Ancient Worship Anglican Futures
2 Jun 2009
I’m off today for the Anglican Worship Ancient Futures conference that I have helped plan and will be leading/facilitating, and presenting at.
I’m looking forward what should be superb content and resourcing, and to making new friends and catching up with some old ones. This really should be a superb event. I’ll also be leaching for a day prior to the event on ‘Deep Church’ at Trinity Seminary.
We’ll be using twitter to interact during the event, and you can follow along with us, here are some suggestions for how to:
1. Visual following: at some points if we can get http://visibletweets.com/ on screen, it looks great and people can see new thoughts and questions. If you go the link type in #awaf and see what this does.
2. We’re asking people to use #awaf in their tweets, that we can then track them at,
http://search.twitter.com/, and http://twittgroups.com/group/awaf. This group will give a permannent record of the tweets from the event.
3. I’ll also being using the search facility of http://www.tweetdeck.com and will encourage other to use it too.
4. Then the old fashioned way, people can send an email to awaftrinity@gmail.com, as well as being able to sms/text questions.
And of course we’ll take questions at the event direct from people, and via paper.
Tagged: Events, Resources, Twitter
12 comments
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Comment by Beth
12.29 pm on 2 Jun 2009
I’m looking forward to meeting you and to the rest of the conference!
Comment by Jason Clark
10.38 am on 3 Jun 2009
Looking forward to that too
Comment by John Kevan
11.45 pm on 2 Jun 2009
I hope this conference goes really well. Noting amongst the links that there is quite an emphasis on a return to liturgy, will there be a chance to consider “Liturgy as a Weapon of Exclusion”?
Having been brought up in an Anglican church in the UK, with years as a child and teenager weekly reciting the BCP amongst a dreary and shrinking congregation, I came to realise that the liturgy was part of a complex social filtering system that they deployed to keep undesirable people out of our parish church life.
On the unwanted list were: working class people, non-conformists, enthusiastic Christians (high or low), people with problems, teenagers, children. It was lethally effective.
When I hear calls for the restoration of liturgy to solve contemporary problems in the church, a shiver goes down my spine and I feel as though some terrible suffocating smog once experienced is about to return. It’s like hearing of elderly Russians being nostalgic about the good old days of Uncle Joe.
I’m not against liturgy: in my personal devotions, I am much helped by liturgical structures. I have my Celtic Prayer Book and an old BCP. I’m drawn to the Desert Fathers, Ignatian prayer, and the life of Francis. I’m a fan of music associated with liturgy (my iTunes collection includes Hildegard von Bingen, Tallis, Bach and, of course, The Orlando Consort and The Perfect Houseplants).
But I know that in the vast social housing estates amongst which I now live, all this would be alien and incomprehensible. A few local priests, trained in liturgy and sacrament but little else, struggle along, saying morning prayer on Sundays and their offices in the week, but they’d have disappeared years ago if they weren’t subsidised and protected by the British state.
Perhaps it is the cultural desert of contemporary evangelicalism/pentecostalism (in USA, particularly?) that’s driving more sensitive evangelicals to seek a deeper church. I suspect that, in reality, it’s just driving them ‘up the candle’. Is this a neo-Tractarianism for the Twitter generation? I think that Newman said that if it weren’t for the evangelical revival at the end of the 18thC, the Oxford Movement would not have happened. I’ve never been sure whether that was a compliment or not.
Here are just four ways in which this weapon works:
• it scares off people unused to bookish culture
• it is not for the uninitiated (when do you sit/stand/kneel/respond/keep quiet?)
• it is often associated with ecclesiastical snobs and snobbery (fine choirs, fine church music, cathedral society)
• it is antithetical to popular notions of freedom from manipulation and control.
There may have been an age when the church was vibrant, missional, transformational, open AND liturgical but I’m afraid that today this is an oxymoron.
It will be a long time before liturgy ceases to do what it does so well now: ensuring the church continues to be a minority interest for a small number of enthusiasts in the thinking and respectable classes.
Perhaps this conference could prove that I’m wrong…?
Comment by Richard
11.49 am on 8 Jun 2009
I think it depends both on the liturgy, and the community that owns the liturgy. After all, Christians aren’t the only ones to use liturgy. Pagan ritual is ‘liturgical’, and that attracts people from all walks of life, including socially deprived housing estates.
