laudable Practice

... hugely inspiring worship ... dramatic liturgy ... awe-inspiring architecture ... The finest choral music in the world ... or making music with fellow musicians in a worship band has been even more profound. My sense of being led by the Holy Spirit in a common purpose has taken me to a level which one could only experience worshipping God. The words are from a recent blog post examining experiences of public worship, entitled ' Boring Ourselves to Death '. While the above extracts emphasise experiences of the inspiring and the dramatic, the post also addresses quite different experiences in the Church of England: That said, I’ve also been bored and, at times, deeply frustrated at what passes for worship. Sometimes, preaching has been dull, or liturgy has been badly led. Other times, music has been poorly executed. Occasionally, I’ve sensed a complete lack of joy or engagement from those leading or worshipping. As suggested by the title, 'boring' worship is the target...

Two Tweets on a subject of beloved of laudable Practice - Sunday Mattins - caught my attention recently.  The first was by Church of England priest and theologian Angela Tilby : The second was from Eric Parker , a priest and theologian in the Reformed Episcopal Church in the United States: What is particularly striking about these comments is the recognition of the - to use a word employed by the latter - wisdom  of Sunday Mattins.  This wisdom is seen in various ways.  Firstly, there is the prudence of Sunday Mattins.  Angela Tilby's mention of it being a more inclusive liturgy than the Parish Communion is certainly suggested by the contemporary appeal of Choral Evensong in the Church of England context.  If there is an ambition to see Anglicanism evangelise and grow in North Atlantic societies, we might ask ourselves if the Parish Communion is really the appropriate principal liturgy on every Sunday when non-Eucharistic services (Choral Evensong, Remembr...

Yesterday at Evensong the second lesson was Luke 2:40-52, the account of the Christ Child, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and Joseph going up to Jerusalem for the Passover.  Taylor interprets this passage in The Great Exemplar (I.V.III)   as emphasising the priority of public worship over private devotions.  Key to this, says Taylor, is the nature of religion as "public virtue", witnessing to "the God of all the world", the God of our common not merely private experience: "the very design, temper, and constitution of religion is to be a public address to God".   We might regard Taylor here as giving expression to a key characteristic shared by the earlier Conformity of the Elizabethan Settlement and the Anglicanism of the 'long 18th century': the centrality of public worship and Common Prayer to the shaping and sustaining of communal flourishing and well-being, in which our shared life is experienced as flowing from and oriented towards God the Creator ...