Prayer and the well-ordered community

From F.C. Mather's High Church Prophet: Bishop Samuel Horsley (1733-1806) and the Caroline Tradition in the Later Georgian Church (1992), challenging those accounts (often Tractarian) of the Georgian Church which portray Latitudinarian ascendancy and liturgical poverty:

In towns some churches continued to hold services twice a day on weekdays throughout the year. Wigan still did so in 1778, as did St Nicholas, a chapel connected with the parish church in Liverpool. Newcastle upon Tyne All Saints and Newcastle St Nicholas followed the same practice in 1769. It may be significant that these churches were all situated in old corporate towns, traditionalism in religion in some way following a well-established communal life (p.16-17).

What is particularly striking about this extract is that reference to "a well-established communal life". There is an almost Benedictine-quality here, a recognition that a flourishing, well-ordered life of prayer is intimately related to a flourishing, well-ordered communal life. It points to that enduring characteristic of the High Church tradition (what Ron Dart calls "the Laudian magisterial Anglican way"), a concern for the right-ordering of communal life and the necessity of the Church's participation in civic, political, and economic life. When communal life is not rightly-ordered - in its civic, political, and economic activity - the life of prayer is inevitably undermined and disrupted. Seeking a well- and rightly-ordered communal life, then, is not a distraction from the Church's mission. It is, rather, a significant means of establishing a cultural context which allows the Church's life of prayer to be authentically practiced and to flourish.

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