Interestingly, this is what happens at Duke Chapel most Sundays. The first Sunday of the month is Communion Sunday and then on normal Methodist service of the word Sundays, communion happens immediately after in the small side chapel.
I always thought it was sweet and intimate, mostly choir members and a few devout congregants, maybe some tourists. I think this works better if you have something like a separate chapel like that.
I could foresee in normal parish contexts with fewer people, it would be more difficult to make it not seem exclusionary to say “Goodbye, but hang around for the supper if you’re prepared” if it’s all in the same space. It might be easier to take the Oxford Movement practice of early communing Eucharists at 7 or 8 (this is what made up for the non-communion high mass) and then have Mattins as the main service, like St John’s Savannah does.
Yeah, that is another option and maybe worth thinking about! I grumble a little bit about using the Eucharistic propers for Mattins/it offends my sense of tidiness but maybe that is something for me to get over, lol.
While not strictly in this liturgy, this is the structure that we adopted in the church plant I led. We also moved to using MP as ante-communion in my sending parish in 2020, when communion was not happening very often. It is very effective. Admittedly, the parish was used to longer than typical Anglican sermons, with 20-25 min.
Less often. We had a schedule tied to the Church Year, but our congregation was mostly under the age of 16. So I had a “normal service” structured similarly to the ante-communion and we taught different liturgical components gradually (Lord’s Prayer was the first, then suffrages from the daily office as the prayers of the people), etc. and we always concluded with a meal.
Folks were dismissed from the meal and the communicants stayed to receive the Communion about once a month. Between “seasons” we went even more stripped down and would pray something more like family prayer for a couple weeks (no meal those weeks).
I'll just note that while I agree in theory that a longer sermon to teach doctrine (3) would be good, that presupposes that clergy both are capable of engaging longer sermons (instead of rambling ones) and that they themselves believe in the basic doctrines. Not that you're not well aware of these problems, but these do limit the application of this idea.
Coming from a background where MP was the norm and HC was the first Sunday of the month, it's been difficult adapting to the HC model for the single service for a group of on average 10 to 12. I like the idea proposed in this article about doing MP followed by litany or AC. When I first attended one of the continuing churches and noted that the OT reading was the only addition to the HC service they used I had reservations about the lack of what I will term the Protestant patrimony in traditional continuing churches I've observed.
I don't have any knee-jerk reactions against this. I also wonder if some other kind of hybrid could be used as well, especially for newer Anglican parishes or church plants that only have a single service. For example, might we worship via the Ante-Communion and include the Litany after the prayer for Christ's church militant on earth? For the parish that I pastor and am planting, we use the full Communion service every Sunday, and I still preach a 30-40 minute sermon (they're a bit longer because we include the OT lesson from Mattins along with our Epistle and Gospel lessons). So, our regular Sunday service lasts somewhere around an hour and 15 minutes to an hour and a half.
However, as we are planning our liturgy for an evening Good-Friday service (we are under the 1662 international edition BCP, which doesn't have a unique liturgy for Good Friday), I'm leaning towards something along the lines of Ante-Communion followed by the Litany. I'd be curious to your thoughts on this, if you feel like sharing.
Lovely. To riff on the theme of ante-communion, I have taken up praying 1662 mattins, litany, and ante-communion every Sunday morning at home (and on red letter days) before attending Holy Communion in my parish. This practice has helped me see how that liturgical sequence climaxes in perpetual offering to the Divine Majesty: "We humbly beseech thee most mercifully [*to accept our alms and oblations, and] to receive these our prayers, which we offer unto thy Divine Majesty". Our entire lives should be this offertory and flow out through the daily offices, the morning and evening sacrifices. Then, on a Sunday when that perpetual offering is fulfilled in Holy Communion, we receive "thy grace and heavenly benediction" whereby we are mystically united to Christ (theosis, divinization, etc., etc.): "we spiritually eat the flesh of Christ, and drink his blood; then we dwell in Christ, and Christ in us; we are one with Christ, and Christ with us". This was a striking and overwhelming realization for me.
Interestingly, this is what happens at Duke Chapel most Sundays. The first Sunday of the month is Communion Sunday and then on normal Methodist service of the word Sundays, communion happens immediately after in the small side chapel.
