NUMBER 74 LENT 2014 - Prayer Book Society · Number 74 Lent 2014 ISSN 0309-1627 Editor: John...

NUMBER 74 LENT 2014

Faith & WorshipThe Prayer Book Society ReviewNumber 74 Lent 2014ISSN 0309-1627

Editor: John Scrivener

Faith & Worship is published by the Prayer Book Society, though publication of an article does not necessarily imply that the opinions expressed therein have the Society’s official sanction. Submissions to the review are welcome and will be given careful consideration. All articles, reviews and correspondence should be sent to the editor at:

The Old Royal Oak, Oak Bank Lane, Hoole Village, Chester, CH2 4ER

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Ecclesiastical Patron: The Rt Revd and Rt Hon. Richard Chartres,Bishop of London

Lay Patrons: The Rt Hon. Lord Hurd of Westwell, C.H.,C.B.E.; Lord Sudeley, F.S.A.

The Prayer Book Society is a company limited by guarantee, registered in England No. 4786973. Registered Charity No. 1099295, I.O.M. company registration 4369F. Registered Office: The Studio, Copyhold Farm, Goring Heath, Reading, RG8 7RT.Rights in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and the Authorised Version of the Bible are invested in the Crown and administered by the Crown’s patentee, Cambridge University Press. Extracts reproduced by permission.

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THE COLLECT FOR THE SIXTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY

O LORD, we beseech thee, let thy continual pity cleanse and defend thy Church; and, because it cannot continue in safety without thy

succour, preserve it evermore by thy help and goodness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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ContentsEDITORIAL: BAPTISMS AND CHRISTENINGS page 3

THE PRAYER BOOK PART 3 9Eric Woods

CONFERENCE ADDRESSES ON THE OCCASIONAL OFFICES

BAPTISM AND CONFIRMATION IN THE BCP 27Jonathan Beswick

THE 1662 AND 1928 MARRIAGE SERVICES 31Richard Thomson

PRAYER BOOK FUNERALS 36Neil Patterson

THINGS OLD AND NEW 44Ralph Werrell

CHILD-MINDING, WINDOW-TENDING, SHEEP-KEEPING: 51 A PREACHER APPLIES THE PRAYER BOOK PSALTER

John Hardy

REVIEWS 56Eric Woods, John Scrivener

LETTERS 61

BRANCHES AND BRANCH CONTACTS 64

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Editorial

Baptisms and Christenings

While compiling this number of Faith and Worship I have noticed that, largely by coincidence, it has a more personal and pastoral flavour than usual. The concluding article in Eric

Woods’ series considers the Prayer Book today and in the future and so necessarily draws more directly on personal experience. In the three addresses on the ‘occasional services’ delivered to the Prayer Book Society Conference and printed here the writers again draw on pastoral experience of actual use, while Ralph Werrell shares recollections of a long ministry to rebut the suggestion that it is now necessary to defer to prevailing cultural norms.

It is also a coincidence that as I write there is a debate going on—stimulated by national newspapers—about Baptism, and that articles in this issue comment on the Prayer Book rite in comparison with that of Common Worship. This debate has arisen from publication of new alternative materials for use with the Common Worship service. The General Synod had requested the Liturgical Commission to produce supplementary texts ‘in accessible language’. These are not yet authorised, but are being used experimentally in over 400 parishes. It was the absence of certain words which caught the attention of the headline writers: WELBY CASTS OUT SIN FROM CHRISTENINGS (Mail on Sunday) and CHURCH OF ENGLAND REMOVES DEVIL FROM CHRISTENING SERVICE (Daily Telegraph). These allude to the fact that the Common Worship question, ‘Do you reject the devil and all rebellion against God? is replaced in the new texts with ‘Do you reject evil?’, while ‘Do not be ashamed to confess the faith of Christ crucified. Fight valiantly as a disciple of Christ against sin, the world and the devil, and remain faithful to Christ to the end of your life’, is replaced by ‘Do not be ashamed of Christ. You are his for ever. Stand bravely with him. Oppose the power of evil, and remain his faithful disciple to the end of your life’. The omitted words echo those of the Prayer Book rite in which the sponsors are told that they must, on behalf of the infant, ‘renounce the devil and all his works’ and in which the sign of the cross is made ‘in token that hereafter he shall not be ashamed to confess the faith of Christ crucified, and manfully to fight under his banner, against sin, the world, and the devil,1 and to continue Christ’s faithful soldier and servant unto his life’s end’.

1 Also earlier in the service ‘Grant that he may have power and strength . . . to triumph, against the devil, the world, and the flesh’.

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It seems a mistake to omit these ancient formulations: indeed, if I were composing a liturgy I would include them in their most familiar form: ‘the devil and all his works’ and ‘the world the flesh and the devil’2, precisely because they are familiar (try a Google search if you doubt this). Even the ‘unchurched’ will vaguely recognise them, and the fact that they come as ready-made phrases of obvious antiquity in an unfamiliar context may prompt the listener (however clumsily) to ‘translate’ them.

On the other hand the alternative texts are right, I think, to cut down the number of questions at ‘The Decision’, though there is already a shorter form which may be used. I agree here with Eric Woods’ criticisms, to be found elsewhere in this issue. The new material also makes it clearer that the parents and godparents are answering on behalf of the child.

Some of those who are using the new texts for a trial period say that they work better in practice than one would think from the page. Certainly on the page they are not very lively. The nadir is reached in the suggested words for The Commission: ‘Parents and godparents, it has been good to welcome you to (name of church) for the baptism of N’. Yeah, good to see you mate. Here the incumbent would be better advised to say something impromptu than go by the book.

The Liverpool motion which led to the demand for new material talked of the difficulty of using the Common Worship service with the ‘unchurched’. I’m not sure that ‘unchurched’ is the right word here, at least as regards the parents. People bringing children to be christened must have some residual sense of connection to the Church, and some reasons, however inchoate, for seeking baptism. Presumably good clergy will want tactfully to explore and build on these reasons. But, as with the traditional phrases mentioned above, the Church seems sometimes to actively discourage any existing cultural associations of the rite, while bemoaning the difficulties of connecting with ‘modern culture’ (always pictured in its most alien forms). It is noticeable for example that both the headlines quoted earlier refer to ‘christening’—a word which the Church has generally discountenanced in recent years, but which is still in very general use.3

A perhaps extreme example of this refusal to make encouraging use of what is already there appears on the website of an Anglican Methodist

2 The more familiar order ‘the world, the flesh, and the devil’ has made its way into the language from the Litany (‘ . . . from all the deceits of the world, the flesh, and the devil, Good Lord, deliver us’).3 See the Editorial ‘Paradoxes of Inculturation’ in Faith & Worship 71, Trinity 2012. However, there are signs of second thoughts about this: since July 2013 the Church of England website has included ‘Top 10 Facts About Christenings’. Judging by the Oxford English Dictionary ‘christen’ and ‘baptise’ are of equal antiquity in English.

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Baptisms and Christenings

LEP church (which I shall not name). The page on Baptism has, under the general heading ‘What is Baptism?’ a section on ‘Infant Baptism or Christening’, which consists of the following possible answers with comments:

The Official Naming of a baby?

No, a baby is officially named when you register your baby’s birth. Baptism makes no difference to a child’s name. Within the baptism service, the words “N, I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” is not about giving the baby a name. It refers to God’s name!

To Ask for God’s Blessing? We ask God’s blessing on a child and on his/her parents in a service of Thanksgiving and Blessing [link to different service].

To Promise to bring the children up as Christians This is what happens within Infant Baptism.At the baptism, the parents and Godparents publicly: declare that they believe in Jesus Christ and trust in him; promise to live as Christians and worship God regularly at church, promise to pray for the children, and promise to help the children worship God regularly at church.

The first two answers (naming and blessing) are wrong and marked with large red crosses. The third is right and has a large red tick beside it.

To take the last answer first: to say that the correct answer to ‘What is (infant) Baptism?’ is ‘To promise to bring the children up as Christians’ is itself wrong on any view of the matter. If this is what Infant Baptism is then the child need not be present—in fact had better not be lest he distract the parents from their vows. The logic of this would be to have a ceremony of dedication by the parents with Baptism following when the child has reached ‘riper years’. In this description nothing is done to or happens to the child at all. Of course this can’t be seriously meant—it has come of putting the proper accompaniments of the sacrament in place of the sacrament itself. The heart of the rite after all, which in an emergency can be performed without any accompaniment at all, is the application of water with the words ‘I baptise thee, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost’.

The two ‘wrong’ answers, on the other hand, are presumably there because they are commonly given by those asking to have their children christened. It seems insensitive, to say the least, to mark these

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answers with a red cross as if they represented an ignominious failure to understand. Parents struggling to explain why they want their child christened might well say that they want God’s blessing on it. This seems to me a promising starting point rather than the cue to shunt them off to a different service. The Prayer Book rite for example certainly includes prayers for blessings of various kinds, and there is nothing unreasonable in thinking of Baptism as a blessing for the child.4

Again, one must agree that Baptism is not a naming ceremony, but there is an ancient nexus between being christened and having a ‘Christian name’. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘Christian name’ as ‘the name given at christening’, and the Chief Scout (‘Bear’ Grylls) is using perfectly normal English when he says ‘I was christened Edward; my sister gave me the name Bear when I was a week old and it has stuck’. Presumably the notion of a ‘Christian name’ was particularly appropriate when pagan converts changed their names on being baptised. The idea gets some purchase from the Prayer Book rite, in which the Baptism itself is preceded by the rubric:

Then the priest shall take the child into his hands, and shall say to the Godfathers and Godmothers, Name this Child. And then naming it after them . . . he shall dip it in the Water discreetly and warily...

This does seem to associate the naming quite closely with the act of baptising. Older clerical diarists such as James Woodforde and John Skinner refer to ‘naming’ as well as ‘christening’ and ‘baptising’, with perhaps a tendency to use the first when the Baptism was in the shortened private form.5 Following the private service the Prayer Book rubrics required the child to be presented in the parish church, but this sometimes occasioned conflict:

Harry Dunnell behaved very impertinent this morning to me because I would not privately name his child for him, he having one Child before named privately by me and never had it brought to Church afterwards. He had the impudence to tell me that he would send it to some Meeting House to be named etc.—very saucy indeed.6

4 ‘...the everlasting benediction of thy heavenly washing’ (The Ministration of Publick Baptism of Infants)5 ‘A child was brought to the Parsonage from Redhill to be named. The woman said it was likely to die, but I never saw a more healthy-looking babe. I desired her to tell the mother that she must bring it the Sunday after next, when it would be upwards of a month old, to be christened in the Church’ (Journal of a Somerset Rector [John Skinner], Ed. Howard Coombs & Arthur N. Bax. 1930, p.129 [entry for 2 January 1828]). There seems to have been pressure on clergy to perform the service privately—see Norman Sykes, Church and State in England in the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge 1934, pp.249-50.6 James Woodforde,The Diary of a Country Parson, Ed John Beresford, Oxford 1924, Vol I, p.212.

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Both speakers seem to regard ‘naming’ as the appropriate word for what they are discussing.

That there was, in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, a concern to get the child ‘named’ is suggested by Kilvert’s record of the recollections of Henry Moule:

The Vicar of Fordington told us of the state of things in his parish when he first came to it nearly half a century ago [i.e. in the later 1820s] . . . One day there was a christening and no water in the font. ‘Water, Sir!’ said the clerk in astonishment. ‘The last parson never used no water. He spit into his hand’. . . . When Mr Moule came to Fordington he went round his parish and asked two questions in each house. 1st, ‘What do you think of Christ?’ 2nd, Why do you bring your children to be baptised?’ They were all agreed that Christ must be ‘an anngel’. With regard to the second question, one said, ‘Well, we must go to the Church at last so we may as well go there at first’. The rest said they understood that if a child died without a name he did flit about in the woods and waste places and could get no rest.7

It is surely interesting if in the present day some folk idea of the importance of naming is still attached to the rite of Baptism. Should the response be—as in the website quoted above—to refer the applicants to the Registrar of Births? Or does the ancient association between Baptism and the naming of children offer something to build on, a way of working towards the idea of what Hooker calls ‘the sacred mystery of their new birth’? Isn’t there a proper sense in which Baptism can be said to confer a new identity?8

Perhaps it is not the part of a layman to comment on these pastoral matters. The public rite and its effectiveness, however, he can comment upon, since these days he must often experience it. Having heard versions of the Common Worship service many times I feel sympathy for clergy who are conscious of its shortcomings, though I am not convinced that the new proposed texts are a solution.

Perhaps we expect too much from texts generally. But any Baptism rite must convey the sense that—as Jonathan Beswick puts it in relation to the Prayer Book service—‘something has happened’ and been done. The Prayer Book seems to me to achieve this, in words which bring awesomely before us the child’s eternal destiny while at the same time conveying an intimate sense of God’s embracing mercy and love. None of the modern rites succeed in doing this.

7 Kilvert’s Diary, Ed. William Plomer, Haye –on-Wye 2006, Vol.2, pp.442-3.8 ‘Baptism is the public rite whereby we are given a new name, a new identity, and thus a new destiny’ (James V Brownson, The Promise of Baptism, Grand Rapids 2007, p.102).

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It has been interesting to note in internet discussions of the new texts how often the Book of Common Prayer is referred to—including the suggestion that the 1928 Baptism Service (or something like it) should be authorised as an alternative traditional-language service. One clergyman asked ‘Is it time the 1662 Book of Common Prayer became a ‘fresh expression’?. Paul Thomas in his Using the Book of Common Prayer suggests of its Baptism Service that ‘its unfamiliarity might be its strength, and so too might its simplicity’, and offers ways of using it, perhaps in a slightly shortened form.9 That it can be used is shown by the testimony of Eric Woods and Jonathan Beswick in this issue—the reader is referred to their articles.

John Scrivener

9 Paul Thomas, Using the Book of Common Prayer, 2012, pp.113-6. See the review later in this issue

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E R I C W O O D S

The Prayer Book Part ThreeThe Book of Common Prayer and the Future

My first article traced the history of the Book of Common Prayer from the first book of 1549 until the 1604 edition of King James 1. The second article explored the making of the

1662 edition and subsequent attempts at revision down to modern times. This final article explores the role of the Book of Common Prayer in the future.1

It may seem strange to begin this final article by quoting from SAGA Magazine. SAGA is the organisation which provides travel, insurance and other services for the not-so-young. Hence the many different interpretations of its name, SAGA, as a mnemonic—of which perhaps the most repeatable I have heard is Send A Granny Abroad.

In the edition of April 2007, Terry Waite—who will always be remembered for his capture and five years’ captivity as a hostage in Beirut, when he was Archbishop Robert Runcie’s Personal Envoy—lamented the changes to the Church of England’s public worship over the last few decades. He began by reflecting on how as a boy he had ‘assimilated the teachings of the Church painlessly. The hymns, psalms and collects were unconsciously committed to memory as I repeated them Sunday by Sunday from my seat in the choir stalls. Although I didn’t realise it, I was building up a store of memories that would stand me in good stead in later life.’

Terry Waite went on to recall how precious that ‘store of memories’ was to prove during his years in solitary confinement:

I had no need of a Service Book as my memory had captured whole passages in childhood and they were mine to call on at will. During those long dark days I refused to engage in extempore prayer as I felt that if I did so I would simply end up by constantly asking God to release me and thus fall into deeper despair. Instead I was able to draw on the collects of the Church. ‘Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord, and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and

1 Eric Woods, ‘The Prayer Book Part One’ in Faith & Worship 72, pp.9-25; ‘The Prayer Book Part Two’ in Faith & Worship 73, pp.34-48. They and this final article are based on three lectures given in Sherborne in 2012 to mark the 350th anniversary of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.

