Sunday, 7 December, 1997

The Church of England: Synod Report Part 2 (Special to Anglicans Online)
by Simon Sarmiento

The General Synod of the Church of England met in the last week of November 1997 at Church House, Westminster. This second of two reports concentrates on the process of liturgical revision. The Process Back in 1991, the Synod endorsed a programme of revision to update the Alternative Service Book 1980 (originally authorised for ten years, then extended for another ten) by the year 2000. (The 1662 Book of Common Prayer remains as a permanent feature and will not be altered by this process.) Although this revision now looks unlikely to complete by 2000, quite a lot has happened already. In 1994, the Synod was asked to endorse several general principles, including: (a) the inclusion of both BCP and alternative services in the same volume and the encouraging of the mixing of traditional and modern texts within one service; (b) the production of a core book containing provision for mainline Sunday liturgies plus other volumes containing supplementary and other material, rather than a single physical book containing everything; (c) the provision for only lectionary references, not printed-out full texts as in the ASB, thus avoiding mandating specific translations; (d) the development for all new texts to be written as far as possible with sensitivity to gender, race, and age, and inclusive language use monitored by both academic study and feedback from parishes; (e) the adotion of ecumenically agreed texts from the English Language Liturgical Consultation for future authorised services subject to some specifics, e.g. both traditional and modern versions of the Lord's Prayer should be provided. The first new publication under this programme was The Christian Year: Calendar, Lectionary and Collects, published earlier this year. Initiation Services At this session, the second new publication was finally approved. It contains provisions for baptism, confirmation, and reception into the Church of England and is authorised from next Easter Eve, that is 11 April 1998. (This gives barely three months to get it published in book form.) The services are formulated and presented on the assumption that they should normally be held within a eucharistic context, and this did cause a few evangelical objections. Criticism also came from those who were concerned that in England, very many baptisms are conducted outside the Sunday morning liturgy, for families who are not regular church-goers and who do not appreciate the liturgical tradition of the church. However, the voting in favour was decisive: bishops 43-0; clergy 179-16; laity 165-39. Dr Kenneth Stevenson, Bishop of Portsmouth, took strong issue with those who claimed the rites failed to represent all Anglican traditions. He pointed out that it was the Alternative Service Book rites which had been one-sided, and that these new rites reflected themes found in both the Thirty-Nine Articles and the BCP. The Eucharist Proposed new rites for the Eucharist were debated in detail, and this debate will continue at the next session. Many sections of the draft were recommitted to the revision process. It will likely be another year before this material is finally approved. The draft is some 120 pages of A5 size paper, so not easily summarised here. Basically there are two rites, called Rite 1 and Rite 2. Each of these is provided in both traditional and modern English. Rite 1 is largely a revision of the ASB Rite A, and Rite 2 largely follows the shape of the BCP. There was a lot of detailed criticism of the text and rubrics. One person described the accompanying notes as having "a nannying approach, the suggestion that we know best how to do the eucharist" in a way that would not work for everyone. Another declared these notes to be "unduly complicated, prescriptive, and unnecessary". Following a discussion of whether or not it was unduly "Catholic" to start the service (optionally!) with the words "In the name of the Father " the Archbishop of York got up to say he would like to see "a diminution of all this sort of stuff" at the beginning of the service, and the Prolocutor of Canterbury wanted to "strip off the excess stuff". Others complained that the full text of the Ten Commandments had been omitted. The Provost-designate of Derby pointed out that this deletion had in fact occurred thirty years ago, when Series 2 was first published! Nevertheless on an informal vote, it appeared that nearly half those present wanted it put back now. In a discussion on the phrase in the Creed "and was made man" where ELLC proposes "and was made human" the most interesting remark came from an Orthodox Archimandrite who suggested following St Athanasius in "he assumed our humanity" and went on "it is unfortunately not what the creed said, but that has never stopped the liturgists". The Psalter The proposal to continue work on a revision of the ECUSA Psalter to be printed in the new English service books was overwhelmingly passed, despite the objections raised before the meeting by some of those academics who had contributed to the translation bound up with, though not formally part of, the ASB. Br Tristam SSF explained that the revision of ECUSA used in Celebrating Common Prayer had attempted to eliminate Americanisms and unnecessary references to "men" and "man". The complete draft of the further revision will be made widely available for comment before a further formal recommendation is brought to Synod. Readers of Anglicans Online can find more detail on this than even Synod members had available from Simon Kershaw's report. Liturgical Publishing The group responsible for getting all this material in the hands of users got approval for their recommendation that the new publications should be collectively titled Common Worship and subtitled Prayers and Services for the Church of England. However, their recommendation that the new publications should not follow the ASB practice of numbering all the paragraphs in the margin was amended. The Bishop of Guildford said that the new publications should also be available on the latest technology. One synod member said: "I would like the website to lead me down to the church in my area, when the services were on, and a full print-out of what the service would be. Let us use technology and give people proper access to our Church". To Part 1 of this report