By Robin G. Jordan
Among the trends that I have been following on Anglicans Ablaze is what has been
described as renewed interest in hymns, more emphasis on congregational
singing, and smaller worship gatherings. A counter-trend is the continued flow
of people from smaller churches to larger churches.
What we are observing are two clusters of trends—one
involving folks who desire to engage in more intimate, participatory forms of
worship and the other folks who prefer to listen to the latest contemporary
Christian music and a celebrity preacher. A small traditional Anglican church
could benefit from the first cluster of trends if it undertook a number of
changes.
To maintain viability in the twenty-first century a
traditional Anglican church needs to establish and keep a reputation for taking
its worship seriously; having a friendly welcoming congregation; offering clear
Bible teaching, providing opportunities for leadership, ministry, and mission,
and serving its community. It further needs to reflect its community in the
makeup of its congregation. If it is a regional church, it needs to reflect the
makeup of the region.
What also is critical is that the community sees its members
as caring, loving people at the heart of whose care and love is Jesus Christ.
This means that the church members themselves, not the church’s clergy, must build
bridges to the community, which bring the church members and the community into
contact with each other.
In addition a traditional Anglican church needs to have an
attractive website on the Internet, which prompts folks visiting the website to
want to visit the church. Nowadays people looking for a new church home visit
the church’s website first. If they do not get a good first impression from the
website, they are not going to visit the church.
The 1928 Book of Common Prayer and The Hymnal, 1940 have
name recognition value to only a tiny segment of the US population, a segment
of the population that varies in size from region to region and is growing
smaller every year. They are not the draw that they were in the heyday of the
Continuing Anglican Movement in late 1970s and early 1980s. A traditional
Anglican church can no longer advertise its use of the 1928 Prayer Book and the
1940 Hymnal and attract a steady flow of visitors. Their use is no substitute
for the characteristics that I have identified in the foregoing paragraph as
essential to traditional church viability. I have watched one too many
traditional Anglican churches go belly-up because they did not pay enough
attention to these areas of church life and worship.
One of the primary reasons members of small churches do not
invite people to their church’s worship services is that they are embarrassed
by what they perceive to be the poor quality of these services. A part of the
solution to this problem is to get the congregation excited about Sunday
morning again. People who are excited about something want others to share in
their excitement. Church members, when they are excited about Sunday morning at
their church, will invite all kinds of people to their church’s worship
services.
The first step to generating excitement about Sunday morning
in a small church is to size-up the resources of the church and show the church
how it can make better use of these resources to enhance its worship services.
In a traditional Anglican church this entails giving attention to five key
areas—planning and conducting of the service, reading of Scripture, preaching,
music, and the sacraments. Only the last area requires a priest and then
primarily for the administration of the Holy Communion.
As the rubrics of the 1928 Baptismal Office recognize, a
baptized layman can administer the sacrament of Baptism in dire emergencies.
Lay baptism is a biblical practice. Jesus’ disciples baptized as laymen, not as
ordained ministers.
In his research on why formerly unchurched people joined a
church, Thom Rainer found that an important consideration was the quality of
the church’s worship music. Style of worship music and quality of worship music
are not synonymous. It is a common mistake to confuse the two. What Rainer
found was that, whatever the various styles of music that a church is using,
when a church is tangibly doing its best, the church conveys to the unchurched
visitor that the church takes the worship of God seriously. This was a major
factor that caused an unchurched visitor to return for a second visit, a third
visit, and so on, and eventually become a regular attendee at its services. The
research included churches that used a variety of instruments as well as music
styles in their worship.
Over a century ago in Loyalty
to the Prayer Book (1904) Percy Dearmer urged his readers:
Let us by all means
have bright Services, if by that we mean singing in which everyone can join, if
we avoid the temptation to make our Services dull and without significance, through
perpetual monotoning, if we secure real brightness by clear and stirring
reading of the Lessons "distinctly with an audible voice"--and by
short and vigorous sermons, and by interesting instructions; and if we remember
to make the highest Service the brightest of all. Let us, in fact, bring out
the real brightness of our Services by doing them proper justice.
