Miscellany #1

What I've been reading and thinking about lately

Hello all! This is my first paid-subscriber-only piece for Draw Near With Faith, a first entry in what will be a regular series here of brief reflections on what I’ve been reading and thinking about. But first, and most importantly, let me say thank you. I am full of gratitude for each and every one of you and for your support of me and my writing. Your generosity makes my regular writing here possible. So, once again, truly, thank you!

Contemporary Language Cranmer?

A few weeks ago, I had the chance to lead worship and preach at St. Martha’s Chapel/Chappelle Ste-Marthe, an ecumenical campus and young adult ministry here in Montreal. Because it is an ecumenical organization, we have a fair bit of leeway regarding liturgy, so I decided to use a Eucharist service from the Church of England: Common Worship’s Order Two in Contemporary Language, which you can read here. It is, more or less, the 1662 BCP Holy Communion in (as the name suggests) a contemporary linguistic register.

I am, of course, a devotee of “traditional language”; about a year and a half ago I wrote a piece for Draw Near With Faith in defense of the use of the archaic vernacular in public worship. But it’s clear to me that, for good or ill, contemporary-language worship is here to stay in North American Anglicanism. And so the question is what our contemporary-language worship should look like. It seems to me that one of the great tragedies of the adoption of contemporary-language liturgies in the Anglicanism is that the drive for contemporary language was married to a drive to toss out Cranmer. At the time of the switch to contemporary language in the 70s, there were some attempts (by the Prayer Book Society USA, if memory serves) to propose contemporary-language versions of Cranmer’s eucharistic prayer, but they were not really taken up by the broader church. However, with this rite in Common Worship the church is, perhaps, finally seeing what was missed in the 70s and 80s: you can have contemporary-language worship that seeks to translate Cranmer rather than reject him in favor of a putative patristic consensus or a more justice-oriented liturgy or what have you. And so I was quite excited to take the liturgy for a spin, to see how it worked in practice.