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dangers of this night.’ Such a prayer gains in significance when you are actually sitting in the dark away from the family and friends. Within the language of the Prayer Book there was poetry and harmony and the recollection of those ancient writings breathed harmony into my soul which at times I felt was in danger of fragmenting.

Terry Waite is well aware that today we live in a very different world from his schooldays during the Second World War and beyond. He puts it like this:

The settled community I knew as a child has largely gone. Internationally and nationally, the Church is faced with tremendous changes. In England today, Sunday is very little different from the other six days of the week. Evensong, which was conducted in almost every church, is now a rare occurrence. In most churches the old Prayer Book has disappeared and along with it the regular use of good language.I am no Luddite, for, along with many Anglicans. I felt that the 1662 Prayer Book needed revision, but I don’t believe that I am alone when I suggest that the clearout might have been a little too rigorous. There was a time when I could attend a communion service and, in the company of others, participate in a contemplative way. I did not have to stand up every few moments; greet my neighbour with a handshake, hug or kiss or sing along to the strains of a guitar.

Terry Waite’s conclusion is a sad one: ‘I remain an Anglican but the Church of England, as those of my generation have known it, has gone for ever.’ Yet he managed to be a little more optimistic in his essay in a volume published to mark the 350th anniversary of the 1662 Book:

It was John Henry Newman who put words into the mouth of one of his characters in the novel Loss and Gain to which I find I can heartily subscribe and with which I will conclude this brief contribution: ‘I value the Prayer Book as you cannot do for I have known what it is to one in affliction. May it be long before you know it in a similar way; but if affliction comes on you, depend on it. All these new Fancies and fashions will vanish from you like the wind, and the good old Prayer Book alone will stand you in any stead’.2

In that regard, it is worth remembering, as we noted in the second article, that the much trumpeted Alternative Service Book 1980 lasted for just

2 T Waite, ‘A Very Present Help in Trouble’, in P Dailey (ed) The Book of Common Prayer: Past, Present & Future, 2011, pp. 197-8

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The Prayer Book Part 3: The Book of Common Prayer and the Future

twenty years. It is now illegal to use it. Common Worship, a veritable library of books published from 1999 on, now holds sway. My question today therefore has to be, ‘has the Book of Common Prayer a future in the twenty-first century?’ My reply is ‘Yes, if we use it wisely and use it well.’

There are three reasons—or perhaps I should say three categories of reason—why I believe the Prayer Book has a future, and certainly want it to have a future. They are, first, literary; second theological, and third pastoral.

Let us begin with the literary reasons. These are, perhaps, the most familiar to all defenders of the Book of Common Prayer: constantly we wax lyrical about Thomas Cranmer’s prose and all that it has given to the English literary tradition. Of course, not everyone agrees. I vividly remember—during a brief and I have to say unhappy time on General Synod—hearing that prose referred to disparagingly as ‘Tudor, or as we call it in the trade, “half-timbered” language.’ But the half-timbered has many friends, not least that craggy old Welsh poet-priest R. S. Thomas:

Some think there will be revival. I don’t believe it. This plucked music has come to stay. The natural breathing of the pipes was to a different god. Imagine depending on the intestines of a polecat for accompaniment to one’s worship. I have attended at the sacrifice of the language that is the liturgy the priests like, and felt the draught that was God leaving. I think some day there will be nothing left but to go back to the place I came from and wrap myself in the memory of how I was young once and under the covenant of that God not given to folly. 3

R. S. Thomas is well-known for being fundamentally pessimistic about the whole of the modern age, let alone the modern Church. But there

3 From his poem ‘Perspectives’ in R.S. Thomas, Later Poems 1972-82, 1983, pp.166-7.

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is a hugely serious point here. It is not that over-educated, middle-class, elderly churchmen and churchwomen are offended by what they see as the suburban supermarket language of more recent Prayer Books (though too many clergy wave aside their opinions as worthless, in a quite breath-taking and patronising display of clerical arrogance which seems strangely at odds with their modernising spirit). It is that, in my experience, today’s younger people are not persuaded by the modern liturgies either. When they come to church—which may not be very often—it is precisely not in the expectation that everything will be immediately accessible, that everything will be in the kind of English they have been employing at work during the week. They expect—and I do not mean they have necessarily articulated this: it is too deep-down for that, and they are not sufficiently spiritually self-aware to be able to put it into words—they expect something which will be a vehicle for mystery and wonder and awe, and which will lift them onto a different plane of experience and awareness.

So it will not surprise you to learn that, of the thirty or so couples who have booked their wedding for Sherborne Abbey or one of my other churches this year, the vast majority have not chosen Common Worship for their marriage service. Now, I am not one of those parish priests who are highly directive over the choice of service. I set out the alternatives, and let the couples choose. It is their day, not mine. Many have already done their homework by downloading the relevant texts from the Church of England website. And most don’t like the Common Worship version at all. Take its Preface. When the couples come to the sentence ‘The gift of marriage brings husband and wife together in the delight and tenderness of sexual union and joyful commitment to the end of their lives’, the reactions is always ‘I say, that’s a bit over the top, isn’t it?’ or ‘Cor, that’s a bit in yer face, Vicar’—depending on the couple.

That does not mean that they immediately rush to the 1662 ‘It was ordained for a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication.’ I have to be honest, and say that the Series One service, which is virtually identical to that proposed in the ‘Deposited Book’ of 1928, provides most of them with what they find most suitable and appropriate. Half-timbered language, certainly, but although it will not please 1662 fundamentalists, it makes the point that ordinary, unchurched young people are not insensitive to religious language, and feel let-down by that language if it is mundane, flat, everyday, or just too ‘in yer face’.

Fredrik Arvidsson, Senior Chaplain at The King’s School, Canterbury, puts it well:

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There are so many ways of using Cranmer’s wonderful liturgy with young people and making it relevant and appealing to them without changing a word of it. I have often asked the pupils if they would like to look at other modes of worship, but such suggestions of change make them uncomfortable. Amid their fast-paced world of computers, smartphones, social-networking sites and satellite television, they are seeking some stability. They need and want a sense of belonging and mystery which they find in the Book of Common Prayer. Young people are asking for, and need, dignified worship—but it needs to be done well and with an engaging sermon. It is sometimes said that younger people find the Prayer Book inaccessible. This may initially be true for some, but if it is taught properly and with love, feeling, meaning and a sense of belonging, it does not take long to comprehend – it is not difficult to grasp that ‘manifold’ is not only a part of a car!4

The point about ‘mystery’ is well made. The language of Thomas Cranmer as preserved in the Book of Common Prayer was not the language of the nation in 1549 or 1552, let alone in 1662. Diarmaid MacCulloch explains why:

Cranmer deliberately intended the language of the book to be sonorous and slightly archaic: he had no intention of letting his liturgy be sneered at for being modish or inferior to the old Latin. This archaic quality was highly significant for the future of English: it saved it from being hijacked by the pompous Latin and Greek vocabulary beloved by many of Cranmer’s scholarly contemporaries.5

In his book written to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the King James edition of the Bible, Melvyn Bragg recalls his years in the choir of St Mary’s, the parish church of the north Cumbrian town of Wigton:

This was an unconscious education. The stories and words of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, the Psalms and hymns, were sung and listened to for many years. They are still lodged in my mind. They were a gift. The music, too, the anthems we sang, the organ voluntaries we heard and the quiet ceremonies of a then benign, easy, undemanding church built up a hidden store of knowledge and sensations, church bells and candles, bowing to the altar, versicles and responses.6

4 F Arvidsson, ‘Inspiring Young People’ in Dailey, op. cit., pp.188-95 D MacCulloch in the Introduction to the Everyman edition of The Book of Common Prayer, London, 1999, p. xxi6 M Bragg, The Book of Books: The Radical Impact of the King James Bible, 1611 – 2011, London, 2011, p.346

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This is all the stuff of mystery—of gaining a sensitivity to the numinous, to the divine. The trend for many years, however, has been to produce a heightened ‘sensation’ in the participants in worship by exposing them to an artificial liturgy that is purely experiential. I sometimes quote an extreme example recorded in 1973 by Harvey Cox, formerly Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard. Cox, a Baptist minister, had recently discovered the importance of ritual and myth in religion, and recorded this liturgical experiment—oddly called ‘Byzantine Easter’—which took place in a Boston discotheque at four o’clock in the morning. Cox had devised it, and was assisted by an Episcopalian, a Melkite and a Roman Catholic priest and two United Church of Christ ministers:

The congregation of some two thousand placed upon the altar ‘pumpernickel, cinnamon buns, doughnuts, twinkies, long French loaves, matzos, scones, heavy black bread and raisin tarts’. They next began to paint ‘peace signs, fishes, crosses and assorted graffiti on one another’s faces and bodies’. Cox explains that there was an attempt at popular liturgy of participation (as opposed to a ‘spectator’ liturgy) and hence there was dancing with light-and-music collages and ‘physical encounter movements’. The aim was to revive the powerful old symbols of Christianity and bring them more directly into the service of human liberation. The music ranged from the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ through the theme march from the film Z, and ended with the Beatles singing ‘Here comes the Sun’, at which point someone opened the back door and ‘by some miracle of celestial timing, the sun was just beginning to peek over the Boston extension of the Massachusetts turnpike’. Two Boston policemen, dismissed by Cox as ‘custodians of convention’, brought the proceedings to a halt because it seemed to them ‘more like a debauch than a religious service’.7

Peter Hebblethwaite, quoting this incident, comments that these way-out liturgies are ‘based on a fundamentally false appreciation of the nature of ritual, which is never a purely spontaneous expression of man’s interiority (as Cox claims) but rather an inherited social experience which is repeated and strengthened in rites.’ He suggests that the tendency towards more spontaneous forms of worship, far from being a sign of religious enlightenment, is a reflection of a society in which social relationships are breaking down and are increasingly loosely structured. He continues:

7 Quoted by P Hebblethwaite, The Runaway Church, London, 1975, pp.40-41, from H Cox The Seduction of the Spirit, New York 1973. See also my ‘The Domino Effect’ in Faith & Worship, Number 62, Easter 2008, pp. 7-8

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...liturgy needs to move round ‘fixed points’ which the historical community that is the Church recognizes as its objective signs, ‘the intersection of the timeless with time’ as Eliot put it. We live in a world that is full of noisy signals, and the mass media assault from all sides. But the liturgy is made up of signs which have transforming significance for the confused, perplexed humanity that we are.8

Hebblethwaite, a former Jesuit priest, was writing primarily about the Roman Catholic Church, but his remarks are equally relevant to the Church of England. Indeed, at about the same time, the highly respected Anglican priest and spiritual director Martin Thornton was warning that we must keep our eye very firmly on the interplay between theology and culture:

The old Western rite (or the 1662 Communion Service for that matter) cannot be seriously faulted on theological grounds. Neither can this sort of liturgy be rejected because it is verbose, fussy, complex, or expressed in archaic language. The quarrel with the old Western rite is that it fits so comfortably into a society in which ‘ladies do not romp’, let alone dance round the altar in incarnational ecstasy. Nor do I believe that pop-tune-hymns, a striptease offertory and hashish interludes will immediately convert the young to the Christian faith.9

From a very different standpoint, the radical theologian Don Cupitt comes to a remarkably similar conclusion, arguing that the Book of Common Prayer is earthed and rooted in a culture in a way that no modern liturgy is. Writing in 1989 he said of the Alternative Service Book of 1980 that it

...floats in a social vacuum, its pages containing no reference anywhere to any of the distinctive features of modern civilisation . . . The book moves in a Heritage limbo, pseudo-traditional and outside real history. In relation to the lives we are actually living and what is making news at the end of the twentieth century, the ASB services are the purest fantasy. Morally speaking, we might just as well be spending our time in church reading The Lord of the Rings.10

It is impossible to separate the literary value of any prayer book from its culture, and whether or not it is ‘fit for purpose’, as they say, within its present culture. It is not so very long ago that T. S. Eliot, coming

8 Hebblethwaite, op.cit., p.41. 9 M Thornton, ‘The Cultural Factor in Spirituality’, in C Martin (ed), The Great Christian Centuries to Come: Essays in honour of A. M. Ramsey, London, 1974, p.19310 Don Cupitt, Radicals and the Future of the Church, 1989, pp.138-9.

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from America, embraced Anglicanism and found fresh inspiration in the Book of Common Prayer. But not many of us are budding Eliots. Nevertheless, time and again one finds that modern liturgies have no cultural connection with the mass of the people at all, whereas the old services, through their rhythms and their resonance, touch deep chords even in the most unchurched. As it happens, I am writing this on the day I took a wedding between a couple one of whom, though very English, was deeply rooted in her Nigerian heritage. Her family, from both England and Nigeria, were perfectly at home with the old service. They would have had far more problems with the irredeemably white middle-classness of Common Worship.

In any case, contemporary society and culture change so very quickly that to have a liturgy that manages to reflect exactly where we are now would be to have a liturgy that is in a constant state of revision—and that will benefit no-one.

But it is time to look at a few theological reasons why I hope the Book of Common Prayer has a future. For make no mistake, there are some serious theological errors in Common Worship, just as there were in the Alternative Service Book.

Take the whole area of the confession of sin and the receiving of the assurance of forgiveness. The Book of Common Prayer in the Holy Communion service typically gives us what I have often heard referred to, disparagingly, as a ‘grovel’. I am sure you know it by heart:

Almighty God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Maker of all things, Judge of all men: We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, Which we from time to time most grievously have committed, By thought, word, and deed, Against thy Divine Majesty, Provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us. We do earnestly repent, And are heartily sorry for these our misdoings; The remembrance of them is grievous unto us; The burden of them is intolerable....

Is that a grovel? I suggest not. It is an acknowledgement of our utter unworthiness before God, and our failure time and again to live the sort of lives he has called us to live, or be the sort of people he means us to be. But note how this Confession ends:

Have mercy upon us, Have mercy upon us, most merciful Father; For thy Son our Lord Jesus Christ’s sake, Forgive us all that is past; And grant that we may ever hereafter Serve and please thee In newness of life, To the honour and glory of thy Name; Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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Now, if that is not a simple throwing of yourself on the grace and mercy and forgiveness of God for all that is past, and on the grace and help and strength of God for all that is to come, I do not know what is.

Meanwhile in Common Worship we have indeed been exhorted to ‘confess our sins in penitence and faith’, but with the qualification that we must do so ‘firmly resolved to keep God’s commandments and to live in love and peace with all’. Now I’m afraid that that qualification will not do. It is precisely because I constantly fail to keep God’s commandments and live in love and peace with all that I need to throw myself on God’s grace and mercy and forgiveness in the first place, and if in order to approach the Mercy Seat I have to screw myself up to ‘firm resolutions’ (rather like New Year’s resolutions but now to be made every week) then I am afraid I will not get to the Mercy Seat at all. This heavy moralising is pure Pelagianism. I thought that particular heresy had been dealt with by St Augustine long ago. But if I persevere, and do manage to reach the Mercy Seat of God, what do I find myself asking? For amazing grace, that saved a wretch like me? Well, not exactly. ‘In your mercy, forgive what we have been, help us to amend what we are, and direct what we shall be; that we may do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with you, our God’. It trips off the tongue easily enough—but is it enough? Not for me—and not, dare I suggest it, for the spiritual condition of most of us. I’m reminded of that parish priest who was rash enough to put up a great banner outside his church: ‘This Church is for Sinners only’. And all the great and the good of the parish got up a petition to protest that they didn’t want to be seen going into church under a banner like that! Why are we so proud?

