In his essay on “The Gospel in the Prayer Book” (1966), J.I. Packer (1926 – 2020), the English, Evangelical, Low-church, Anglican Theologian, wrote that “a good (worship) service is not a set of unconnected bits and pieces,” but is rather “an integrated unit, having an overall ‘shape’ and a clear, planned ‘route’ along which worshippers are led.”
Reflecting on the “journey” that his own Anglican tradition of worship takes its worshippers, Dr. Packer observed that it has “an inner structure consisting of a sequence of three themes: sin, detected and confessed; grace, proclaimed and celebrated; and faith, focused and expressed.” He explained that “in the proclaiming of grace, Jesus Christ, the Mediator, must be central, so we may formulate the sequence as, first, facing our utter need of Christ; second, acknowledging God’s merciful provision of Christ; and third, expressing our trustful, thankful response to Christ.” He saw this as the “Gospel Shape” of Christian worship.
First it makes us face “our present badness. “Second, it tells us of “the new life of grace.” And third, it leads us into “the right response,” which he said was “multiple,” including “prayer and praise for pardon; a joyful trust in God’s promises of mercy; learning of God from his Word; asking for help both for ourselves and for others; professing our own faith; and giving ourselves directly to God out of gratitude for all he has given to us.”
Growing up in this Prayer Book tradition and adding back into my spiritual repertoire now in retirement, not as a replacement for but as an addition to my Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) identity, vocation, and practice (spiritually, you can go home again), I find that I am greatly mindful of and deeply grateful for the way this “Prayer Book Path” has shaped me, and continues to move me.
Baron Friedrich von Hügel guided the people who came to him for spiritual direction into personal participation in the sacramental worship of the Church. He believed that such worship exerted “a crucial, inexorable force in the gradual spiritual formation of believers.” He said he’d seen some trees as a child on a family holiday in Brussels that had been permanently bent in the direction the wind blew, and those trees shaped by the wind became for him a picture of how the sacramental worship of the Church shapes and forms the souls of believers.
I make my home, spiritually, in churches where architecturally the Lord’s Table is front and center, and where liturgically I am led to and sent from the Lord’s Supper every time we gather. The Quaker Theologian Thomas Kelley wrote about how the two beats of Biblical religion are God pulling us into His heart where He tells us that we are His beloved daughters and sons, and then God hurtling us out of His heart and into the world where He asks us to carry its hurts and hopes with Him in “infinitely tender love.”
The liturgy of my Anglican practice with it “Prayer Book Path” insures that I am caught up into the two beats of the Biblical rhythm every time I worship with them, just as the hymnody of my Disciples practice with the richness of its “Lord’s Supper” selection (#384 – #430 in the Chalice Hymnal – That’s 46 Communion Hymns and Readings!) insures that I am caught up into the two beats of the rhythm of Biblical religion as well.
In my Anglican practice, it is the “Prayer of Humble Access” that gathers everything that I am thinking and feeling inside when it’s time to go forward for Communion, and gives it voice –
“We do not presume to come
to this your table, O merciful Lord,
trusting in our own righteousness,
but in your abundant and great mercies.
We are not worthy so much as to gather up
the crumbs under your table;
but you are the same Lord
whose character is always to have mercy.
Grant us, therefore, gracious Lord,
so to eat the flesh of your dear Son Jesus Christ,
and to drink his blood,
that our sinful bodies
may be made clean by his body,
and our souls washed
through his most precious blood,
and that we may evermore
dwell in him, and he in us. Amen.
And in my Disciple practice, it’s hymns like Elizabeth Cecilia Clephane’s standard “Beneath the Cross of Jesus” (#197 in the Chalice Hymnal) that does the very same thing for me –
“Upon that cross of Jesus
mine eye at times can see
the very dying form of one
who suffered there for me;
and from my stricken heart with tears
two wonders I confess:
the wonders of redeeming love
and my unworthiness.”
David Naugle, a Professor at Dallas Baptist University, writes about the “bits and pieces” problem that we have in the church today. Things don’t touch from one Sunday to the next. In fact, quite often things don’t even touch on the same Sunday morning! Worship is just a series of separate acts, each one with its own content and concern. We don’t see how things fit together. They’re like a bunch of pearls in a great big bowl. We reach in, pick one out, and hold it up all by itself. It has nothing to do with what came before. It has no connection with what comes next. It’s just one pearl at a time, and one pearl after another.
I don’t think this is how Christian worship is supposed to be.
I think there’s supposed to be a logic, a progression, a unity to the things we do in worship. When we reach into that big bowl of pearls to pull one out, all the other pearls in the bowl come out with it because they’re all connected. They’re all strung together on the same string. There’s something that holds all its different “bits and pieces” together, and what I think that “something” is that holds together everything we do in worship is the Gospel. I think there is supposed to be a Gospel “shape” to Christian worship, an underlying skeletal structure that gets fleshed out in different ways from week to week, but that gives every worship service its basic shape and sequence.
William Sperry, (1882-1954), a Congregational Minister (the Pilgrims’ Church) and the President of Harvard Divinity School (1822-1953), wrote his book “Reality in Worship” in 1925. In it he suggested that ministers take a moment to review the order of the worship service of their churches to see if any “operative principle which determines the logical sequence of ideas and interests” is discernable, something that makes the service “a religious and artistic unity.” He observed that “the average minister, beyond picking a scripture lesson and hymn to anticipate the sermon and another hymn to follow the sermon, probably does not give five minutes thought a week to the rest of the service, and has no definite theory as to what is supposed to be happening or what a minister is theoretically doing.” Dr. Sperry said that the result is that our worship is “chaotic,” a “potpourri” of texts and gestures ransacked from diverse sources devoid of “a single guiding principle” which shapes and sustains the whole service, “flowing beneath the surface” in all of its acts.
To remedy this, Dr. Sperry turned to the narrative of the Prophet Isaiah’s encounter with the Living God (6:1-8). He saw this text as the Bible’s “formal transcript of the spiritual life,” the “simple, inevitable pattern” of the divine/human encounter.” He framed it as a dialectical sequence of two ideas colliding and then combining to create a brand new situation/condition –
Thesis: A Vision and Adoration of God – “I saw the Lord high and lifted up” (v. 1)
Antithesis: A Confession of Creaturehood – “Woe is me. I am lost” (v. 5)
Synthesis A: A Perception of a Redeeming/Reconciling Energy – “This (live coal) has touched your lips” (v. 7)
Synthesis B: A Reaffirmation of God’s Glory and a Rededication of the Self – “Here I am, send me” (v. 8)
“Why should not a religious service definitely follow this order?” Dr. Sperry asked. “What other order can it follow?” And because our worship services don’t, he concluded, more often than not, they fail to deliver the encounter with the living God that informs, forms, and transforms our lives as human beings, and we settle for entertainment, stimulation, and/or provocation instead.
*SOUNDINGS 