What isn’t mentioned is that liturgy relies very heavily on symbols, and the problem with most Christian litury is that the symbols have lost their meaning for a lot of people, and are based on ideas that make no sense to the rest.
A re-investment of meaning into the symbols that underpin a lot of our liturgy would do a great deal to help us.
Comment by Jason Clark
8.15 am on 11 Jun 2009
For some liturgy is a negative experience, and no amount of renewal will help them. But the presenting issue, is not the form of liturgy, but that we are all liturgical, we all have worship liturgies, high and low.
I’m not wanting to argue for any form of liturgy, rather that we understand we have liturgies already, and for some of us using old forms might help break out of the false ones we have, and vice versa.
Comment by Becky
7.58 pm on 11 Jun 2009
HI Jase, Me again
you know this is a pet topic of mine 
What if the old ones are false too? For e.g., in the church where I grew up, liturgy was more about obsequious posturing and performing, and to make those not in the know feel lowly and unholy. That’s why it scares the beejebus out of me and makes my blood run cold. I simply cannot get past thinking that anyone involved in liturgy simply loves the false pomp and ceremony of it all – the star at the front reading pre-prepared stuff out in a ‘godly’ voice so that other people think they’re anointed, the person in the congregation who needs not read the screen as he’s memorised it before bedtime a week ago.
I relished finding a church that stripped all that ostentatiousness and fanfare away.
Comment by Jason Clark
7.06 am on 12 Jun 2009
Hi Becky, sounds like you understand your experience of misuse of liturgy, and overlay that on any experience that seems similar.
And people have that experience with all kinds of things, that once experienced in a bad way are hard to get past.
We all have liturgies, informal or formal, and the ones we are trying are still pretty informal. Other than a gut reaction to them due to your past experiences, what is intrinsically wrong with what we have been doing for example?
Comment by Jason Clark
10.43 am on 3 Jun 2009
Hi John, you raise a great and important question.
How is liturgy exclusive? I’d respond that we are all liturgical, that liturgy is not just the official formal liturgies. In that sense how does the way we do things regularly exclude others.
High and low and non church can exclude as much as each other.
Then should liturgy be excluding. In some sense I think it should, it should be something you have to learn, something for people to have to be initiated in, especially in a consumer culture that thinks exclusion is overcome by making a payment.
But on the other hand, our liturgies need reveal and explaining, so that people understand and review them, and know why we have them.
Warmly, Jason
Comment by John Kevan
1.18 pm on 4 Jun 2009
Thanks for your response, Jason. Yes, I agree that explaining and revealing is crucial to making any liturgy, formal or informal, ancient or modern, work as it should. As long as there is a genuine will to do that, as humans, we’re doing all we can, in the circumstances.
Since you’ve named the name of today’s Evil One (Consumerism), it seems important not to forget that, before liturgy was a weapon of exclusion, it was for centuries a weapon of religious and political conformity, pre and post-Cranmer. Not until the effects of the wider Reformation and Renaissance placed individual rights above those of the family, sect and (in theory) the state, did liturgy lose its repressive power. If the results of the struggle for human rights include rampant individualism and consumerism in our day, I suggest we have to learn to live with them.
If we’re not careful, therefore, any life choice (with or without the need for initiation) can be branded as merely an act of consumerism – particularly if we don’t personally care for what’s being chosen.
I don’t think, furthermore, that liturgy can be implemented as an antidote or an alternative to individualism in the West, as some seem to suggest. We have to face the fact that choosing to do liturgy will always be an individual, um, choice.
What might be more fruitful is to look at the extent to which our faith communities and acts of worship can be moved from being collective to being corporate. This is hard because it seems easier to gather and maintain a crowd of interested individuals than it is to nurture a living, breathing body of interdependent disciples. I feel that focusing on Jesus and his kingdom movement teaching and practice must be the foundational and constant reference for this. This is source, whereas liturgy is expression.
So I would suggest that liturgy is more mood-altering than life-changing.
So there, I have accused liturgy of being a weapon of exclusion and forced inclusion, and a mood-altering drug. I’m still not against it, but I would like to see the current discussion taking some of these problems into account. I worry that there’s more amnesia than anamnesia.
Comment by Becky
2.31 pm on 9 Jun 2009
John expresses perfectly what I feel about the return to liturgy.
Jase, are there MP3s available of that part of your conference? I’d be interested to hear them
x
Comment by Jason Clark
12.50 am on 10 Jun 2009
There should be Becky, when there are, I’ll post them here.
Jase
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