Now let us move to one of the Prayer Book services most often held to have been in sore need of revision, that of Holy Baptism. Why? I find far more reassurance there than I do in the revisions, as in the prayer for the infant, ‘Receive him O Lord, as thou hast promised by thy well-beloved Son, saying, Ask, and ye shall have; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: So give now unto us that ask; let us that seek find; open the gate unto us that knock; that this Infant may enjoy the everlasting benediction of thy heavenly washing, and may come to the eternal kingdom which thou has promised by Christ our Lord.’

Or, in the next section, the words of the Gospel: ‘… Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of God. Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein. And he took them up in his arms, put his hands upon them, and blessed them.’

And what of Common Worship? Well, here (I confess) I begin to become really very angry. It is an immensely wordy service, though of course

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section after section ‘may’—and therefore may not—be used (which poses the question of how far the clergy can be trusted to leave in what is necessary and leave out what is superfluous). The note of assurance is largely lost in a welter of words. And some of the eleven or (if the candidate is old enough to answer for him or herself) fifteen questions that have to be answered are positively objectionable. ‘Do you submit to Christ as Lord?’ asks the priest. ‘I submit to Christ’ reply the candidates, or the parents and godparents.

Now, the noun ‘submission’ and the verb ‘to submit’ are not unknown to the Authorised Version of the New Testament, though I can find only two verses which in any sense refer to submission to God. There is Romans 10.3 where, talking of Israel, Paul says they ‘have not submitted themselves to the righteousness of God’. And there is James 4.7: ‘Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you.’ The other references all have to do with human relationships, as in Ephesians 5.21: ‘Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God.’

Now the verb behind the AV’s translation is υποτάσσω, which can be translated ‘to subject’, ‘to subordinate’, ‘to obey’ or indeed ‘to submit’. What amazes me is that in the year 2000, at a time of unprecedented awareness of child abuse and human vulnerability to the aggression of others, the compilers of Common Worship should have chosen to use such a loaded word in today’s language as ‘Do you submit to Christ?’ Cranmer in his three (not eleven, three) questions in the Publick Baptism of Infants finds no such necessity. The language of ‘submission’ in an ancient Prayer Book would be difficult today. In a twenty-first century Prayer Book it is totally unacceptable.11

Which brings me to the pastoral reasons why I believe there is a future for the Book of Common Prayer in the twenty-first century. Let us go back for a moment to my Sherborne wedding couples. I spend a great deal of time on each individual couple. I believe it is time well spent, an investment. Not an investment in the future of the Church in Sherborne, as sadly most of those couples either already live in London or wherever the work is, or cannot afford to live in our expensive little town. But rather an investment in the future of the Church itself, as well as in their future as a married couple. And they take me seriously when I ask them to come to church in the weeks and months before their marriage.

However, for many young couples Sunday morning is impossible. That is not so much their choice as the way the world is. Many, many people

11 There is further discussion of the theological and doctrinal importance of the Book of Common Prayer in the Easter 2010 edition (Numbers 65-66) of Faith & Worship, including my paper ‘Innumerable Benefits: the Soteriology of the Book of Common Prayer’ (pp.23-38).

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have to work on Sunday mornings. That is why we need as a Church to be as flexible as possible in providing opportunities for worship to those within our care and cure. And that includes Sunday evenings.

Sunday evenings are popular with my wedding couples. Not just because the service is at 5.00pm in the winter or 6.30pm in the summer, both of which times are quite ‘dead’ for many other activities, but also because Evensong is a service which feels less threatening to them than the principal Parish Eucharist.

Let us be quite clear about this. By its very nature the Eucharist, the Holy Communion, is an exclusive rather than an inclusive ordinance. After all, in the Early Church catechumens were not even allowed to witness the Eucharist, let alone take part in it, until they themselves were baptised and confirmed. The Eucharist is not a missionary ordinance. But nowadays it seems to be the staple for every moment of the Church’s life. In my bad moments I call it ‘chips with everything’. And I do not believe that is what we should be offering either the faithful, committed congregation as the only part of their diet, or the basically ‘unchurched’ as the only service to which they are invited.

The great, good and saintly Michael Ramsey warned about these things many years ago when he was Bishop of Durham. As a member of the Catholic tradition himself, he welcomed the renewed emphasis on the Eucharist in the Church of England. But he could not but be aware of its dangers. He characterised them under three headings:

First, he said, the emphasis in modern rites and usages on the Eucharist as ‘our offering’ tended to diminish the fact that it was primarily about ‘the one sacrifice of the Lamb of God.’ He wrote that ‘Though Catholics and Evangelicals may differ in their views of the relation between our Lord’s sacrifice and the sacrament, they are at one in believing our Lord’s sacrifice to be the great fact under whose shadow we worship.’12

Second, Ramsey warned that there is a danger in over-emphasising that the Holy Communion is ‘corporate’. He explained that, though here a truth was being recovered, the ‘Holy Communion involves none the less the responsible act of an individual, and it is an act full of awe and dread.... The awe in the individual’s approach to Holy Communion which characterized both the Tractarians and the Evangelicals of old, stands in contrast to the ease with which our congregations come tripping to the altar week by week.’13

Third, he utterly opposed the suppression of some services—most typically those in the early morning—so that there would be one service

12 M Ramsey, Durham Essays and Addresses, 1956, p.1813 Ibid., p. 19

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at which one congregation would gather in ‘fellowship’. He asked ‘if you have one celebration of the Holy Communion at 9 and suppress the services at 7 and 8 so that all the people are present at 9, is there necessarily more “fellowship” in the Christian sense? I doubt it. There may be a certain “symbol” of the fellowship, but not necessarily more than that. It is possible to have worshippers at 7, 8 and 9, and true fellowship in a supernatural bond of charity through participation in our Lord.’14

But I have wandered away from Evensong. What is happening to Evensong? In Sherborne it is beautifully sung, and often attracts a large congregation. In the depths of the winter numbers shrink, but so far the Choir has not suggested to me that what they are doing is not valid when there is only a small congregation. If they were to do so, I would remind that that it would be totally valid without any congregation at all. But I do not think they will harbour any such thoughts, because I know equally well that if I were so foolish as to suggest that we attempt to sing a modern replacement for Evensong as we all know it, I would soon find myself with no choir, and certainly with no congregation. A glorious Sung Evensong in Sherborne Abbey is not just an aesthetic bonus. It is a spiritual and a pastoral necessity.

Yet Evensong has all but disappeared from most of the Parish Churches of England. Why? What else are the clergy doing? Watching television? Tending their gardens? Surfing the net? Let them go back to their churches, ring the bell, and say and pray Evensong faithfully, and (to adapt the old chorus) it may surprise them what the Lord will do.

I realise that here I will touch a raw nerve with many. But I am going to suggest that some of our parochial clergy have become very lazy. They have been seduced by their tutors at their theological colleges or on their theological courses into believing that the priest should conduct no more than two services on a Sunday. I recently went to take an evening service at a church in deepest, darkest Dorset in response to an urgent ‘SOS’ from the parish priest. Of course I did. That’s what priests do. How can we leave the faithful unfed? As it happened, I had already taken four services that day in my own benefice. Evensong was my fifth. When I enquired of the Churchwarden if the parish priest was ill, or on holiday, I was simply told, ‘Oh, our Vicar won’t take more than two services on a Sunday’. The clergy used to be the commandos of the Church of England. Nowadays we are doing a very good impression of being its Chelsea Pensioners. On second thoughts, that is really very unkind to the Chelsea Pensioners.

14 Ibid., p. 20

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Earlier in this article, in commenting on the literary value of the Book of Common Prayer, I quoted some of the fears expressed in the 1970s by Martin Thornton and Peter Hebblethwaite about what was happening to liturgy then. You may think that they were over-reacting, and in one sense you would be right. The liturgical anarchy which appeared inevitable in the 1970s was eventually rounded-up and corralled by the Church of England Liturgical Commission in what I have already described as ‘a veritable library of books’, Common Worship. First came The Common Worship Lectionary in 1999 (1309 pages) followed closely by Common Worship: Services and Prayers for the Church of England in 2000 (850 pages). In the same year Common Worship: Pastoral Services was published (417 pages). Things went quiet for a little while as we digested the new books, but then in 2006 came Common Worship: Christian Initiation (a relatively slim 377 pages) and Common Worship: Times and Seasons (a whopping 681 pages). Common Worship: Ordination Services appeared in 2007 (a mere 204 pages) and Common Worship: Festivals (501 pages) followed in 2008. And these are only the books which are still extant: other, preliminary volumes have since fallen by the wayside.

Not surprisingly, in 2011 there appeared Finding Your Way Around Common Worship: A Simple Guide by Mark Earey. It is actually an extremely useful book. Earey himself, not without a little hubris, described it in his Introduction as ‘the ‘manual’ that should have come with the Common Worship library.’ He went on:

The first volumes of Common Worship, which came out around the year 2000, took up half a shelf, but some have been superseded, and all have been followed by more parts of the library, so that the ‘full set’ has been completed only in recent years. How is anyone expected to keep up with what there is, let alone know where to look in the library to find the answers? The result is that, unfortunately, ‘Common Worship‘ has become, for some in the Church of England, a byword for wordiness and complexity. The sheer amount of material is seen not as an abundant resource, but as a complicating constraint.

Small wonder, perhaps, that in his fulsome Preface to the book, the Bishop of Coventry noted ‘It helps that Mark is an engineer by training. He knows how one bit of something is connected to another, what it is doing and how the total system is meant to work.’15

But this merely serves to highlight the pastoral deficiencies of the

15 M Earey, Finding your way around Common Worship: a simple guide, London, 2011. See also P Bradshaw (ed), Companion to Common Worship, London 2001, and the Using Common Worship series of books, of which at least eight have been published since 2000 at between £8.95 and £10.95 per copy.

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‘library’. How can a library of seven books, amounting to nearly 4,500 pages and costing up to £30 each, begin to meet the pastoral needs of the people of God? How can it meet their spiritual needs, either? The answer, as its compilers would no doubt insist, is that it is a quarry from which clergy and others are meant to hew what they need for this situation or that.16 But that entirely misses the point made so graphically by Terry Waite that it was only because two books, the King James Version of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, were so much a part of him—almost part of his DNA—that they kept him alive spiritually, mentally and emotionally in his darkest days in solitary confinement. How, one wants to scream, will Common Worship ever find its way into the spiritual bloodstream of the average worshipper, given its length and complexity? I simply do not understand the joy which so many clergy take in cutting and pasting bits from here and there to produce a bewildering array of sub-rites which guarantee that the average Anglican on holiday in this country can never, ever be sure of what he or she will get at a Church of England service on a Sunday morning, and may not even discover a family resemblance to what they have been used to elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the Book of Common Prayer dies a death by a thousand cuts as clergy stop offering the old and familiar services which were so much part of the spiritual bloodstream of an earlier generation on a Sunday, or (at best) relegate them to a distant church on one early morning a month. It is a wonder that it survives at all. But it does. And one of the reasons it still survives is that it alone does justice to the principal moments of the life of parishioners, of which the close of life is perhaps the most important. Funerals remain amongst the most important rites of passage for the vast majority of the citizens of this land, and still today most want their funeral service to incorporate the ‘benefit of clergy’. And what do we give them? So often ‘the sacrifice of the language which is the liturgy the priests like’, as R. S. Thomas put it. Time and again I arrive early at Yeovil Crematorium and listen to one or other of my ordained brothers or sisters treating the deceased, and his or her grieving relations, to what amounts to a Gang Show with hymns—or else a liturgy which, in the context of a municipal crematorium, might as well have come from Old Constantinople.

Why? Why cannot we grasp this simple fact, that a funeral service is primarily a pastoral office? It is not about liturgy, as such, at all. It is about

16 If they can afford it. The cost of the seven Common Worship volumes listed above is £175. To buy the further ten guides mentioned in n.15 would add £108 to the bill. Then there are a host of additional volumes, such as New Patterns for Worship, London, 2002 (£25).

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finding the appropriate liturgical response to the particular needs of this family or that. And the wise and caring pastor will always tailor the service to the needs of the mourners, not to his or her own liturgical preferences. If we do not do that, then we are guilty of giving the children stones instead of bread.

Just take a look at the Outline Order for Funerals and the Notes to the Funeral Service from Common Worship. Terribly worthy. Terribly directive. Terribly didactic. Common Worship provides rites for

• At home before the Funeral• For those unable to be Present at the Funeral• For receiving the Coffin at Church before the Funeral• A Funeral Vigil• On the morning of the Funeral• The Funeral Service• The Funeral Service within a Celebration of Holy Communion• The Blessing of a Grave• At Home after the Funeral• The Burial of Ashes• A Memorial Service• A Memorial Service within a Celebration of Holy Communion

It all sounds so pastorally helpful. But, after nearly thirty-five years of officiating at all these occasions, I have to tell you that it is mostly utterly inappropriate for where people actually are. Modern pastoral liturgies remind me of the old Irishman who was stopped by a driver asking directions for Cork. ‘Cork?’ he replied incredulously. ‘To be sure, if I were going to Cork I wouldn’t be starting from here.’ And yet the new liturgies demand that the people start from where the rites are, rather than allow the pastor to craft rites for where the people are. And my people are certainly not queuing up for a large supply of off-the-peg liturgies for before, during and after the funeral. Let no liturgists come to my funeral—but pastors, real pastors, will be doubly welcome.

Yet I am far from dismissive of Common Worship. There is much good material there: like the curate’s egg, parts of it are excellent. The problem is simply that, pace Aristotle, the whole is less than the sum of its parts. As the 1662 Prayer Book’s note Concerning the Service of the CHURCH (itself echoing the 1549 Preface) said of the medieval rites, ‘the number and hardness of the Rules ... and the manifold changings of the service, was the cause, that to turn the book only was so hard and intricate a matter, that many times there was more business to find out what should be read, than to read it when it was found out.’

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I personally have never advocated anything other than a mixed economy in the Church, whereby the Book of Common Prayer can continue to exist, and be used, side by side with Common Worship. And this now appears to be the position of the Liturgical Commission too, as their 2007 report Transforming Worship makes clear.17 As its Secretary at the time has since written, ‘there is a case to be made for greater familiarity with the BCP, its contents and its tradition, as part of a truly vibrant mixed liturgical economy.’18

Canon Peter Moger, who is now Precentor of York Minster, goes on to comment that the real reason why the Book of Common Prayer is not used more extensively is that too many ordinands, and those who train them, are ignorant of its contents and its value. As he writes:

Given the enduring place of the BCP within the liturgical life of the Church of England, and its importance as a foundation of Anglican theology and polity, it is vital that those who prepare for ordained and lay ministry are given adequate training in Prayer Book practice. In addition to an historical understanding of the theological and liturgical background to the BCP, ordinands and readers in training should be familiar with its content, whether or not they see themselves using it on a regular basis. The increasing flexibility of patterns of ministry now means that clergy and readers who might formerly have exercised their ministry within one tradition (or location) will now find themselves called upon to work across the old boundaries and to be competent in leading worship in traditions and contexts other than their own.19

To which one might add, ‘That is what being an Anglican means’. The Liturgical Commission may not be rapturous about the future

of the Book of Common Prayer, but at least it sees that it has one. And so do I. It fulfils too many needs to be abandoned out of ignorance (as Moger suggests) or prejudice (which is all too common amongst the clergy). However, clergy need to be more than purely ‘competent’ in the delivery of worship. The offering of worship is far more than an efficient mechanical action. In his wonderful book about acting and the theatre, The Empty Space, Peter Brooke makes the same point about performance on the stage:

I remember vividly when shortly after the Pekin Opera had come to London a rival Chinese Opera Company followed, from Formosa. The Pekin Company was still in touch with its sources and creating

17 Transforming Worship: Living the New Creation. A Report by the Liturgical Commission, 2007.18 P Moger, ‘The Book of Common Prayer in a Mixed Liturgical Economy’ in P Dailey, op.cit., p.14119 Ibid, p.147

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its ancient patterns afresh each night: the Formosan company, doing the same items, was imitating its memories of them, skimping some details, exaggerating the showy passages, forgetting the meaning – nothing was reborn.’20

Towards the end of his book, Brooke touches on the essential quality that can bring a script, a text, a score alive—or render it deadly and soulless. He finds it in the French word for performance: représentation:

A representation is the occasion when something is re-presented, when something from the past is shown again—something that once was, now is. For representation is not an imitation or description of a past event; a representation denies time. It abolishes that difference between yesterday and today. It takes yesterday’s action and makes it live again in every one of its aspects—including its immediacy. In other words, a representation is what it claims to be—a making present. We can see how this is the renewal of the life that repetition denies and it applies as much to rehearsal as to performance.21

So, it is simply not enough to repeat the services of the Book of Common Prayer competently. They have to be re-presented: made present again, in all their life and vibrancy.

