Liturgy and ecclesiastical triage
I found this one very interesting. You might find it interesting too. It is about where we place liturgy and polity relative to each other when deciding to join a local church.
For Giles Coren, Christianity is The Punch Line
Steve McAlpine continues his ongoing look at the turning tide on faith and religion. This time, he has a look at recent comments from Giles Coren about going to church, driven by his son’s desire to start attending.
Talking about Generation Z
On a similar note, Guy Davies reflects on a recent report focused on Generation Z.
There’s Church Planting and then there’s real Church Planting!
‘I’m not overly keen on defining sharp boundaries for what is and isn’t planting. As I say, I’m happy to see new and faithful churches coming about. But I do think that given the evident diversity within planting, it would be useful to recognise and hear from that diversity. This is even more the case when you start to think about some of the other spectra involved in the process.’
Smuggling the gospel?
‘We are not guests at the storytelling table, but hosts, on God’s behalf. Every story ever told, or lived, or remembered; every story written down and carefully crafted, every story that is unfolding in the news or in our neighbourhoods, or our soul: all of it is materially dependent on the God who sustains our lives. Our stories are linguistically dependent on the God who gives us words, and they take place in the storied environment that we call life. In other words, Christians are not agents creeping past the customs officials at the arrivals gate of the world, but ambassadors for the King who established story, and sanctions story and redeems it.’
Who was St Patrick?
‘Patrick was a younger contemporary of Augustine of Hippo and Martin of Tours—the fifth century heroes of the faith who laid the foundations for the great civilization of Christendom.’
From the archive: Four reasons we don’t want to plant homogeneous churches
‘Within our church, we have a significant number of Iranian and Afghan Farsi-speakers. It has always been our intention to integrate our Farsi-speaking brothers and sisters as best we’re able, with a long term plan to raise them up to positions of leadership within our church. But there is no denying that translating everything makes life considerably harder. Some would argue that it is best, surely, to simply plant a Farsi-speaking church and allow folk to reach their own. There are several reasons we disagree with that view.’
I found the first article on liturgy and polity very interesting too, but I saw it not so much as being about the relative importance of the two when choosing a church to join, but rather about the author’s growing valuation of liturgy in worship.
Having to choose between the two is something that I find very frustrating. The only thing that strongly attracts me to the Anglican church is its liturgy; however, the style of governance and the dire consequences of its position as the established State church are truly awful. But in low-church evangelical worship there is so little communal participation, and with the complete absence of any sense of the transcendent majesty of God, I find it a thoroughly frustrating and dispiriting experience.
If I could find a church with congregational governance that held liturgical worship services like the full Series 3 Anglican Communion service, I would be delighted. I don’t think that any such church exists.
I think your first point is about right. I think that article was more about his growing valuation of liturgy.
I understand your comment that follows. I tend to agree. It is why most our elements of the service also take the form of communal participation. Sensing transcendent majesty is rather more subjective (one person’s ‘move of the spirit’ is another person’s disspiriting insipid worship that will cause them to move). Rather harder to quantify and, to some degree, one must choose a preferred mode and accept you can’t please all the people all the time.