On Ordination Formulas, Canadian and American
A quick comparison
As you may know, I will be ordained a deacon in the Church of God using the ordinal of the Episcopal Church (USA) this coming Saturday, June 5. However, apart from a few opportunities to preach and assist at the Eucharist this summer, I will not actually spend much time as a deacon in the Episcopal Church, Rather, I will serve the majority of my diaconate (and then, God willing, at least the first few years of my priesthood) in the Anglican Church of Canada, as I am undertaking doctoral study at McGill in Montreal.
It will, I imagine, surprise few of you that I wanted to spend some time with the ordinals of the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada in preparation for my ordination. What I found was actually quite interesting, and reminded me of something I learned from the Rev Dr Bryan Spinks, my liturgy professor in seminary: our ordinal in the Episcopal Church is actually quite an outlier within the churches of the Anglican Communion.
First, some quite background: the ordinal refers to the collection of liturgies for the ordination of bishops, priests, and deacons. The Episcopal Church just has one ordinal, in its 1979 Book of Common Prayer. The Anglican Church of Canada actually has two: one in its 1985 Book of Alternative Services, and another in the 1962 Book of Common Prayer. I assume based on broader patterns of use that the BAS ordinal is more commonly used in the Canadian church today, although I would welcome confirmation or correction by Canadian friends!
So, in our 1979 book, the consecration of a deacon happens via a Prayer of Consecration, during which the bishop lays the episcopal hands upon the head of the ordinand and says:
Therefore, Father, through Jesus Christ your Son, give your Holy Spirit to N.; fill him with grace and power, and make him a deacon in your Church.
The prayer goes on for a little while, and then the people respond “Amen.” And the deacon is consecrated!
The service in the Canadian BAS is related closely to that in our 1979 BCP, and the prayer of consecration is quite similar. However, in the consecratory formulas, there is a significant difference. The 1985 Canadian BAS has this:
Send down your Holy Spirit upon your servant N, whom we now consecrate in your name to the office and work of a deacon in the Church.
In the 1962 BCP, then, as in the 1662, this is what the bishop says when laying hands upon the person to be ordained deacon:
Take thou authority to execute the office of a Deacon in the Church of God committed unto thee; In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
I’d like to focus in particular on the differences between the two modern ordinals. The formula used by the Canadian BAS, in which the Holy Spirit is petitioned to come upon the ordinand to enable her to fulfill the office and work of a deacon, is a common, even ubiquitous, one across contemporary liturgies in the Anglican Communion. For a somewhat random selection, based largely on the BCPs currently sitting on my bookshelf, this formula is used by the Church of England’s Common Worship, by the Church of Ireland’s contemporary-language ordinal, the Church of South Africa, the Church of Wales’ contemporary-language ordinal, the Church of the Province of the West Indies, the Church of Nigeria, the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia. While there are other churches, like that of Kenya, which use neither the formula found in the Canadian BAS or the American BCP, the only other Anglican church I have found which uses the American BCP language is the Scottish Episcopal Church, in the 1984 Scottish Ordinal. (NB: I cannot claim to have done a fully exhaustive search here, however!)
Now, at this point, you might want to ask: who cares? Certainly I would want to make clear that both the American-Scottish and the majority-of-the-Communion formulas are valid and appropriate. But interestingly, I think they arguably show slightly different conceptions of the nature of ordained ministry. In the BAS formula, one receives the Holy Spirit for the office and work of a Deacon; in the BCP model, one receives the Holy Spirit to be made a Deacon. Without wanting to make stronger claims about liturgical language that are warranted — after all, the Roman ordination rites do not, as far as I can tell, use this language of making the ordinand a deacon/priest/bishop — I think it’s fair to say that the BCP tends towards an ontological account of ordination and the BAS a more functional one. That is, the model throughout much of the Communion emphasizes ordination as being set apart for a particular office within the Church; the model in the US emphasizes becoming something that one is at this point is not. Neither formula, it seems to me, excludes those who would hold to a quasi-Roman Catholic doctrine of ontological change (often related to a highly sacerdotal view of orders) or those with a more Reformed/Protestant view of ministry as being set apart with prayer for a particular office (often related to a more ministerial account of holy orders). But they might reasonably be seen to indicate tendencies in one direction or another.
It will surprise none of you, I imagine, that my own sympathies are more in the direction of the Canadian formula here, although I hasten to add that I will have no problem whatsoever vowing to conform to the worship of the Episcopal Church. But mostly, as someone who will be serving in two different churches of the Anglican Communion, I was struck by these liturgical differences and - given the importance of liturgy in defining doctrine - the different emphases in the doctrine of holy orders they suggest.