Confession…

Deep down inside, I am an old-fashioned, low-church evangelical Anglican.

That means I like a simple liturgy, a spiritual worship, centred on what Donald Coggan called ‘the Sacrament of the Word’, without excessive ceremonies piled on.

I like good hymns (not mindless drivel), and a service that’s accessibly led by a minister who loves and relates to people rather than slavishly following rubrics. I like intelligent preaching that leads me into the biblical text and helps me apply it to my life; I like to learn something new from the sermon and I like it if it gives me a challenge to take home with me. I like a simple celebration of Holy Communion that’s not so cluttered with extraneous ceremony that there’s no space for me to sense the presence of God.

What I don’t like is ritualism. I find ritualism at times distracting, at times annoying, and at times amusing (i.e. in the ‘what on earth are they getting up to now?’ category). What I never find it is ‘helpful’.

My attitude, in fact, is almost completely in line with that of the author of the preface to the 1549 Book of Common Prayer (probably Archbishop Thomas Cranmer), who wrote these words in his section on ‘Of Ceremonies, Why Some be Abolished and Some Retained’.

‘This our excessive multitude of Ceremonies was so great, and many of them so dark, that they did more confound and darken, than declare and set forth Christ’s benefits to us. And besides this, Christ’s Gospel is not a Ceremonial Law, (as much of Moses’ Law was) but it is a religion to serve God, not in bondage of the figure or shadow, but in the freedom of the Spirit; being content only with those Ceremonies which do serve to a decent Order and godly Discipline, and such as be apt to stir up the full mind of man to the remembrance of his duty to God, by some notable and special signification, whereby he might be edified’.

Nowadays ritualism (under the general heading of ‘enriching our worship’) is so all-pervasive in the Anglican Church of Canada that people like me are sometimes accused of not being real Anglicans – surely we must really be a sort of species of crypto-Baptist, or Calvinist, or Puritan? So I find it oddly comforting to reflect that in 1549 – and indeed throughout the next three centuries, until the beginning of the Oxford Movement – I would have just been a standard Anglican. I certainly was when I was a child.

If memory serves me correctly, in St. Barnabas’, Leicester (the church where I was baptised on December 28th 1958), we had Holy Communion at our main Sunday service once a month. The rest of the time the service was Morning Prayer. I remember palm crosses on Palm Sunday when I was growing up, but I never saw ashes on the forehead on Ash Wednesday until I moved to western Canada in 1979. The first time I saw footwashing on Maundy Thursday was in 1985. In my childhood, incense was only used in extreme Anglo-Catholic churches, and I never went to one of those. The minister raised his hand to bless the people, but did not make the sign of the cross (and neither did they, in response).

What we did have, week by week, were good hymns led (not performed) by an enthusiastic choir, a service saturated in scripture (i.e. the Book of Common Prayer), prayers of intercession that connected with the real needs of the worshippers as well as the wider world, and good preaching. My Dad became a minister about the time I started paying attention to the preaching, and my Dad was an excellent preacher, with a way of explaining the text that somehow held your attention. There were many times when I was a teenager (and fairly new at being an intentional Christian) that the Holy Spirit spoke to me through one of Dad’s sermons.

Given the strong role model I had, and given the fact that I was trained in an evangelical institution, I suppose it isn’t surprising that when I became a minister I aimed at the same sort of simple liturgy that had nurtured me as a young man. But it isn’t as ‘simple’ as that. I’ve done a lot of revisiting of theological positions that I imbibed in my youth, and have discarded more than a few things along the way. I’ve tried my hand at ritualism, too, in some of its milder forms. But the older I get, the more unsatisfying I find it. To me, it’s not the way of the simple carpenter rabbi who walked the roads of Galilee calling people to follow him.

And so I find as I get older that I want to simplify things even further. I’m not sure why we Anglican clergy feel we have to dress in these ancient robes to lead worship; after all, originally they were just modelled on the formal robes worn by Roman state officials. How Christian is it to elevate one form of ministry – that of pastors and bishops – and dress it up in albs and stoles, copes and mitres (and even have our bishops sitting on ‘thrones’), while we give no such symbolic recognition to the ministry of the vast majority of our church members?

I heard a minister a few weeks ago say words to this effect: ‘Church is really very simple. We preach the gospel, we pray, and we love people. That’s all. It’s not easy, but it is simple’.

I agree. And the older I get, the more I want to keep it simple.