Dearmer’s advice is as true today as it was then—perhaps
even more so.
If you are not familiar with Percy Dearmer, he was English
priest and liturgist best known as the author of The Parson's Handbook, a liturgical manual for Anglican clergy.
Dearmer championed the English Use, sound liturgical practice that came from
the traditions of the pre-Reformation English Church and which conformed to the
rites, services, and rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer and the canons that
governed the Prayer Book. He wrote a number of other books as well as revised The Parson’s Handbook several times.
Dearmer had a strong influence upon the music of the church during his
lifetime. He was responsible with Ralph Vaughan Williams for the publication of
The English Hymnal in 1906 and with
Vaughan Williams and Martin Shaw for the publication of Songs of Praise in 1926 and The
Oxford Book of Carols in 1928. Dearmer was professor of ecclesiastical art
at King's College London from 1919 until his death in 1936. His ashes are
interred in the Great Cloister at Westminster Abbey.
On a personal note my favorite hymn as a child was Dearmer’s
“Jesus, good above all others,” 540 in Songs
of Praise, Full Music Edition, Revised and Enlarged edition 1931, sung to the tune QUEM PASTORES LAUDAVERE.
I have given serious thought over the past few years to how
a small Anglican church that uses one of the older Anglican service books and
what is known as the “new traditional” core hymnody in its worship might reach
and engage the unchurched population of its community and its region. The article
series, “Early in the Morning Our Songs Shall Rise to Thee: The Music and
Conduct of Morning Prayer,” is one of the fruits of that thinking as it relates
to worship, particularly worship music.
Reinvigorating its worship, however, is only one of a number
of steps that a small Anglican church needs to take to achieve this goal. It
must make itself more attractive in other ways. It must also expand its
“footprint” in the community and the region. A church can be small but have a
very large “footprint.” A church’s “footprint” is its impact upon the community
and the region which it is located.
A common way for small churches to expand their “footprint”
is to have a yard sale in the church parking lot to raise money for a
charitable organization in the community such as a food bank. The community is
impacted in a number of ways—through the purchase of inexpensive items at the
yard sale and through the proceeds donated to the food bank. The church also
benefits from the yard sale—from the goodwill it generates in the community,
from the visibility it helps to give the church, and from the interactions
between church members and community members at the yard sale. The previously
invisible St. Fursey’s suddenly become the church down the street that had the
yard sale last week and the people of St. Fursey’s the nice folks who sold me
this whatsomadoodle real cheap. Another common way is a parish fair with
booths, games, prizes, and food—lots and lots of food. Any profits from sales
at the parish fair are donated to a worthwhile cause in the community or the
region. A third common way is to join other groups and individuals from the
community or the region in a community service project benefiting the community
or the region or both. This is a great way to meet people, form new
relationships, and to expand the church members’ relationship network. It also
puts a human face on St. Fursey’s.
Yard sales, parish fairs, and that sort of thing also help
church members to recognize that the church does not exist for them. It exists
for the whole community, for the entire region. These types of outreaches help
church members become more outward-looking and less inward-focused—a critical
step in church revitalization.
Jesus said, “No one lights a lamp and puts it under a
basket, but rather on a lampstand, and it gives light for all who are in the
house” (Matthew5:15 HCSB). Have you ever seen the lamps that were used in
ancient Palestine during the days of Jesus’ earthly ministry? They are tiny!
One easily fits in the palm of your hands. They also can be easily hid under a
basket, especially a large basket used to measure grain. I have replicas of the
two most commonly-used lamps. But in the dark windowless houses in that part of
the ancient world they provided a welcome light. If a tiny lamp can brighten a
house, how much more can a small church be a light in its community and its
region?!
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