The same point is made in an important paper by Professor Jeff Astley and Dr Bridget Nichols. They recall that the 1985 Church of England Report on Urban Priority Areas, Faith in the City, suggested that inner city communities, living in poverty and often having a low level of literacy, benefited more from a style of worship that reflected local culture and communicated ‘through feeling rather than the mind, through non-verbal communication rather than verbal’. Such worship would be ‘more informal and flexible in its use of urban language, vocabulary, style and content’.22 Astley and Nichols comment:

Leaving aside the deeply patronising assumptions of these well-intentioned proposals, they reveal a startlingly limited view of the human capacity to grasp complicated ideas. Religious language, by which we mean not only words but also gestures and choreography, is doing its job properly when it engages the whole person, finding its way to the intellect via the body and the imagination. Success is not related to the antiquity or contemporariness of the words and

20 P Brook, The Empty Space, Penguin Classics edition 2008, p.17. This wonderful book, first published in 1968 and running to many editions, should be compulsory reading for all Anglican clergy. 21 Ibid., p.13522 General Synod of the Church of England, Faith in the City, London, 1989, p.135

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movements which frame our prayers.23

The Book of Common Prayer has an assured future as long as it is offered—by clergy and laity alike—with passion and imagination, so that it becomes a re-presentation of what is timeless, abolishing the difference between yesterday and today, between the sixteenth century and the twenty-first. Then it will continue to resonate in this generation, and those to come.

Let that redoubtable wordsmith P. D. James have the last word:

We live in an age notable for a kind of fashionable silliness and imbued with a restless desire for change. It sometimes seems that nothing old, nothing well-established, nothing which has evolved through centuries of experience and loving use escapes our urge to diminish, revise or abolish it. Above all every organisation has to be relevant – a very fashionable word – to the needs of modern life, as if human beings in the twenty-first century are somehow fundamentally different in their needs and aspirations from all previous generations. A country which ceases to value and learn from its history, neglects its language and literature, despises its traditions and is unified only by a common frenetic drive for getting and spending and for material wealth, will lose more that its nationhood; it will lose its soul. Let us cherish and use what we still precariously hold. Let us strive to ensure that what has been handed down to us is not lost to generations to come.24

(Canon Eric Woods is Vicar of Sherborne Abbey, a Deputy Lieutenant of Dorset and a former Trustee of the Prayer Book Society.)

23 J Astley and B Nichols, ‘The Formative Role of the Book of Common Prayer’ in The Prayer Book Society Journal, Number 27, Michaelmas 2011, p.824 P D James, ‘Through all the Changing Scenes of Life: Living with the Prayer Book’, in P Dailey, op.cit., p.51

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Conference Addresses on the Occasional Offices

A friend of mine, an energetic retired American priest, has a good line when he is accosted by someone in the pub and buttonholed over some complex theological issue: ‘Honey, I’m in sales: you

want management!’ I offer this both as a useful tip to fellow clergy and ordinands alike, but also by way of a disclaimer: I’m very much at the sales end of things and not the management. I love the Book of Common Prayer and her occasional offices and have been what might be described as ‘a user’ ever since I first sang Evensong as a boy of seven or eight in my local church choir in Somerset; I then received a Prayer Book from my parents when I was confirmed in 1981. This was read by torchlight under the blankets at boarding school and sits today on my desk, as a working tool. I found it very strange at first, but got to know and love it. I am enjoying playing a long game today, working towards the wider acceptance of the riches of the Prayer Book in parish life, though I have never been doctrinaire about its use. And I have never been much of a theorist. I love the language and register and robustness of the Book of Common Prayer: it’s my home. But I value it as a priest and as a Christian because of its converting power. Quite simply, to borrow a phrase from the old Heineken beer advertisement: ‘it refreshes the parts that other beers cannot reach.’ For what it’s worth, my favourite part of the BCP is the Forms of Prayer to be used at Sea: it contains a marvellous collection of prayers and thanksgivings, perfectly suited to the ups and downs of modern life. I commend it to you wholeheartedly, if you don’t yet know it.

I began life as a deacon almost twenty years ago, when the Prayer Book seemed doomed: the Alternative Service Book (remember that?) had conquered the field in many places and, even then, the adumbrations of Common Worship were beginning to be felt. Many clergy, especially the

(The three articles printed together here were originally given as addresses to the Prayer Book Society Annual Conference 2013)

Baptism and Confirmation in the Book of Common PrayerJ O N AT H A N B E S W I C K

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older ones, were absolute fundamentalists about modern language, and it was possible to chuckle at humorous anecdotes about the BCP, as perhaps about an elderly and eccentric relative. A favourite of mine was when, towards the end of his life, Bishop Lloyd Morrell, Bishop of Lewes in the 60s and 70s, was poorly in bed and saying the office. He sat up to receive a visitor and his prayer book slipped off the bed and landed in the bed-pan. He remarked drily: ‘Poor old Prayer Book: it’s always coming in for it!’

Well, in spite of ‘always coming in for it’ the Book of Common Prayer is still here and, I think, in better heart than for a long time. I served three curacies and used the ASB and then Common Worship baptismal rites under duress, until discovering the gloriously illicit possibilities of Sunday afternoon baptisms that were of no pastoral or social interest to the Vicar . . . at which point I discovered the real riches of the Prayer Book rite. I felt like I had joined some sort of underground resistance movement.

The Baptism rite captures, for me, the essence of the Prayer Book: it is straight-talking about God and man and about the nature of the challenge facing us. When I go to visit a family prior to a baptism, and work through the service with them, I generally offer an explanation for the strong language that they are about to encounter: telling them that it is a serious matter, like a wedding or like buying a house, yet much more so. It’s about being grafted into the body of Christ’s Church, and there isn’t a register of language that is too solemn for this occasion, nor is there a way of talking about it that can be simply and quickly understood, by churched or un-churched alike.

As with all of the Christian rites: we are handling mysteries, holy mysteries; we are caught up in them. Mysteries are different from secrets. A secret is what I have in my pocket that I’m not telling you about. A mystery is meant to be discovered, to be understood, just not immediately and not all at once. As Aquinas famously remarks, quoting Dionysius, at the opening of his Summa: ‘The divine rays cannot enlighten us except wrapped up in many sacred veils.’ The light would be blinding were we to behold it all at once. The recent idea that we can produce another form of baptismal rite that is even easier to understand than Common Worship is, to me, absurd. How can I explain to you that you need to die with Christ and be buried with him if you are to have a share in his resurrection? What better pictures are there for conveying this truth than those woven into the two great opening prayers of the Prayer Book service: Noah and his family in the ark; the Israelites crossing the Red Sea; the Christ being baptised at the Jordan; and then the baptised passing ‘the waves of this troublesome world, that finally he may come to the

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Baptism and Confirmation in the Book of Common Prayer

land of everlasting life, there to reign with thee world without end.’ And the image that always causes me a wry smile, when the second prayer speaks of the person to be baptised enjoying the ‘everlasting benediction of thy heavenly washing.’

So, the first great advantage of the Prayer Book rite is that it offers the people a rich and vivid set of images to carry in their hearts and gradually absorb, images and phrases that are scriptural, that are profound and that are memorable: images that open the way for God’s grace to change lives and to change them forever.

The second great advantage is that it is so easy to use: stand alone, robust and with plenty of scope for interpolation—if necessary. Particularly with un-churched families, it is easy to stitch together the portions of the service in a way that makes it easy for them to feel at ease. As with all services: the way it is done is of enormous importance in terms of the impact it has on people, and its accessibility. I believe more and more strongly that the Book of Common Prayer from start to finish, provides us with the root system of the Christian faith, which flowers and bears fruit in many different ways in different generations. It has all of the essential ingredients and can be augmented as necessary, depending on the needs of the time and the situation. Sometimes it will be used almost as it stands in the book; but, very often, it will be supplemented, for both pastoral and practical gain. It ought to allow high churchman and low churchman alike to share more ground than they contest.

The third great advantage of the Prayer Book rite is that it conveys to the people an unshakeable sense that something has actually happened: the language is awesome, in the fullest sense of the word. I don’t want to make cheap remarks about other rites, but I was dismayed when I saw the early versions of the Common Worship Baptism service: principally because it didn’t really seem to contain anything. There was nothing to get your teeth into. Mercifully it has got better since then. I was taught as a teenager that the difference between the baptised and the unbaptised is the difference between living matter and stone: the Prayer Book rite leaves us in no doubt about this.

These three advantages of the Book of Common Prayer’s Baptism rite apply equally to its Order for Confirmation: it communicates clearly and memorably what is happening, it is extraordinarily simple and it is powerful. We are left in no doubt that something has actually happened. The particular genius of the Order of Confirmation is the recapitulation of the principle of the laying on of hands: the Bishop lays his hand on the head of the candidate, recalling aloud the primitive example of the holy Apostles, and then prays: ‘Let thy fatherly hand, we beseech thee, ever be

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over them....’ Bishop, apostles and God the Father are lined up, and we hit the jackpot. No matter how remote and tiny the village church, no matter how hopeless the parson and his confirmation classes: through the Prayer Book Order of Confirmation, the candidate is connected, as if by a lightning flash, with all the ages of the Church and, through them, to the very Godhead. It is a brilliant and deeply moving text and one that I hope will return to wide circulation. There is, however, a particular obstacle for the Prayer Book Order: namely that many Dioceses now issue a standard, non-BCP, text for the service of Confirmation. Individual parishes and clergy often have little choice in the rite that is used.

What of the future? I believe that those who love the BCP for its converting power find themselves poised at an exciting moment in the liturgical life of our country, because the arguments that have been forcefully advanced for forty years, in support of a modern language liturgy, are crumbling to dust around us. The strongest argument has been: there is now a high degree of ecumenical consensus in a set of common English liturgical texts, and therefore we ought to use them: for the sake of ecumenical friendship. However, on both flanks, this argument has now suffered a body-blow: the Roman Church has deliberately re-translated her texts into English in such a way as to make them distinct from those used by others, and the Evangelical world has, in many places, jettisoned the very practice of a structured liturgy.

It is a wonderful moment for the Church to discover afresh the uniting and converting power of our old Prayer Book: not through a rigid, BCP fundamentalism, but by recognizing that this precious inheritance of faith and worship is fit for purpose and capable of being adapted and interpreted in ways both old and new, to lead us, at the last, to the beauty that is ever old and ever new. I would like to close by urging you to advocate and encourage, patiently and gently, the restoration of these beautiful and dignified services: for the sake of the Gospel. To put it simply, they do best what we have been called to do: they speak of the glory and mercy of God, they speak of the sinfulness and the duty of man, and in so doing they produce robust and straightforward Christians and unfailingly give the glory to God.

(The Revd Jonathan Beswick, SSC is Parish Priest of St Barnabas’, Oxford.)

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It is interesting how most people simply don’t know about 1662 and 1928. Archbishop Cranmer wanted the faithful to know their faith in the Vulgar language, words like, ‘just cause’, ‘impediment’, ‘joined

together’ and phrases like ‘in sickness and in health’ and ‘for richer, for poorer’, are of course, now, all well-known and much loved English phrases. But when couples come up and say they want to get married, most of them have absolutely no idea that there are two old services.

Once we have established that they don’t want the new service, I ask them: ‘Would you like the old, old service or the new old service?’. ‘What is the difference?’ they ask.

‘Ah’, I reply, ‘I am writing a paper about that!’So, what are the differences? The most obvious difference is the vow.

1662 has the woman promise to ‘obey’ her husband. There are some words that speak volumes about culture and the way things change over time. And perhaps the word ‘obey’ is like that. We have gone from a culture in which men ruled the roost, to one in which everything is equal and all decisions are made together. And if that were all there were to it, then there would clearly be no good reason for having the 1662 vow in which the woman promises to ‘obey’ her husband. And yet, I think there is more to that word, than meets the eye. It is after all, used within the context of how early Christian men and women were to relate within marriage. Men were to worship and honour their wives, and women were to respect and obey their husbands. The man in the relationship stands for something proud and responsible—head of the family, as St Paul taught, the decision maker—even if in reality, he consults pretty convincingly. So, obedience properly understood, is not always about inequality. It can be about role and responsibility.

Often a young couple look at each other, and say, we’d like that left in. In which case it’s 1662. You see, many young brides are so self-assured, that the thought that their husband might do something without first consulting them, never crosses their mind! He just wouldn’t dare! If however, couples want a service that just uses traditional language, but does not commit the woman to obeying her husband, then they should

A Comparison of the Marriage Services in the 1662 and 1928 Prayer BooksR I C H A R D T H O M S O N

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go for the 1928 service. That is the service that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge had at their wedding.

The 1662 rite is a lovely service, written at a time when language was grounded in the material world. Here is a service that is absolutely rooted in the imagery of the physical stuff of Scripture. For example, in the preface, there are a number of phrases left out of the 1928, which the 1662 book contained. Marriage, it says, was instituted ‘in the time of man’s innocency’, referring of course to the union of Adam and Eve. And ‘is not to be enterprised . . . . lightly . . . to satisfy men’s carnal lusts and appetites, like brute beasts that have no understanding’. This is visual and stirring imagery. The concept of mankind as a ‘brute beast’, may not appeal these days. But it reminds us that wanton sexual freedom does not reflect anything that distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom. If we have a soul, then we are not just brute beasts ‘satisfying (their) carnal lusts’. We may want to, but we have a higher calling, to love and care for the other, to have some form of commitment.