Oh, that's really interesting!! How do you find it?
I always thought it was sweet and intimate, mostly choir members and a few devout congregants, maybe some tourists. I think this works better if you have something like a separate chapel like that.
I could foresee in normal parish contexts with fewer people, it would be more difficult to make it not seem exclusionary to say “Goodbye, but hang around for the supper if you’re prepared” if it’s all in the same space. It might be easier to take the Oxford Movement practice of early communing Eucharists at 7 or 8 (this is what made up for the non-communion high mass) and then have Mattins as the main service, like St John’s Savannah does.
Yeah, that is another option and maybe worth thinking about! I grumble a little bit about using the Eucharistic propers for Mattins/it offends my sense of tidiness but maybe that is something for me to get over, lol.
While not strictly in this liturgy, this is the structure that we adopted in the church plant I led. We also moved to using MP as ante-communion in my sending parish in 2020, when communion was not happening very often. It is very effective. Admittedly, the parish was used to longer than typical Anglican sermons, with 20-25 min.
Oh, that's really cool! Were you doing weekly communion at the church plant too? Or was it less often?
Less often. We had a schedule tied to the Church Year, but our congregation was mostly under the age of 16. So I had a “normal service” structured similarly to the ante-communion and we taught different liturgical components gradually (Lord’s Prayer was the first, then suffrages from the daily office as the prayers of the people), etc. and we always concluded with a meal.
Folks were dismissed from the meal and the communicants stayed to receive the Communion about once a month. Between “seasons” we went even more stripped down and would pray something more like family prayer for a couple weeks (no meal those weeks).
I'll just note that while I agree in theory that a longer sermon to teach doctrine (3) would be good, that presupposes that clergy both are capable of engaging longer sermons (instead of rambling ones) and that they themselves believe in the basic doctrines. Not that you're not well aware of these problems, but these do limit the application of this idea.
No, this is certainly fair and a real concern!!
Coming from a background where MP was the norm and HC was the first Sunday of the month, it's been difficult adapting to the HC model for the single service for a group of on average 10 to 12. I like the idea proposed in this article about doing MP followed by litany or AC. When I first attended one of the continuing churches and noted that the OT reading was the only addition to the HC service they used I had reservations about the lack of what I will term the Protestant patrimony in traditional continuing churches I've observed.
I don't have any knee-jerk reactions against this. I also wonder if some other kind of hybrid could be used as well, especially for newer Anglican parishes or church plants that only have a single service. For example, might we worship via the Ante-Communion and include the Litany after the prayer for Christ's church militant on earth? For the parish that I pastor and am planting, we use the full Communion service every Sunday, and I still preach a 30-40 minute sermon (they're a bit longer because we include the OT lesson from Mattins along with our Epistle and Gospel lessons). So, our regular Sunday service lasts somewhere around an hour and 15 minutes to an hour and a half.
However, as we are planning our liturgy for an evening Good-Friday service (we are under the 1662 international edition BCP, which doesn't have a unique liturgy for Good Friday), I'm leaning towards something along the lines of Ante-Communion followed by the Litany. I'd be curious to your thoughts on this, if you feel like sharing.
Thanks for the post!
Lovely. To riff on the theme of ante-communion, I have taken up praying 1662 mattins, litany, and ante-communion every Sunday morning at home (and on red letter days) before attending Holy Communion in my parish. This practice has helped me see how that liturgical sequence climaxes in perpetual offering to the Divine Majesty: "We humbly beseech thee most mercifully [*to accept our alms and oblations, and] to receive these our prayers, which we offer unto thy Divine Majesty". Our entire lives should be this offertory and flow out through the daily offices, the morning and evening sacrifices. Then, on a Sunday when that perpetual offering is fulfilled in Holy Communion, we receive "thy grace and heavenly benediction" whereby we are mystically united to Christ (theosis, divinization, etc., etc.): "we spiritually eat the flesh of Christ, and drink his blood; then we dwell in Christ, and Christ in us; we are one with Christ, and Christ with us". This was a striking and overwhelming realization for me.