Falling in Love with Liturgy

John Leach argues for a fresh appreciation for liturgy in Charismatic Anglicanism.

I recently graduated, at the grand old age of 72, from my doctoral studies, which examined the growing phenomenon of churches replacing Anglican liturgical worship with a diet of worship-songs, songs usually coming from non-Anglican sources. This involved asking church leaders why they had adopted this policy, a question which yielded some fascinating answers. These are the kind of churches, of course, which are producing, and training, ordinands who may well go to multiple traditional churches, and who will often go with little experience of how to make their own spirituality and worship work in much more Anglican settings. The consequences can be painful and disenfranchising to existing church members.

If I am known for anything, it is probably my work as a Charismatic liturgist; but in a different field, I was recently contacted by two different young men from our diocese who were being let loose, from a background in Charismatic Evangelical churches, to first incumbencies in much more traditional parishes. They had both realized that they would have to chair PCC meetings and had absolutely no experience of how to do that. They wanted to spend some time with me learning from my supposed wisdom. We subsequently held what they would say were very helpful sessions, but this also made me realize that holding lightly to Anglican ways of doing things does not always best prepare new clergy for ministry outside their own narrow networks.

Another example: recently, I was invited to cover a service at a nearby church which was in vacancy. I was told by my contact that he was ‘leading’ the service, but that I would preach and ‘do Communion’. I arrived to find the altar-table adorned with two bottles of wine, a pack of four rolls, a rack of Baptist-style ‘shot glasses’ for the wine (not permitted for use in the Church of England), about ten corporals but no purificators. The Gospel reading was read before the Epistle (which I had asked for in addition to the single verse from Matthew which I had been asked to preach on), neither of which was adorned with the usual liturgical responses. The whole approach was relaxed and informal, and (in my view) totally lacking in any kind of reverence. The liturgist in me came out feeling really disturbed by the whole thing. It wasn’t even as if there had been any powerful moments of sung worship, any sense of the moving of the Spirit. It was just … bleurgh.

Now I know that anyone reading that last paragraph is likely to have one of two responses. Some will be as deeply offended as I was. Ten corporals, for goodness’ sake! But others will not see at all what the fuss is about. They will welcome the informal ‘chattiness’ of said type of service, and may not even know what a corporal is (it’s the little ‘tablecloth’ which the communion vessels sit on), and why any of that stuff matters in the slightest. I probably will have come over as a dead traditionalist, obsessed with swallowing camels while filtering out gnats. If your focus as a church is on evangelism and outreach, and being open to the work of the Spirit, why get worked up about how much of the Bible you read in services?

While my research was limited to liturgical manifestations of this unease around all things Anglican, the people I interviewed demonstrated in all kinds of ways their antipathy to the Anglican rules, including solemn promises they had made when they were licensed. We seem to be building a Church within our Church where people are happy to be a part of the system, but also happy to neglect its disciplines. One respondent did tell me that he was deliberately engaged in civil disobedience in order to change the system, but most were not that thought out. They just got on and did their own thing regardless.

‘Does any of this really matter?’ I hear you cry. I believe it does. I’m not arguing for ‘the system’ as a legalistic bit of rule-keeping. I’ve broken enough rules myself to understand that sometimes that is the way to bring change. As a liturgist I’m also very aware that liturgical developments often come on the basis of ‘If you can’t beat it, change it’. The inclusion of permission, for example, for preaching series instead of strict adherence to the lectionary, came with Common Worship because many churches were doing it anyway, so how can we help them to do it better? But having to confront the issues in my research has convinced me strongly of one thing: rules are, in general, there because they’re good for us. I have had to argue in my thesis for the very real benefits of a liturgical style of worship, and in making those arguments I have become more convinced of them myself. There are many compelling arguments, to my mind, that a liturgical approach to worship, with an emphasis on reverence as well as informality, leads to the good disciple-making which I believe is the main role of the Church now as it was in the first century.

Of course this is counter-cultural in our post-postmodern society, but that is the point: liturgy is meant to challenge culture, just as the very earliest creed ‘Jesus is Lord’ was used directly in defiance of the divine claims of Roman emperors. Liturgy is not there to make us feel good, or to give us spiritual ‘highs’. It is deliberately repetitive, because that’s how we learn and how things penetrate deeply. My closing plea in the thesis was for people to ‘fall in love with liturgy again’, to know it, learn it, value it, use it with all the creativity we can muster. The ‘worship songs are good, liturgy is bad’ rhetoric which I encountered so often is actually a deeply false dichotomy.

I want to pay tribute to hundreds of faithful church leaders who are just getting on with the job of running parish churches which seek to form Christian disciples to work for the blessing of their local communities. But I wonder if some of them would benefit from the amazing resources which Spirit and liturgy together can bring to the task, and it was because of this I wrote this book.

John Leach has been in ordained Anglican ministry for 40 years. He has lectured in various theological institutions and currently teaches theology at St Hild’s, Mirfield and Emmanuel Theological Colleges.

His new book Anglicans who don’t like Liturgy: How the worship song took centre stage is out this month and available to order here, with 20% off all orders before the end of March.