1662 reminds us that we have a spiritual nature, and marriage keeps us holy and undefiled, as St Paul wrote. One can see how in the Edwardian drawing rooms of the early twentieth century, such base imagery and language might have felt a little unsophisticated. This sexual, physical world is largely done away with in 1928, and the focus shifts to the more cerebral and spiritualised. In 1662 the purpose of marriage is first and foremost for the ‘procreation of children’. In 1928 it is for the ‘increase of mankind’. Procreation is physical because it has to do with new life, and it is scriptural too because children are produced from Adam and Eve’s union. It hurts having babies and they make a lot of noise. The Edwardians do not need this realism and the notion of the ‘increase of mankind’, is clearly less alarming, as well as being more ethereal and abstract for modern society, so, along with the brute beasts, 1928 takes out the earthy and replaces it with the cerebral. Perhaps it is this process of high-minded cleansing of earthy human nature that D.H. Lawrence was addressing in his novel of the same year, Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

The second purpose of marriage (1662) is that marriage: ‘was ordained for a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication; that such persons as have not the gift of continency might marry, and keep themselves undefiled members of Christ’s body.’ This is precisely what St Paul teaches in 1 Corinthians 7.2: ‘avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband’ You see, 1662 is Biblical! And again in verses 8 and 9: ‘I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, It is good for them if they abide even as I. But if they cannot contain, let them marry; for it is better to marry than to burn’. St Paul clearly

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A Comparison of the Marriage Services in the 1662 and 1928 Prayer Books

sees marriage as a way of living a holy life: ‘That such persons as have not the gift of continency might marry, and keep themselves undefiled members of Christ’s body’. Rather than: ‘that they should continue therein in pureness of living’(1928). So the 1662 text is much more faithful to Paul, who speaks of being ‘undefiled members of Christ’s body’ rather than of ‘pureness of living ’.

The 1928 service says that marriage was ordained ‘in order that the natural instincts and affections, implanted by God, should be hallowed and directed aright’. I guess this is saying much the same as avoiding fornication, but how much less bold and clear it is, compared to 1662. Directing ‘the natural instincts and affections aright’ is altogether more genteel. 1662 calls a spade a spade. 1928 is very ‘PC’ really, for its time. Much of this reflects the cultural changes that had come about as a result of the burgeoning wealth and gentrification of the middle classes in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. You feel it would be the same if you were to put the raw bloody text of a Shakespearean play next to one of Noel Coward’s drawing-room plays. Everything has been sanitised in 1928. Not only that, but mankind has now come of age. Whereas the 1662 service had it that marriage was to be enterprised ‘reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly’, the word: ‘advisedly’ is removed from the 1928 text. Advisedly? Grown up mankind does not need advice!

Not only is the text less raw and earthy, scriptural references are left out of the 1928 service. 1662 tells us that marriage ‘is commended of Saint Paul to be honourable among all men’, whereas 1928 leaves that out and speaks simply of ‘Holy Writ’. Also with the Nuptial Prayer: in 1662 we pray that ‘that, as Isaac and Rebecca lived faithfully together, so these persons may surely perform and keep the vow’, but in 1928 this becomes simply: ‘living faithfully together they may surely perform and keep the vow’. What is wrong with mentioning the Old Testament characters of Isaac and Rebecca? 1928 is less interested in them, that’s for sure. 1928 moves away from the Biblical. Isaac and Rebecca, you may recall, had a very human relationship. Rebecca helped her favourite son Jacob steal the birth right from his brother Esau! What spouse does not occasionally find creative ways of getting what they want in family politics.

This is also true of the prayers: ‘O God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob’, simply becomes ‘O God of our Fathers’ . And: ‘Look, O Lord mercifully upon them from heaven, and bless them. And as thou didst send thy blessing upon Abraham and Sarah, to their great comfort, so vouchsafe to send thy blessing upon these thy servants’, is all omitted from the 1928 text. How sad, when the story of Sarah’s late pregnancy in life is full of so much human mirth and surprise. Also the third Prayer, which has a

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scriptural section left out of 1928: ‘who hast made all things of nothing; who also (after other things set in order) didst appoint, that out of man (created after thine own image and similitude) woman should take her beginning; and knitting them together, didst teach that …..’ (all omitted from 1928). A reference to the Genesis story of Adam and Eve, and the deep sleep that God laid upon Adam, whilst he took a rib and created Eve, a companion for the first man.

The Blessing in 1662 prays that God, ‘who at the beginning did create our first parents, Adam and Eve, and did sanctify and join them together in marriage…’ is completely and sadly omitted in 1928. Perhaps 1928 is trying to avoid being old-fashioned and is succumbing to the de-mythologising of Scripture. (ie trying to rationalise all mythological and miraculous stories). Yet today, the power of myth and story is recognised as having a vital place in the poetry of religion.

One or two other changes worth noting are the prayer: ‘assist with thy blessing these persons, that they may both be fruitful in procreation of children,’ which becomes: ‘bestow we beseech thee upon these thy children the heritage and gift of children’. The ‘heritage and gift of children’ rather than ‘fruitful in procreation of children’. Is the care and gift of children more important, than being fruitful? Maybe it is these days.

So we come to the vows. The 1662 Prayer Book had the couple make their vows ‘according to God’s holy ordinance’ , which becomes ‘according to God’s holy law’ in 1928—a minor alteration. ‘And thereto I plight thee my troth’ becomes ‘and thereto I give thee my troth’. ‘Plight’ means pledge, which is probably better than ‘give’ . Then with the giving of the ring, the man says: ‘With all my worldly goods I thee endow’, which becomes ‘share’. I wonder which of these you prefer? Do we ‘endow’, or ‘share’ our goods? Share is perhaps a better verb to use, if we are to be literal.

Finally a word about how the two services end. After the Blessing of the Marriage, the 1928 Prayer Book offers the possibility of a Bible passage or a sermon or an exhortation, before concluding with a prayer and a blessing. As not all clergy wish to preach at weddings, the alternative of a Bible reading is helpful.

However in the 1662 Prayer Book, the service concludes with the sermon or exhortation. In reality, most clergy opt for the reading and address to come before the final prayers as with the modern services. Ending with a reading rather than prayers, seems odd.

To summarise: throughout 1928, the text has been purged of many Biblical references; it emphasises values and concepts, rather than Biblical

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A Comparison of the Marriage Services in the 1662 and 1928 Prayer Books

characters and stories. However, it does offer one or two more modern ways of putting things, and it does not grate nor need interpretation to the modern mind. Whichever text you opt for, both have an undeniable sense of the historical beauty of our language, and both services evoke a sense of tradition and culture which cannot hope to be present in modern liturgical writing, be it ever so theologically and poetically put. It is impossible to hear these services without knowing that your grandparents and great grandparents have been there, and said pretty well the same words, and that we are merely part of something much bigger than ourselves. And frankly, at the start of something as momentous as marriage, we need as much of that kind of support behind us as possible. What a gift this great liturgy is to the Church, in the twenty-first century, whichever version is requested.

(The Revd R.W.B.Thomson is Priest in Charge of the Badminton Group of Churches in the Diocese of Gloucester.)

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I should like to begin with a caveat. Talking about funerals is a sensitive matter, because they are events in life which take place in circumstances of high emotion, and when offence can easily be taken out of

proportion to the actual mistake or difference of opinion involved. For the clergy, however, they are of course everyday work, and (particularly amongst ourselves) we discuss them with considerable freedom. It may be that some of my comments bring to mind elements in funerals which you remember, and which may have been particularly difficult times for you; I ask you to attempt a certain degree of detachment in the interests of objective discussion, and ask your forgiveness in advance for any offence caused.

As members of the Prayer Book Society, I know that we wish to think about the background to, and issues raised by, organising funerals according to the Prayer Book, as opposed to the alternative rites available within the Church of England. However, I think it is only fair to preface that discussion with some observations about funerals in this country in general at the present time. It is my belief, although the Church at large does not seem very fully aware of this, that we are entering a period of considerable change in funerary practice, for which we are corporately rather ill-prepared. The reason is generational.

When I was first ordained, nearly ten years ago, I realised quickly that a great proportion of the funerals I was taking were of those who had fought in the Second World War, and noted to myself how they would be formative for my ministry in certain respects. There was a degree of common pattern, especially in men who had fought. It was often apparent that the war had been their most testing and also exciting experience, but also that they had often not spoken about it much throughout their subsequent lives. That generation is now mostly passed, but many of those now dying in maturity are still those who were born during or just before the war, and grew up in its shadow. To them (or to some readers, I of course mean, to you) the spirit of self-sacrifice and the common good was allied to an underlying Christian culture in education. This often laid down a deep-seated acceptance of tradition, and a world-view which was broadly accepting of Christianity, even if not lived out very often in actual churchgoing.

However, many of those now coming to their natural span are representatives of the ‘baby-boomer’ generation like my parents, born

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Prayer Book Funerals

after the war and knowing far greater freedom through their youth and adult lives. There are of course many exceptions, but statistically this is the generation much less likely to have stayed in one career, or married to the same person, throughout their adult lives. In a similar way, these are often those who have taken, even when professing the Christian faith, a much more open and flexible approach to matters of religion. It can only be expected that they (or their families) will expect a similar flexibility in planning the details of their funerals.

At present the Church of England is responsible for just over a third of all funerals in England, and the figure is steadily falling, mostly in favour of secular ‘celebrants’ who often act largely as a compère for tributes by family and friends and selected music. My belief is that this trend is only likely to continue. Within the variety of funeral services sought by families for their loved ones, it is our hope and aspiration, of course, that some will continue, perhaps with greater boldness, to ask for a service conducted according to the Book of Common Prayer, and so (with relief?) it is to that we now turn.

Like all the services of the Prayer Book, the funeral service, or to give it its proper name, the Order for the Burial of the Dead, has its origins in Cranmer’s adaptation and simplification of the medieval funerary rites and ceremonies. These were an area of great controversy during the Reformation. The Anglican solution found in the Prayer Book needs to be understood against the Calvinist background of an even stronger reaction to medieval practice. With good reason late-medieval Catholicism has been characterised as ‘the cult of the dead’, and at its heart was the Mass for the Dead. Masses were offered for the dead both as the central element in what we now call a funeral service, and also thereafter, on selected anniversaries. Thousands of clergy across England earned money, in some cases their entire income, from chantries—chapels (understood either as a building or a corporation within a church) where mass could be said for the dead, according to the generosity of their benefaction.

The Mass for the Dead was under attack at the Reformation for three reasons. The first problem was the whole concept of the votive mass. Although understood in a rather more nuanced way in modern Catholic theology, this is essentially the idea that a communion service, celebrated with a particular intention in mind (this typically expressed through using particular proper texts) somehow focussed divine attention on the issue in question. In relation to the dead, this was their present state in Purgatory, and the desire of living relatives to improve it. To say the least, this is a long way from the Last Supper and ‘do this in remembrance of me’. Second, the concept of Purgatory itself was questioned. Third was

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the deeper theological view that the spiritual fate of any individual was settled at the time of his or her death, and that there was nothing that anyone else could or should be doing to alter this. In many Protestant churches, this meant that all liturgy whatsoever was abolished at the time of death, and replaced by, if anything, a stern sermon on the inevitability of death and judgement, and the need to renew one’s faith before it was too late. It was in this spirit that, after Charles I’s execution in Whitehall, Bishop Juxon was forbidden to read even the simple Prayer Book service at his hasty burial at Windsor.

In that era of controversy, it was perhaps we now see inevitable that the Church of England should have expressed its true spirit by a compromise! In 1549 and 1552 the service was, like many others, first trimmed and then more thoroughly reordered, but using texts adapted from some of the Latin originals. Further revision in 1662 gave us the present simple rite. This consists of a short service comprising a psalm or psalms and a reading, to be used either by the graveside or in church, a committal ceremony, and prayers which call for the coming of the kingdom and our own repentance to a more righteous life. Framing these are three texts which may be sung and are probably the most memorable part of the service: the introductory Sentences, the anthem ‘Man that is Born of Woman’ and the text ‘I heard a Voice from Heaven’. The most famous setting is that by Croft, of which many of you may have heard the Sentences used at the recent funeral of Baroness Thatcher. There is no provision for a sermon, whether that means an actual preaching of the Christian hope in death or a concise and sanitised biography of the deceased. The overall effect, compared to the medieval service, is to shift the emphasis from the honouring and praying for the dead to the edification of the living.

As the authorised text, this provision remained in use unaltered for many centuries. But like other Prayer Book services, perhaps most obviously the Marriage service, it acquired surrounding customs which were often of more concern to those involved. Mostly, I believe, it was used entirely outdoors. The body, having been laid out at the home of the deceased, would have been carried to the church, in a coffin if rich or a linen shroud if poor, on the parish bier—many of these survive in country churches. At the lych-gate (so called from the Anglo-Saxon lich, a body) the bearers would rest and smarten themselves up, until the parson arrived to lead the procession to the grave. If it were raining, he might have been able to avail himself of a little portable hut placed at the head of the grave to read the service whilst the mourners huddled damply.

But there were exceptions. Certainly funeral addresses were given, for

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the great and the good. In the eighteenth century the fashion arose for upper-class funerals to take place in the evening, taking full advantage of the theatrical possibilities of torchlight. Only in the late nineteenth century did the preparation for a funeral start to pass from the family to professional undertakers. The twentieth century has brought this to full fruition—normally funeral directors remove a body as soon as possible, and from there organise all aspects of a funeral, with the service and minister conducting it representing only a part of the total ‘package’. The traditional ‘last duty’ of the clergy to visit and pray with all the dying, not merely well-known members of their congregations, was holding on in rural Shropshire into the 1950s, but is now gone. Except where one has been in touch with a family through the illness, the normal expectation is to hear about a death from the undertaker, who will have already begun funeral planning.

The other great change in funerals is the introduction of cremation. Culturally this began as a response to the overcrowded and sometimes perceptibly unhygienic churchyards and cemeteries of major cities in the nineteenth century—a ‘clean’, ‘modern’ approach to dealing with the bodies of the dead. And if you have ever been round the back of a crematorium, you will have found that they are respectful but vaguely industrial – an efficient means for a necessary task. In Britain there was only limited debate about the religious significance of cremation, but I would like to argue that it is more important than we may suppose for a number of reasons.

The Prayer Book, as we have already seen, provides for the Burial of the Dead, giving instructions for the body to be lowered into the grave, and earth cast upon it. We know, as Christians, that God is Almighty, and can raise up on the day of general Resurrection all the dead to life eternal, no matter what the actual fate of their bodies. And this is recognised in the Prayer Book in the evocative words at the committal in a Burial at Sea, ‘when the Sea shall give up her dead’. So to choose cremation is in no way to deny one’s hope of the Resurrection of the Body, as we profess in the Creed. Nonetheless, for centuries burial has been normative for Christians for the simple reason that Jesus was buried, and from the grave rose again. As Christianity spread across Europe in past centuries, cremation was gradually abandoned in favour of burial, and around every church a churchyard was placed for the dead to sleep until Christ’s return.

The Orthodox churches teach that Christians must be buried; the Roman Catholic Church that it is preferable. The Church of England avoids, understandably, any such pronouncement. However, I hope that

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you can see how the modern move to cremation has diminished the previously automatic Christian religious associations surrounding death. This is especially true if the funeral takes place only at the crematorium. There may be a cross on display and the building, especially if older, will have a chapel-like design, but that is not the same as the service taking place in a church used for worship week by week, and where the experiences of death and life are integrated in the praise of Christ who knew both. A grave in a churchyard connects immediately with the church itself, though, and my commendation to any of you who intend to be cremated (and I accept it is a very personal choice, not always easy to explain) or who are in custody of ashes of a relative, is to consider their burial in a churchyard or church memorial garden.

Back to the Prayer Book. The other significance of the rise of cremation is that it makes it harder to use the 1662 book for a funeral service. However, it is still possible, and a few years ago I drew up the leaflet published by the Society to provide guidance in just such situations. One is also helped by the fact that the 1928 version of the Funeral Service, still very much in Prayer Book language and style, was re-authorised as Series 1 in the 1960s, and is still an officially authorised text today. It is also printed in the Funeral Services book which is generally found in crematoria, and so it is possible simply to ask for this to be used, and for the congregation to use the printed copies. Depending on the degree of purity desired, it is not difficult to introduce hymns and other music, and indeed any other elements that may be fitting to the deceased, however eccentric.1 It is also worth being clear about the law. Canon B3 gives the choice of funeral rite (as for marriage and so on) to the minister, but a right of consultation to the relatives. Cases of disagreement are to be determined by the bishop. Given that both the 1662 and Series 1 services are lawful, I would argue that not only does this give relatives every right to ask for their use, but lays the burden upon an unwilling minister to find a substantial reason to refuse.

