full pattern of Sunday morning worship: morning prayer, litany, and a single celebration of the eucharist.
Cranmer had not reckoned with the conservatism of traditional piety. The resistance of many lay people to regular reception of communion for reasons of exaggerated sacramental reverence led to a decline in the frequency of eucharistic celebration where the requisite number of lay participants could not be found. Morning Prayer, intended to be the first movement in a Sunday morning symphony of worship (a model that continues in the East), became in many places the central act of worship by default. The very rules that were meant to enforce both/and became the cause of either/or, leading to a tension that has been a thorn in the Anglican side ever since.
We are ourselves in the midst of a not dissimilar period of liturgical ferment, of which the Book of Alternative Services is only one visible token. As someone who has spent most of his life in that ferment, I cannot help asking what well-founded policies we have embraced that will, in the long run, have bizarre effects.
Some have begun to appear already. In keeping with the spirit of a General Synod resolution adopted in 1971, the Book of Alternative Services was conceived as a guide to a much more flexible approach to liturgy. This was never meant to encourage the notion that the field of liturgy is devoid of valid rules and structure (even if they are not absolute), nor that every point of flexibility must be stretched to the utmost conclusion to which it can be carried, but something like that is in danger of happening. Let me illustrate.
The rubrics in the Book of Alternative Services were intended to foster a concept of the liturgy as a truly corporate act in which there are many roles and functions. This had been true of our first 1549 Prayer Book, but in 1552 the tradition turned in a much more clerical direction in which almost everything was done by the priest with a few congregational responses. The Book of Alternative Services frequently identifies functions that may be performed by a deacon or by lay people as assistants or when conducting a liturgy of the word, and roles such as taking communion to the sick, which had been unnecessarily restricted to clergy. This expansion of functions has, however, been interpreted in some quarters as a mandatory dismantling of traditional church order.
I have twice attended eucharistic celebrations where everything (including the first half of the eucharistic prayer) was performed by vested lay readers. This reduces the role of the ordained leader to magic and the narrative of the last supper to an incantation recited by a wizard. The compilers of the Book of Alternative Services did not intend to undermine church order, just as Alcuin did not intend to subvert the Roman rite. We do not know what time bombs we leave behind.
It is against this background that I renounce the temptation to stand at the end of a millennium and predict where Anglican liturgy will go. Millennial forecasting is futile because the future is bound to bring the unexpected. There is, however, a ray of positive light in all of this. John Keble said, "God never lets us know the result of our actions, and in one way that keeps us humble, and in another it keeps us hopeful." The question is not what will happen? but what goals and guidelines will keep us more or less on track?
First of all, we have to remind ourselves as often as possible that the liturgical movement is essentially a theological movement. It is about the church as a corporate body with a common mission: to illuminate the way to the re-making of humanity in the model of Jesus Christ, his wisdom, his justice, his compassion, his subversion of the accepted values of self-interest, his love.
Insofar as the liturgical movement is reactive, it seeks to correct a piety expressed in individualism rather than sharing, guilt rather than liberation, political stability rather than social transformation. Biblically, the liturgical movement is rooted in the first word of the Lord's Prayer: Our (not My), and the destiny we are called to share together. It is rooted in Acts 2.42 and the notion of people held together by common teaching, by the bonds of social relationship, by the ritual action of sharing bread (at once a gift of creation and the sign of new being), and by common prayer. It is rooted in Ephesians 4.11-13 and the notion of a harmony of different gifts that combine "to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come ... to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ." It is rooted in 1 Peter 2.9-10 and the notion that the nobodies who have chosen to follow the way of Jesus are, in fact, "a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people." The liturgical movement is based on the idea that we should fashion our worship so that it will embed this vision within us.
A second goal for our liturgy is to be comprehensive, not only in terms of traditional tensions between conservatives and liberals, evangelicals and catholics, but in terms of different types of human personality and consequently of spiritual need. I find this tension running through myself. I recognize that I am a theologian of community, and yet I am a loner rather than a joiner, happy to be on the edge rather than at the centre of activity. I worry sometimes that we are in danger of creating a church only for extroverts, where more solitary people will feel unwelcome.
St. Benedict, in his Rule, said that an abbot should "so temper all things that the strong may still have something to long after, and the weak may not draw back in alarm." Without attempting to define strong and weak for myself or anyone else, I suggest that this counsel of accommodation is no mere compromise but is a principle of creative dialectics that must be played out in our theology, our worship, in the whole fabric of our pastoral care.
Finally, we must constantly remind ourselves that all our worship is about the reign of God. Our liturgy of the word must always be informed by the teaching ministry of Jesus with its good news for the poor and the broken and its provocative challenge to the established order of ideas and power. Our liturgy of the sacrament must always be informed by Jesus' table fellowship with marginalized and alienated people. I believe this means that we must craft our texts and design our liturgical events so that they open the door to new visions of the reign of God already among us (and not only to our own ready-made visions), so that they set people free rather than restrict and confine, so that they build people up and fan the flame of the God-given goodness that is already in them. These, I believe, are some of the principles that should shape the theological, pastoral, and biblical agendas of our liturgical future. If we are faithful to them, we will not forbid picnics where Jesus fed the multitude.
