Adding worship to the Marks of Mission at ACC15; The Book of Common Prayer at three hundred and fifty; Bishop Robinson plans an active retirement; Native American saint stirs controversy
Adding worship to the Marks of Mission at ACC15
Bosco Peters, an ordained liturgist, has written this Open Letter to ACC15 (the Anglican Consultative Council) which is meeting in New Zealand from 27 October to 7 November. The letter is “a passionate request that you revise the Anglican five-fold mission statement and explicitly include worship/liturgy.” He writes:
“Dear Archbishop of Canterbury and members of the Anglican Consultative Council,
“This open letter is a passionate request that you revise the Anglican five-fold mission statement and explicitly include worship/liturgy.
“The five-fold mission statement is regularly used as a starting point for the life and mission of the church. It is good, but inadequate. I ardently advocate that our worship, our liturgy, be central, and be seen to be central, to the church’s mission. Its omission from the five-fold mission statement affects our church life and integrity.
“The Anglican five-fold mission statement from the Anglican Consultative Council has:
• To proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom
• To teach, baptise and nurture new believers
• To respond to human need by loving service
• To seek to transform unjust structures of society
• To strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth
(Bonds of Affection-1984 ACC-6 p49, Mission in a Broken World-1990 ACC-8 p101)
“I propose that worship, liturgy, is not a means to further the mission of the church. It is not a means to further any or all of the dimensions in the five-fold mission statement. Worship, in and of itself, is an essential dimension of our mission and should find its place in our accepted mission statement.
“Worship, liturgy, especially the Eucharist, is understood, by the majority of Christians, to be “the source and summit of the Christian life” (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, 11). St Ignatius Loyola understood “The human person is created to praise, reverence, and serve God” (The Principle and Foundation in his Spiritual Exercises).
“Although worship is not a means, giving it centrality does lead to desirable effects. On the other hand, I would argue, the loss of the pivotal place of worship and liturgy leads to consequences, such as the loss of the unifying power of common prayer, of common worship.
“I would suggest that as Anglicans unity has been a gift to us through common prayer which has been at the heart of Anglicanism. We neglect our shared spiritual disciplines, and our common unity in God through Christ in the Spirit, at a cost to our unity. Lex orandi, lex credendi, (“the law of prayer is the law of belief”); lex vivendi, in fact. Prayer shapes belief which shapes our life….”
http://liturgy.co.nz/open-letter-to-acc15/11822
The Book of Common Prayer at three hundred and fifty.
The New Yorker Magazine notes the 350th anniversary of the Book of Common Prayer and reflects on its influence on the English language and literature. James Wood writes:
Suppose you find yourself, in the late afternoon, in one of the English cathedral towns—Durham, say, or York, or Salisbury, or Wells, or Norwich—or in one of the great university cities, like Oxford or Cambridge. The shadows are thickening, and you are mysteriously drawn to the enormous, ancient stone structure at the center of the city. You walk inside, and find that a service is just beginning. Through the stained glass, the violet light outside is turning to black. Inside, candles are lit; the flickering flames dance and rest, dance and rest. A precentor chants, “O Lord, open thou our lips.” A choir breaks into song: “And our mouth shall shew forth thy praise.” The precentor continues, “O God, make speed to save us.” And the choir replies, musically, “O Lord, make haste to help us.”
The visitor has stumbled upon a service, Evensong, whose roots stretch back at least to the tenth century, and whose liturgy has been in almost continuous use since 1549, the date of the first Book of Common Prayer, which was revised in 1552, and lightly amended in 1662, three hundred and fifty years ago. The Book of Common Prayer was the first compendium of worship in English. The words—many of them, at least—were written by Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury between 1533 and 1556. Cranmer did not cut his text from whole cloth: in the ecumenical spirit that characterizes the Book of Common Prayer, he went to the Latin liturgy that the English Catholic Church had used for centuries. In particular, he turned to a book known as the Sarum Missal, which priests at Salisbury Cathedral had long used to conduct services. It contained a calendar of festivals, along with prayers and readings for those festivals; and it held orders of service for Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, and the Mass. …
Despite the quality of language that strikes us nowadays as majestic and grandly alienated, the words of the Prayer Book are notable for their simplicity and directness. C. S. Lewis called this quality “pithiness”; I would add “coziness” or “comfortability.” The Prayer Book was a handbook of worship for a people, not for a priesthood, and its job was to replace and improve the ancient collective rites of worship that bound people together in the English Catholic Church. The marriage service, for instance, was a medieval liturgy that long predated the final form it found in the Book of Common Prayer. It availed Cranmer nothing to invent a liturgy that threw out that history and erected a verbal screen or altar between the priest and his congregation. Cranmer’s prayers use ordinary phrases and familiar Biblical similes.
Read more here.
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/10/22/121022crat_atlarge_wood?currentPage=all
Bishop Robinson plans an active retirement
Surprise! Bishop Gene Robinson plans an active retirement. The Advocate reports:
Being a trailblazer is never easy, and for Gene Robinson, becoming the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church brought harsh denunciations, harassment, even death threats.
But Robinson, looking back as he prepares to retire at the end of the year, says he was never deterred from his groundbreaking path. “There has never been a time when I didn’t feel this was worth it,” he says. “When you are pursuing God’s dream for a just society, that is worth dying for … it’s a noble thing to pursue.” And he takes great satisfaction from the progress his church and society as a whole have made on LGBT issues since he was elected bishop of New Hampshire in 2003.
Robinson, however, is not just looking back but looking forward. After retiring as bishop, he will be working half-time in Washington, D.C., as a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, the think tank founded by former White House chief of staff John Podesta, where he’ll be writing and speaking on a variety of social issues. The bishop is also the subject of a documentary, Love Free or Die, which will air on PBS October 29 [editor’s note: at 10 p. m. Eastern and Pacific], and he has a new book out, God Believes in Love: Straight Talk About Gay Marriage.
Native American saint stirs controversy
Religion News Service reports on the controversy surrounding the latest person to be canonized by the Roman Catholic Church, Kateri Tekakwitha:
[The] viewpoints reflect the diverse, seemingly contradictory reactions to the young Mohawk woman who converted to Catholicism more than 300 years ago.
Some see it as a story of commitment and strength and an affirmation of Native Americans’ place in the Catholic Church. Others view it as the result of the excesses and arrogance of colonialism, the suppression of Native American tradition and culture, and the remnants of a missionary tradition that forced its narrow understanding of faith on others.
Tekakwitha was born in 1656 to a Mohawk father and an Algonquin/Christian mother in a Mohawk village in what is now Auriesville, N.Y. When she was 4, her parents and a younger brother died in a smallpox epidemic. The illness left her scarred and nearly blind.
She was baptized by a Jesuit missionary in 1676. Some Mohawks tormented her for her conversion, but she committed herself to Christianity and a life of virginity, practicing extreme acts of religious devotion, including self-flagellation. She fled to a Mohawk/Catholic village in what is now Montreal, and died there in 1680 at age 24.
Calls for her recognition as a saint date to her death, and the official church campaign began in 1931. According to the Vatican, prayers to Tekakwitha for her intercession were responsible for the inexplicable cure of a 6-year-old Native American boy in 2006 in Washington state who developed a flesh-eating virus after an injury