If a funeral is to involve interesting elements, it does of course require careful planning. I was present at (but did not conduct) the funeral of a great hunting man in South Herefordshire a couple of years ago, and there was of course to be some ceremonial horn-blowing at certain appropriate points. One of these was towards the end of the service, and the huntsman had been instructed to blow at a nod from the vicar. Unfortunately he was trigger-happy, as it were, and although we could all see there was a piece of flute music to come on the order of service, the horn rang out ‘gone away’. The vicar turned with the gentlest smile

1 The leaflet A Prayer Book Funeral? is available from the Prayer Book Society office.

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and said ‘now, unlike many of you, I am not a hunting man, but I don’t believe that was a flute’. A more modern innovation is that apparently some crematoria are arranging for all services to be potentially recorded and broadcast on the internet. You may shudder at the thought, but on reflection, it might be very consoling to relatives overseas to be able to participate remotely.

I shall conclude with some thoughts as to why I believe that the Prayer Book funeral service is of value, whatever the exact context in which it is used. Of course, it has the familiar advantages of having stood the test of time, being written in beautiful and memorable language, and being familiar to those who have heard its phrases many times before. Those are arguments that apply to the whole Prayer Book and will be common to us all. But to say why I value using it especially is also, to be honest, to explain what is wrong with the Common Worship services, and I hope you will not mistake my meaning here.

As with all else in Common Worship, variety is the name of the game. There are many fine texts to be used, some new, some old. One could quite readily fit some of the Prayer Book texts into the structure. But it suffers from having been infested by liturgists. I always feel that the Prayer Book was written by bishops (Cranmer chief among them, of course), with the benefit of pastoral experience and the whole nation in mind. Common Worship was written by liturgical specialists, knowledgeable about the fascinating rites of previous centuries and keen to make use of them to enhance the Church of England’s worship. But most mourners attending funerals are not liturgical specialists, most of them are not regular worshippers at all, and some will certainly not have their minds on the service. Common Worship treats the funeral as a complete liturgy, with penance, readings, sermon, responses—familiar maybe to churchgoers but a foreign structure to many funeral attendees. The simplicity and space of the Prayer Book services demands no such engagement, but rather allows the more important engagement, with God, to happen in the context of the death in question.

My further reason brings me back in part to my opening comments about the clergyman’s view of funerals. In Common Worship there is, much of the way through, an emphasis on flagging up the virtues of the deceased, and also in the modern way on our present and future relationship with God. To paraphrase rather cruelly, it is as if one as vicar is being asked to say, ‘dear Lord, we all knew what a terribly nice chap John was, and that you loved him too, and being quite nice yourself, we do hope you will look after him’. The reality, of course, is that very often I do not know if John was that nice, and I didn’t know him myself

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at all. I may have asked the family if he was religious, and received a mumbled answer to the effect that he wasn’t really a churchgoer, but was always very kind to people. So I would rather leave it to God to decide what he thinks of John himself, and not spend too much of the funeral presenting his possible virtues in prayer.

No, the uncomfortable reality is that you are all sinners. Even worse, so am I. But when our time comes, our hope is a poor one indeed if all we hope is that God will see our better sides. Rather, our hope is, as the Prayer Book states so clearly in many places, that the blood of Christ was shed for us, for he came into the world to save sinners. Whatever else may be said at my funeral, my request will be that those attending are summoned to recall that truth, and to praise our great Redeemer, whose hasty burial by Nicodemus and Joseph may not have been much of a funeral, but was only the way to the new day to which we all look, when the dawn breaks, and the shadows flee away.

(The Revd Neil Patterson is Rector of the Benefice of Ariconium in Hereford Diocese, and a former Trustee of the Prayer Book Society.)

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Having for a long time asked, ‘Why is the Church of England so concerned with changing the Book of Common Prayer?’ I read with interest the two articles in Faith and Worship, No. 71.1 I am still

asking the same question.I have always thought that the only Prayer Book revision needed was

modernising a few words; for instance, I have never said, ‘as by thy special grace preventing us thou dost put in our minds good desires.’ Prevent in its meaning ‘going before’ is not what people understand today, so I modernise the word when saying the Easter Collect, and other places it, or other similar words, occur in the Book of Common Prayer. To have made these changes, making the wording understood in today’s world would have meant that the Church of England could have saved much time and money ‘modernising our worship’.

Now, we have entered the kind of world that existed in the Middle Ages, when different churches used different forms of worship. Thomas Cranmer (in days of less mobility of people) recognised the problem. In Concerning the Service of the Church he explained why he had made many changes to the medieval services, and also the importance of having only one Service book.

And whereas heretofore there hath been great diversity in saying and singing in Churches within this Realm; some following Salisbury Use, some Hereford Use, and some the Use of Bangor, some of York, some of Lincoln; now from henceforth all the whole Realm shall have but one Use.

Now, since I retired, I have taken Holy Communion services in various Churches. At first, even with some of the earliest Revised Prayer Books, the questions I asked were simple, such as, what congregational parts were sung. Now, occasionally I have to ask, ‘What Eucharistic Prayer do you use?’ However, most churches have a series of separate services photocopied, so that everyone knows what variations they have from week to week, and I am supplied with a copy by the church. But, if I have two services on a particular Sunday, I have to use different kinds of Common Worship service as I move from one Parish to another. My English dictionary does not help me understand the new meaning of the word ‘Common’ in the title of the new service book. I do not go to some

1 By Graham Cray and Alison Milbank under the heading ‘Things New and Old’.

Things Old and NewR A L P H S W E R R E L L

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of the alternative kinds of Service that have crept into the Church of England, such as Fresh Expressions. I often feel like saying, ‘Come back Cranmer and sort us out of a worse mess than you ever had to clear up!’

Up to the time I was 14, I had no connection with Christianity. I had been turned off by my experience of Sunday School. At Junior School there were some hymns I enjoyed, the words and music were strong, two of my favourite ones when I was seven were, ‘Immortal, Invisible, God only wise’, and ‘Eternal Father strong to save’, and they are both among my favourite hymns today. I could not stand ‘Let us with a gladsome mind’ because I found the repetition of the last two lines of each verse boring.

At Grammar School I lay somewhere between agnostic and atheist. The methodology at eleven was the same as the methodology for my research doctorate. We were taught to question what we were being taught, and this was important for me as a scientist and also to bring me to a faith in God. Between thirteen and fourteen years of age something happened to my life; two important steps came through Science and the third through reading a book by an atheist, I think it was by a Huxley. I had written off Christianity, but our School Library had the Koran and all the Sacred Books of the East. I read the Koran and skimmed through the different Eastern Religions, and although I didn’t know what I was looking for I did not find it in any of them. Then we moved. My form master at my new Grammar School was the Crusader Leader. There was only one good thing about the move, and that was being invited to Crusaders, and in my second week I realised that I had the fourth and last step that I was looking for.

The Crusaders went to the Baptist Church (the only Evangelical church in the town), and so I went along, but I found that I seemed to be drifting away from the ‘God’ I had found. So I left and went to our local Church of England church. It was not the Vicar or congregation that brought me through to a true, deep faith in God—it was The Book of Common Prayer.

In my ministry I have never found the changes the Church of England has made to its forms of worship have been an improvement; and as for the multitude of changes—authorised or not—that are supposed to make the Church of England grow, they do not seem to have led to larger and ever larger congregations. I have found that the revised authorised services have taken away the ‘cutting edge’ of the Book of Common Prayer, with its strong reliance on Scripture. Its use helped the Christians within the congregation to grow spiritually in their Christian life.

Church growth! I do not believe that changing the services has had any real effect in growing the Christian community. One Christmas,

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through HOST, we had a Malaysian Christian staying with us. He said that in the Christian Union at the University he was attending, not one of the members would survive as Christians in Malaysia, where a Christian starting school, and throughout his life at school, needed to know what and why he believed as a Christian. It was the duty of the teachers and all his classmates to convert a Christian to Islam. He and my daughter had a serious theological discussion for over two hours that Christmas Day afternoon.

If we want to stop people falling away, or thinking that Christianity is irrelevant, we need a form of Service that challenges them, that is different to anything else they do, and one that changes lives.

That means that as Christians we need to know what and why we believe—so that we can discuss Christianity with those of other faiths freely and openly, by trying to convert them, quite forcefully, perhaps, with a Muslim, but at the same time allowing him room to try to convert me, I have always been thanked at the end. We need to ‘love our neighbour as ourself’, and, as Jesus said, that includes the unlovable and enemies. There are thousands of people seeking a better way of life, from gangs to ‘respectable’ people. They are waiting to see Christ at work in their lives, and a form of worship that is not us pretending to be ‘like them’. After all, they are looking for a way out of the trap they are caught up in.

The Book of Common Prayer is the most wonderful way that people can find what they are looking for, that will fill what is missing in their lives. I have never converted anyone to become a Christian, and I don’t think anyone else can do it either. But I know many who God has given faith and a new life to through my ministry. And in the Book of Common Prayer we cannot escape from hearing God’s voice through the Scriptures.

Today’s CultureThe two articles had a lot about ‘Today’s Culture’. I would like to know

what ‘Today’s Culture’ is that will attract people to church worship so that they can find faith in Christ Jesus for their lives. Today’s culture is ‘binge drinking’, and not just among the young people—we are told a larger number, especially older people, are binge drinking in their homes. Today’s culture is the drug culture, so we find many (who are not addicts) who admit that they ‘tried it out at University’. Today’s culture is sport, and we have witnessed that with the Olympic games; and now with football and other sporting activities (tennis, golf, etc.) that take place, which, so often, rules what we are shown on our television screens.

Before I was ordained I was told, as my first Curacy was in Wolverhampton, I had to learn something about football if I was going

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to reach the young people. I still remained ignorant, even when I became a Vicar in Bootle—where the only conversation on a Sunday in the Vestry was how Liverpool or Everton had done the day before. I still don’t know anything about football (of either kind), and tell people, ‘I don’t know what side of a football to kick!’

I gave up an interest in popular music before the Second World War (when I was 8 or 9), with a lapse during the War with the anti-Nazi songs, as a sign of my patriotism. The fact that I did not know any ‘pop’ songs, had no effect on the success or otherwise of my ministry.

I have said, I am a ‘cube’, that is ‘square in every direction’! And that has never been a hindrance to my witnessing for Christ and being listened to. So many clergy today think wearing a ‘dog collar’ acts as a barrier between us and those outside the Church. I have only once been told I should not wear my dog-collar—it was by the choir boys on a choir outing!

On one occasion we were staying for a few days with the Vicar who had officiated at out wedding. The churches in the town had been allowed to use a coffee bar for a short time before it was demolished. The clergy had to wear collar and tie so that the young people they wanted to come would not be turned away because of their collar. When I sat down at a table, and told the boys sitting at it that I was a clergyman, they immediately asked, ‘Why aren’t you wearing a dog-collar?’ I told them that I was on holiday and had not got one with me. I got on well with a lad of fourteen, although I did not see him the next two nights. The last night before it closed, the speaker at the Coffee Bar had been in prison for manslaughter, where he had been converted. He held the youngsters attention because of what he had done. But he also stopped the Christian pop music being played, and insisted on classical music, we listened to a Beethoven symphony, and the young people said, ‘This is real music, not the rubbish that had been played!’ After it was all over, and we were praying for the young people who had come, the boy I had been talking to knocked on the door wanting to speak to me. He was sent away, being told I could not speak to him because I was praying! The young person who answered the door had been working in that coffee bar to ‘convert’ those young people who came—but it was obvious that it had been felt they did not have to know how to do it, or the culture of those they were ‘witnessing’ to.

The use of imagination is wonderful. On a Junior Sunday School (3-6 year olds) outing to a country park, the Sunday School Superintendent said she had brought some balls along for us to play with. I over-ruled her, and said, ‘We are going on an explore!’ The car tracks were rivers that had man-eating crocodiles in them. (When a car came along an older

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boy said, ‘that’s not a crocodile, it’s got people in it.’ My reply was, ‘That just shows crocodiles do eat people.’ After that he, like the rest, found he had a living imagination.) The sheep were lions in sheep’s clothing; we kept clear of picnics in case they were cannibals; a small quarry that even three-year-olds could climb became Nottingham Castle, and somehow we found Robin Hood and Maid Marion were with us: and we had many more switches of their imagination before we got back for our picnic. Afterwards I got the complaints from the parents—‘What did you do? Our child is driving us round the bend telling us all the exciting things they did, and we can’t stop them talking about it!’ With older children we never had an outing—it was always a peregrination; and it was always to somewhere which would have been of interest to me when I was their age. After one I had a letter thanking me, ‘I really enjoyed it I thought it was mega fun …’

I have also, during the last two years been contacted by two, who I last knew, many years ago, as ‘young people’ in my parish. One of whom has (fifty years later) retired!

There is something much more than our modern idea of culture that reaches out to people if we want them to become Christians. I have found that those outside the Church are looking for something that is different to what we call culture; it doesn’t matter how old or how young they are. They are looking for a visible, life changing Christian ‘culture’ in the Christian’s life—something that the churches seem to have lost today.

How can we get a church to grow?In one Parish, before Series 1 had come into use, I talked to our local

gang. Through being friendly, they said they would like to have a Youth Club in the church—so that one night a week they would have a warm, dry place to spend an evening, and that was better then the stair-wells of the tower blocks. Most of the time we only did what they would have been doing sitting, talking in the stair-wells of the Tower Blocks. After a few months they worked out for themselves, ‘We meet in church, therefore we belong to the church, therefore we should go to church.’ Thankfully, I hadn’t thought we had reached the point where I could suggest they came to church, when one Sunday they came to Evening Prayer. And they kept coming after I had left the parish. After they got married most of them moved away and went to their new parish church, but one stayed in the parish, and before I lost contact with that parish I heard that he was still going to church with his ten-year-old son.

I could go on with many incidents in my ministry where being different has been beneficial to our church building—why we were the only church building that escaped vandalism! How to stop a local gang

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breaking the church windows! How to...I have never thought, ‘How can we reach out to people to win them

for Christ?’ ‘What can we do to make the church appeal to those outside?’ My only concern has been to live as close as we can to a true Christian life; and to love our neighbours as we love ourselves. To do this we must not water down our Christian message, nor our form of Christian worship. As St Paul wrote, ‘Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.’ (Rom. 12:2.) When there are enough, clergy and laity, aiming to live according to Paul’s words, then we can expect things to happen.

In five years in one parish, in which my wife had been attacked twice (and after the second attack the Police told the Diocese they had to make alterations to the Vicarage, to make it safer, and also increase the alarm system to include a panic button at the front door) we had to move because my daughter was too old to have adult supervision if she played in the garden. But we saw the church grow.

I only know one way to make the church grow, and in that parish the members of the congregation took it on board. Most of the growth came from infant baptism. In the Book of Common Prayer, after the child is baptised comes, ‘We receive this Child into the Congregation of Christ’s flock,’ and the congregation took it seriously. Those young Christians were important members of the church, and so through nurturing them we had up to thirty babies and toddlers (too young for Sunday School) in church every Sunday morning, and they were all well-behaved because they felt they were very important. They were more important than their parents, because they joined the Choir when it recessed out into the Vestry after the Service. A lot of the parents had not been confirmed, and my last year in that parish we had nine adult confirmands. In about three years the number of communicants quadrupled.

How did we get these people coming to church? It was because we, clergy and laity, had taken seriously those words said after the infant was baptised. We believed those babies who had been baptized were part of Christ’s flock. Because we took those words seriously our church grew in numbers. I asked some of those adults coming for confirmation, ‘What made you start coming to church?’ They all said, ‘The Church took our child’s baptism seriously, so we thought we ought to.’ (As a Conservative Evangelical I believe this is the Scripture’s teaching in the Old and New Testaments.)

The Church Lads’ Brigade grew in numbers from nine to over forty. The Young Wives’ grew from six to thirty. The Mothers’ Union (in spite of ten deaths) grew from thirty-six to sixty-eight; the Men’s Society

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from nought to nine; Bible Study group from nought to twelve.The year before the church started to grow, according to the Church

Service Register, the communicants were 2374, and in the last full year the number was 3432; while during the last six months (January to June) before I left the parish it was just over 2,100 (and on Whit Sunday that year we had a Confirmation Service with a number of children and eight adults confirmed—after the service one father said he wanted to be confirmed also, and I arranged for that to take place in another church).

It was the only parish where I have had a fifteen-year-old boy, after a year of Confirmation preparation, come to me and say, ‘Vicar, I don’t think I can make the promises in the Confirmation Service.’ He was most surprised that I did not try to persuade him to get confirmed in any case! Years later I was told he had become a Churchwarden.

In another parish, a small rural village, there was a Methodist Chapel, and some people went to other churches in the neighbouring town. Out of population of just over 200, including those who were too old to come to church, and babies and very young children, we, once a month, had a congregation of 45 at Evening Prayer, with a meeting in the Rectory after the service for a cup of tea and a time to chat. A lot of the growth came (following my Harvest Festival sermon) from the farmers at the weekly market, where, I was told by one farmer, my Sunday sermons were discussed—some agreeing and some disagreeing with what I had said!

What is the most worrying thing about giving people what we think will fit into their culture? When what they are looking for is something that will meet their deepest needs, they are not looking for a culture, a Christian culture that is totally different from the culture of music (pop, classical, baroque etc), the golf club or anything else—they can still keep those cultures if they want, there is nothing wrong with them—but rather their deepest desire is for the Christian life: they need to see changed lives, not an alternative culture, because we are children of God. It would be quite deadly for us if we did not have other cultures in our own lives.

I will finish with something that broke away from every idea of how to get alongside those outside the church portrayed in those articles. As Vicar in Bootle I was a Governor of the Comprehensive School. When the RE teacher retired, and there was no money to employ another teacher, I was asked to take one RE lesson a week for the oldest children (the school did not have a sixth form). One year I had a very small class because 50% of the pupils never went to school. Of the few who came to school about a third had spent time in YOI (Young Offender Institution), and the Headmaster couldn’t understand why some of the

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others had escaped that punishment. After the first lesson I asked them what they wanted to talk about, remembering it was RE. Their reply surprised me: ‘Has the Church any standards we can try to live up to? Because society hasn’t any standards at all!’ Spending a year discussing the Ten Commandments and Christianity, truancy dropped from 50% to 25% with some coming to school for RE only and then walking out of school after the lesson. I got to know so much about them and the different levels of burglary some of them indulged in; the shoplifter; the mugger, the joy rider, and a few who indulged in lesser crimes. They also taught me ways I could protect myself from their criminal activities! My only regret was that I was not able to give those young people any time after school.

I told a Christian Juvenile Magistrate some of the things those young people had told me about life in a YOI, and he said, ‘You don’t know what you are talking about! If you had seen those places you would not say that!’ It was not worth while telling him I had seen life inside a YOI, visiting a parishioner. I had also visited a parishioner in a top-security wing of a prison. The obvious thing is he had never seen inside the homes of some of those he was passing judgement on. I tried to get on the Government scheme for bringing young criminals and their victims face to face. I was turned down on two grounds: 1) I understood and knew too much about the young offenders, and 2) I thought the young offender would accept a harder judgement than the court would give. So it is not just the church that needs to see the reality in people’s lives. ‘Be not conformed to this world,’ wrote Paul, so why are so many leaders in the Church today saying, if the church is to grow we must follow the culture of the world?

I can only see any hope of the Church growing if Christians are ‘transformed by the renewing of our minds, that we may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God,’ as we ‘present our bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God,’ for that alone is ‘our reasonable service.’ (Rom. 3:1,2.)

(The Revd Dr Ralph S Werrell is the author of The Theology of William Tyndale and most recently Roots of William Tyndale’s Theology (2013)).

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Introduction: Preaching at St Laurence’s

Whilst chaplain at Hurstpierpoint College (1863-70), Revd Joseph Thomas Fowler MA (Durham, 1861), FSA (1867), preached a children’s address at St Laurence’s, Reading, on

St. Laurence’s Day (10 August) 1869. Fowler (1833-1924) was later (1894) awarded an honorary Durham doctorate (DCL) in recognition of his antiquarian accomplishments, and is nowadays primarily thought of as an antiquary; the long run of elaborate volumes which he edited for the Surtees Society comprises the core of a substantial literary legacy.1 He was no stranger to the young, however, teaching elementary Hebrew for almost half a century (1871-1917) to undergraduates and ordinands at Durham University. This children’s homily is simple, direct, gentle, and for the moment. It was printed in the parish magazine.2

Fowler’s text is from the prayer book psalm for the seventh evening: Ps. 37. 38: ‘Keep innocency, and take heed unto the thing that is right; for that will bring a man peace at the last.’ His exposition begins with some attention-seeking observations: young people may more readily listen to a stranger’s voice than ‘to the familiar voice of their own teachers’; the subject is a simple one; the talk will be brief; and ‘you can easily attend to all I shall have to say if only you will try.’ He proceeds to commend the consoling, advisory character of Ps. 37—a source of encouragement ‘for all who try to live a godly life’, or who do not know what to do, who want to improve, or who are in any kind of difficulty. Of this psalm, he suggests that v. 38 is the core verse: discoursing upon the innocency of childhood, he explains that ‘taking heed unto the thing that is right’ is the way to ‘keep innocency’. If his addressees are tempted to deceit, then Fowler exhorts them:

remember what the Psalmist says, ‘Come ye children, and hearken unto me, I will teach you the fear of the Lord. Keep thy tongue from evil, and thy lips that they speak no guile.’...Seek earnestly after him

1 Fowler biography: ‘Joseph Thomas Fowler, DCL, FSA’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal 28 (1925-26), pp. 107-17.2 Sermon to the Children on St. Laurence’s Day (St. Laurence, Reading, Parish Magazine, September 1869).

Child-minding, Window-tending, Sheep Keeping: A Preacher Applies the Prayer Book PsalterJ O H N H A R DY

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who alone is perfect…who says in His most blessed word, ‘I love them that love me, and those that seek me early shall find me.’ O my children, seek him now in this early morning of your lives. Say unto him, ‘O God, thou art my God, early will I seek thee.’

Complementary to this consideration of ‘keep innocency’ is the exegesis of ‘peace at the last’ (from our enemies round about, from sinful passions), which he defines as ‘a calm and holy joy arising from the answer of a good conscience, but far more from a sense of God’s most blissful presence in us and around us at the last.’

Unsurprisingly, given his youthful audience, Fowler’s preaching as here described, although exegetically based, demonstrates little in the way of exposition, and no endeavour at all to ascertain either the historical context which gave rise to his text, or the meaning which the latter was originally intended to convey. By contrast, Fowler’s application of the scripture is reasonably extended, not to say laborious. In this regard, a useful comparison is with the practice of a contemporary Hebraist whom Fowler very much admired, the great Samuel Rolles Driver (1846-1914). Unlike Fowler, Driver—Oxford’s Regius Professor of Hebrew for over thirty years (1883-1914) in direct succession to Dr Pusey—never cared to ‘labour and expand his conclusion…The permanent spiritual application...will be found…to spring directly out of [his] exposition…which is commonly as terse and summary as it is directly to the point.’3

St Cuthbert’s WindowNot long after Fowler had returned to Durham (1870), moving there

from Hurstpierpoint, St Cuthbert’s window in York Minster, at the south end of the east transept, was taken down for necessary glass and stone-work repairs (c. 1875). By invitation of the Dean and Chapter, Fowler took the opportunity of re-organising and re-captioning the panels according to literary tradition.4

The iconography of the York Cuthbert window is especially indebted to one of two important early twelfth-century manuscripts of the Venerable Bede’s Prose Life of Saint Cuthbert produced for Durham Cathedral Priory—probably at Durham scriptorium, which may have been home to a tradition of pictorially illustrated Cuthbert books. This is the BL (British Library) Yates Thompson 26.5 A vivid example of such indebtedness is the

3 S. R. Driver, Studies in the Psalms, ed. by C. F. Burney (London, 1915), preface. 4 J. T. Fowler, ‘On St Cuthbert’s Window in York Minster’, Yorkshire Archaeological and Topographical Journal (1875-76), pp. 249-76; ‘On the St. Cuthbert Window at York Minster (Additional Notes)’, YATJ 11 (1890-91), pp. 486-501. 5 The second manuscript, Oxford University College 165, underlies Bertram Colgrave’s 1940 edition of the Bede text: see below, n. 8.

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window-scene of Cuthbert praying in the sea and having his feet wiped by otters (Bede’s Prose Life, chapter 10): despite damage to the glass, which has reduced its clarity, this bears an unmistakable ‘family resemblance’ to a corresponding image in the Yates Thompson manuscript, indicating that the latter has sourced the window-image. Someone (probably the window’s donor, Bishop Langley) directed the glass-painters to this hagiography of St Cuthbert for modelling purposes, a fact that reflects medieval preference for Bede’s Prose Life of the saint (721) over the earlier Life of St Cuthbert, anonymously composed by a Lindisfarne monk (c. 700). The source manuscript is unlikely, however, to have been accessed direct by the glass-painters; intermediary artists were probably instructed by the donor to prepare sketches for translation on to glass.6

By his own account, Fowler was well acquainted with both Bede manuscripts.7 For reconstruction purposes, however, he spread his net more widely. So far as he was concerned, literary tradition comprised the Anonymous Life and Bede’s Prose Life (a stylish re-presentation of the Anonymous Life, commissioned by the monks of Lindisfarne, including ten chapters of new material); these are both conveniently available in Dr Bertram Colgrave’s standard edition.8 An additional source was the fabulous Irish prose hagiography, Libellus de Ortu Sancti Cuthberti, probably of late twelfth-century vintage, describing incidents from Cuthbert’s early years which go unreported in Bede and the Anonymous Life.9

Fowler conjectured that the window lights had been removed for safety during the civil war, and then replaced in reverse order. In their presumed original order, panels 14-16 (counting from the bottom of the window) stand out, for present purposes, as depicting a holy man’s (Cuthbert’s) psalter-devotion. During the putative removal and replacement, panel 14 had been much mutilated, and original panels 15 and 16 had been lost: Fowler’s ground-plan, based on the literary evidence, provided the basis for their restoration by York glass-painter J. W. Knowles (1887-88).10

Thus, as he worked among the sheepfolds, like David (panel 14;

6 See S. Brown and D. O’Connor, Medieval Craftsmen: Glass Painters (London, 1991), pp. 35, 37 (Langley’s patronage); D. Marner, St. Cuthbert: His Life and Cult in Medieval Durham (London, 2000), pp. 37-53 plus 46 plates (BL Yates Thompson MS 26). 7 ‘St Cuthbert’s Window’, pp. 254-56.8 Two Lives of St Cuthbert: A Life by an Anonymous Monk of Lindisfarne and Bede’s Prose Life: Texts, Translations, and Notes (Cambridge, 1940; repr. New York, 1969).9 See Miscellanea Biographica. Oswinus, Rex Northumbriae, Cuthbertus, Episcopus Lindisfarnensis, Eata, Episcopus Haugustaldensis, ed. by J. R. Raine (Surtees Society 8, 1838). The Life of St. Cuthbert in English Verse, c. A. D. 1450, from the Original MS in the Library at Castle Howard, ed. by J. T. Fowler (Surtees Society 87, 1891), based on the Irish Libellus, ‘might well serve as a companion to the window’, according to Fowler (‘Additional Notes’, p. 487).10 ‘Cuthbert’s Window’, pp. 277-79; ‘Additional Notes’, pp. 486-89.

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Anonymous Life 1.5, Bede’s Prose Life 4), Cuthbert learned the Psalms of David (panel 14, Libellus 14). Fowler suggests that in panel 14 the glass-painter had originally included grazing sheep in a green field, and three shepherds, one of whom was playing a bag-pipe, complete with fittings and finger-stop holes—as if to imply that Cuthbert, from shepherd(s), musically memorised the Psalter in accordance with ancient custom. Cuthbert’s subsequent loss of his Psalter at sea (panel 15, Libellus 14), swallowed by a sea-calf (or seal) (vitulus marinus), is remedied when the creature vomits it back to the rightful owner (panel 16, Libellus 18).11

Conclusion: Preaching at York MinsterFollowing the successful re-construction of Cuthbert’s window,

Fowler was aptly invited to preach at York Minster on the saint (1887).12 Again he adopts a Psalter text: Ps. 78.71, from the Prayer Book psalm for the fifteenth evening. He describes Ps. 78 as ‘an inspired summary of the history of the Jewish church’ up to the psalmist’s own time: ‘a poetical recital’ of God’s mercies, his ancient people’s errors, his displeasure on account of their manifold transgressions, ‘his gracious forgiveness and restraint despite Israel’s misdeeds’. He commends the psalm’s memorable, musical poetry: ‘By chanting it or hearing it chanted the whole Israel of God might be affected and impressed by it more than they would be by any bare narrative.’ Evidently, exposition (I use the term loosely) of the chosen psalm’s historical situation and meaning is not altogether lacking this time around.

But it is still subordinate to contemporary application. By accident or design, Fowler neatly links to his previous research as embodied in the Minster’s reconstructed Cuthbert window. He does so first by underscoring the fact that, like Cuthbert, David was chosen from among the sheepfolds, the chosen seed of the new Israel, and then by re-applying the text’s Davidic emphasis to the character of St. Cuthbert. For Fowler, Ps. 78.71 is an incentive to elaborate Cuthbert’s career and qualities, also his commemoration in Bishop Langley’s fifteenth-century St. Cuthbert window in York Minster: thus Jerusalem held David’s sepulchre; Durham proudly holds Cuthbert’s tomb; York houses one of Cuthbert’s noblest memorials. Just as that is exemplary of period church art, so Cuthbert himself offers a fifth century model of exciting holiness, arisen out of the common ranks of ordinary Christians in humble occupations.

And what is the ‘cash value’ of that particular sentiment? What is in

11 Fowler originally thought vitulus marinus signified a whale, but changed his mind; panels 15 and 16 actually represent the sea-calf or seal as a fish, ‘by a mistake for which the writer is responsible’: ‘Additional Notes’, p. 489.12 St. Cuthbert. A Sermon Preached in York Minster on the Second Sunday after Christmas. January 2nd, 1887 (York, 1887).

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it for Fowler’s auditors? Let God be thanked, he implies, for men and women who keep alive the memory of holy people—saints who show us the way. Let God be thanked, he implies, for patrons like Bishop Langley who funded Cuthbert’s window—and, we might add, for more recent conservators like Fowler and Knowles who keep it all together. Let God be thanked, he implies, for St Cuthbert as a model of an ordinary boy who hung on to his faith, and was willing to learn about his faith—from ordinary men, out in the fields. Fowler intimates that faith is to be tried and tested: in the work-place. Much can be learnt from books, especially the Psalms, but faith is put to the test in the trials and excitements of everyday life. From the harsh misfortune of losing one’s books, for example, comes greater reliance on interior resources, on an internalised faith. In highlighting the case of a north-country shepherd boy who learnt his Psalms and became a saint, Fowler implicitly particularises the Prayer Book Psalter lesson of his Sunday School address to the children of Reading St Laurence: ‘O my children, seek him now in this early morning of your lives. Say unto him “O God, thou art my God, early will I seek thee”.’ By so doing, he surely sets them on the path to becoming life-long learners and lovers of Coverdale’s Psalms, able to savour their foundational moral teaching from infancy, or just a little later.

(The Revd John Hardy is Rector of St Mary’s and St Agnes’, Newmarket in the Diocese of St Edmundsbury & Ipswich.)

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Stephen Platten & Christopher Woods (edd.), Comfortable Words: Polity, Piety and the Book of Common Prayer, SCM Press, 2012, 169 pp., Pbk. £45. ISBN 978-0-334-04670-7

It is tempting to use the old cliché ‘curate’s egg’ about this collection of papers, published to coincide with the 350th anniversary of the 1662 edition of the Book of Common Prayer. At £45 for a relatively slim paperback, that would make it an expensive egg, and one only good in parts. Stephen Platten refers to the Glorious Revolution of 1689: most scholars date it to 1688, when James II fled the country. Diarmaid MacCulloch asserts in his Foreword that the BCP’s form and content were ‘settled’ in 1662 and ‘remained unchallenged until 1927-28’––an assertion exploded by at least three of the subsequent papers, notably that by Brian Spinks on the BCP in the nineteenth century: although ‘no revised liturgy was authorised in the nineteenth century, the flood of liturgical revision that came in the late twentieth century was set in motion by Victorian assaults on the Prayer Book’.

However, this is not a single egg. It is a collection, assembled by the Bishop of Wakefield and the Secretary of the Church of England Liturgical Commission. The contributors show a curious unawareness of this journal: have there been no contributions in over seventy editions which have added anything to the sum total of BCP studies? At least our slighter sister, the Prayer Book Society Journal, gets a favourable mention, for the fine article by Jeff Astley and Bridget Nichols, ‘The Formative Role of the Book of Common Prayer’, in the Trinity 2011 edition.

In his opening paper, Platten clearly wants to place the eggs of his contributors in as large a box as possible. I am sure that he would echo the words of my late Director of Studies at Trinity College, Cambridge, Bishop John A. T. Robinson, that the ‘proof text’ for the Church of England is Psalm 31.8: ‘Thou hast set my feet in a large room’. But in this large room, or box, the bantam-weight is the account by Brian Cummings of the making of the 1662 edition itself. One would have expected more of the editor of that invaluable volume, The Book of Common Prayer: The texts of 1549, 1559 and 16421. Perhaps he thought that 1662 is a path too well-trodden. As it is, he takes barely fourteen pages to tell us the story of its publication, very slightly less than Hannah Cleugh needs to discuss the role of the Prayer Book in early Stuart society. She shows—

1 Reviewed by John Scrivener in Faith & Worship 70 pp.58-60.

REVIEWS

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pace MacCulloch—that in that period the BCP’s version of Protestantism (what worship should look like and where the Church of England stood in relation to Reformed Protestant Europe) remained contested ground, as is clearly reflected in early attempts at Prayer Book revision.

The duck egg in the box is Peter McCullogh’s fascinating paper ‘Absent Presence: Lancelot Andrewes and 1662’. This explores how one of the greatest of the seventeenth-century Divines used his copy of the Prayer Book. Andrewes was successively Bishop of Chichester (from 1605), then of Ely (from 1609) and then of Winchester from 1618 until his death in 1626. He had the habit of heavily annotating his copy of the 1559 edition of the Book of Common Prayer. No fewer than four transcriptions of his notes have come down to us. They give a fascinating glimpse into how a seventeenth-century bishop ordered his personal chapel and the liturgical life of his household. Quite why Andrewes was annotating the 1559 edition of the Prayer Book and not the King James edition of 1604 is not explained. But it is well known that he preferred the First Prayer Book of Edward VI to the Second. His annotations show him to have been ‘Laudian’ before Laud in the ordering of his chapel2, and to have been the inspiration of many subsequent reforms in Anglican liturgy. McCullough, Professor of English at Oxford, is currently engaged in writing Andrewes’ biography. His re-evaluation of the bishop’s debt to Eastern Orthodoxy will be one of his principal insights.

After that, we settle into a more standard size of eggs—I mean essays—from the Tudor Prayer Books (Gordon Jeanes) to the place of 1662 in the twenty-first century (Christopher Woods). William Jacob sheds light on the neglected spiritual life of the Church in the eighteenth century, and shows that it was more pious and vibrant than it is often painted, with the Prayer Book being constantly assailed both by the scriptural conservatives and the theological liberals.

Paul Bradshaw, on liturgical development in the twentieth century, puts much of the rest of the collection into a perspective which will not be lost on us in 2014, the year which commemorates the start of the First World War. Noting the beginning of a new process of Prayer Book Revision in 1906, he comments ‘Thus began a process that was to last 21 years … when representatives of the Church of England continued solemnly to debate matters of rubric and text while European civilization was collapsing all around them.’

Looking back at the twentieth century, one is bound to conclude that, when a Church turns inward and spends most of its time and most of its energy on liturgical reform whilst the rest of the world passes through

2 Laud was appointed Bishop of Bath & Wells in 1626, the year of Andrewes’ death.

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two World Wars, the nuclear age and the Cold Wars, it is little wonder that that Church appears irrelevant. Paul Avis, in a beautifully-written paper on ‘The Book of Common Prayer and Anglicanism,’ does much to restore hope, after which the ‘Epilogue’ by Christopher Woods on ‘A place for the Book of Common Prayer in the twenty-first century Church?’—with the emphasis on the question-mark—seems both grudging and otiose. In the end I prefer Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Foreword, which acknowledges the Book of Common Prayer as a gentle antidote for those ‘who view a well-signposted theological motorway, straight as an arrow, as an unconvincing route to divinity, or who are repelled by the bleak certainties and bullying self-righteousness of much organized religion.’ In that light, one can be grateful to him for his acknowledgement of the ‘heroically grumpy efforts of the Prayer Book Society’ that have ‘shamed Anglicans into arresting the decline’ in the use of the Book of Common Prayer.

Eric Woods

Paul Thomas, Using the Book of Common Prayer: A Simple Guide, Church House Publishing, ISBN 978 0 7151 4276 9, £12.99.

Robert Atwell, The Good Worship Guide: Leading Liturgy Well, Canterbury Press, ISBN 978 1 85311 719 0, £19.99.

Paul Thomas’s introduction to the Prayer Book is, the back cover tells us, ‘intended as a basic, beginners’ guide for ordinands, clergy and readers, especially those less familiar with the Prayer Book tradition’, and it is admirably designed for that purpose. In the first half of the book we are given a concise history of the Book of Common Prayer from 1549 to 1662, while Part 2 guides the reader, by way of an overview of the whole 1662 volume, through the services of Morning and Evening Prayer, Holy Communion and the occasional offices of Baptism, Matrimony and Burial of the Dead. The approach is practical and low-key, designed to allay anxieties and defuse hostility.

Readers who are familiar with the Prayer Book tradition should bear in mind that this book is not for them. Its strategic aim is ‘to encourage a wider use of the Book of Common Prayer in the Church today’. Tactically this involves assuming readers to be familiar only with Common Worship, and approaching the Prayer Book from their direction. This purpose should be remembered when reading a passage such as this: ‘Unlike the Eucharistic Prayers in Common Worship, the Sursum Corda in the Prayer Book is missing the opening greeting, “The Lord be with you”. In many cases

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clergy insert this into the Sursum Corda because they feel that the opening dialogue is incomplete without it. This is certainly an option for you’. ‘Missing’ begs the question, of course—it is ‘missing’ if you come to the 1662 order from Sarum, or 1549 or more recent rites, but if your direction of travel is the other way the insertion of the greeting mars one of Cranmer’s high points, the powerfully immediate transition from the Comfortable Words to ‘Lift up your hearts’. So we need to remember that Prayer Book readers are not being addressed here. Some, of course, will also dislike the idea of clergy inserting new matter at will—and it would surely be wise on their part to consult the congregation before tinkering too much, even if Canon B5 gives ministers a ‘discretion to make and use variations which are not of substantial importance’. Part 1 of the book ends with 1662, but I think it might have been helpful (where variations are concerned) to take the story a little further so as to clarify the legal difference between the Prayer Book services as such and the Common Worship ‘Prayer Book’ services, both of which are, quite reasonably, drawn on here.

If this book goes through several printings—and I very much hope it does—thought might be given to other small additions to the text (as well as to a few corrections1): the language of the Prayer Book seems to be an obstacle for some, so a bit of guidance on this would have been helpful, including pronunciation and explanation of the thou/thee conventions. And the inclusion of a short bibliography would encourage those whose interest has been kindled to explore further. But I return to my opening point—Using the Book of Common Prayer is admirably designed for its purpose and warmly to be welcomed. It is encouraging that the Church has recognised the need for such a book.

Bishop Robert Atwell’s Good Worship Guide is a more wide-ranging work. Perhaps the best way to suggest its character is to say that it is (very roughly) a modern equivalent for Percy Dearmer’s Parson’s Handbook, and written from (again very roughly) the same perspective. It contains general reflections on liturgy and spiritual life together with often very detailed advice on the planning and conduct of services. Bishop Atwell quite rightly believes in the importance of careful and informed preparation if worship is to be effective, but if the amount of attention given to some matters were to be given to all matters a very much longer book would be required. As things stand the effect is of attention bestowed in a slightly haphazard and arbitrary fashion—why for example, in the

1 A few slips and errors have crept in. It is, for instance, stated that ‘there is only one example in the Book of Common Prayer (Ash Wednesday) when the Epistle for the day is actually a passage from the Old Testament—Joel’. But this is to forget the Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Trinity (Jeremiah), Candlemas (Malachi), The Annunciation of the BVM (Isaiah) and St John the Baptist (Isaiah).

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glossary, include ‘ombrellino’ (a ceremonial umbrella no longer in use) but not ‘preaching bands’?—while the passion for forward planning sometimes leads to advice in the vein of Pippa Middleton (‘ensure that the font is clean and that the plug is inserted before filling it with water’).

However, the author’s head is in the right place, and I especially welcomed what he has to say about ministerial professionalism. ‘Presence’ he remarks ‘is something that can be recognised in a person, but not easily taught. What can be taught is competence’. Among the things he emphatically thinks clergy should be competent in is use of the Book of Common Prayer:

The majority of clergy these days have not been brought up on the Prayer Book and, unlike earlier generations, have consciously to learn ‘how to do it’. A priest must learn how to preside, so that word and action are in harmony. It is incumbent on all clergy, but especially a younger generation of ministers, to familiarise themselves with the text until they are fluent

Among the services he works through in detail, with much sensible advice, are BCP Holy Communion and Evening Prayer. He clearly thinks that the Prayer Book rightfully belongs at the centre of the Church’s worship, whatever else may be done.

The appearance of these two books from mainstream Anglican publishers is rather heartening.

John Scrivener

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From Mr Simon McKieI found the articles by Canon Woods in the Easter & Trinity 2013

Issues of Faith & Worship on the history of the Prayer Book fascinating and look forward to reading the final part in a future issue. I must, however, take issue, gently I hope, with the article’s consideration of five matters.

First, the killing of Charles I was not, as Canon Woods terms it, an ‘execution’. An execution is, as it is defined in Mozley & Whiteley’s Law Dictionary ‘the putting into force [of] the sentence of the law in a judicial proceeding’. The ‘trial’ of St Charles was not a trial in law and is still not recognised as such by the Law of England. The sentence was not, therefore, a sentence of the law and the beheading of St Charles was not only, in law, an act of high treason but also one of murder. No retrospective legal act has legitimised it.

Secondly, ‘conformist puritans’ were not ‘driven to accept what had hitherto been the separatist position, that bishops were incurably anti-Christian’. They may have accepted it but they were not driven to do so. It is an old canard to blame legitimate authority when malcontents refuse to accept its legitimacy.

Thirdly, it is very strange to include Oliver Cromwell, a man who made himself the absolute dictator of England under the distinctly Orwellian title of ‘Lord Protector’ and whose burial aped a royal funeral even including an imperial ‘crown’, with those whom Canon Woods cites John Moorman as calling ‘those who really cared for liberty’.

Fourthly, it is true that ‘there was no attempt to add a state service to commemorate the ‘Glorious Revolution’. This was not, however, because, in the words of Diarmid MacCulloch quoted by Canon Woods ‘the Church of England ... was never quite sure how to justify James’ removal and it seems to have decided to leave well alone ...’. The doctrinal justification of James’ abdication and the exclusion of his sons from the succession was, and remains, clear. As I explained in my article ‘A Godly Unity’ which was published in the Easter 2010 Issue of Faith & Worship, the happy coincidence of the fact that King William’s landing in England took place on 5th November 1688, Guy Fawkes Day, allowed the forms of prayer provided to thank God ‘for the happy deliverance of King James I and the three estates of England from the most traitorous and bloody intended massacre by gunpowder’ to be revised so as also to commemorate what the revised form called ‘... the happy arrival of his Majesty King William ... for the deliverance of our church and nation’.

Finally, it is true that the State Services were abrogated by Queen Victoria by Royal Warrant in 1859 but one can hardly describe the

LETTERS

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Queen as having ‘decided that the additional state services were no longer relevant’. The Warrant was issued in response to a petition of the House of Lords proposed and strongly advocated by Earl Stanhope and supported, unfortunately, by a majority of the bishops who spoke on the matter. Loyal Members of the Church of England must submit to the acts of its Supreme Governors, however ill-advised, but we should not invest Queen Victoria’s acquiescence to this petition with a greater weight than it can bear.

I hope that Canon Woods will forgive what might seem rather pedantic objections. As I tried to show in my article ‘ . . . Knowing Whose Minister She Is . . . ‘‘ in the Trinity 2012 issue of Faith & Worship, the Doctrine of the Royal Authority and of the subject’s duty of obedience to it, forged in the terrible events of the Great Rebellion and its aftermath, is one of the distinctive doctrines of the Church of England, indeed, possibly, its only distinctive doctrine. An accurate understanding of the historic events which led to its formulation and its expression in our liturgy and daily offices is a matter of continuing relevance and importance.

From Mrs A.L.Stephenson

With reference to Faith & Worship 73, letter on pages 62-3, the French proverb comes to mind ‘It is the first step that counts’. The mob shouts in approbation of the rejection of the Book of Common Prayer. They are shouting against the source of spiritual, uplifting goodness, worship and humility. Beware of the first step, further down the line was the shout of another mob who were against spiritual, uplifting goodness, worship and humility - ‘Crucify him, crucify him.’ Be careful, it is the first step that counts...

From Mr J.B.Reavill

Your correspondents have given a rough ride to the modest suggestion I made in the Easter 2012 number of Faith & Worship, namely that the Book of Common Prayer might be made more accessible to newcomers, this apparently under the impression that (God forbid!) I was advocating that the inspired liturgy in the Prayer Book should be tampered with.

As it happens a new vicar has been instituted at the church I attend, one who is a faithful friend of Choral Evensong according to the BCP. Independently of the idea I put forward this vicar has produced a Service of Evensong which is distributed to the congregation to guide them through the worship. With one small exception it reflects exactly the thoughts in my original letter and I believe other churches could adopt it with advantage.

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