For a time, I am not promoting these essays. If anyone senses a use in sharing privately or publicly, that’s fine with me. I am more comfortable conversing with just the subscribers. This is not a financial call,. because I do not have a paid option or means of receiving donations. Nothing here is behind a paywall. I prefer to engage this group because you are a very small but diverse and well informed assembly of Wesleyans who are willing to offer correction (or even passionately disagree) without falling into frenetic social media conduct.
In August of 2023 this site published An Order for The Lord’s Supper and then A Brief Order for the Lord’s Supper a year later. Each of these received over 3,000 unique file downloads in their first 30 days. While the intent was to provide a worship resource for those who are moved toward classical liturgy, it included some concessions to the Liturgical Movement of the sixties and seventies and refrained from reinstating certain concepts from classical antiquity through the Late Medieval period. Those concessions troubled my conscience then, and they continue to trouble me now. Those mid-twentieth century reforms, which I once taught and defended, were based on bad scholarship and bad theology.
All files for the earlier project have been taken down.
A new project is working to restore a full set of rites in the classical liturgy consistent with our Methodist heritage and unpolluted by the Liturgical Movement.
There is no shortage of liturgies with both feet planted firmly in the 1970s, and more show up in my inbox every day. Meanwhile, no one seems interested in restoring classical liturgy to the twenty-first century without first passing it through the smoke of the Woodstock generation. Yet, it is those classical liturgies that contain the faith once delivered to the saints and have proven reliable at preserving and propagating that faith in every place where such liturgies are retained.
If Methodists had remained devoted to the faith they received and to the liturgies that transmitted that faith (without the adulterations of 1932 or the complete divorce from our tradition in 1989), then what would those rites look like today? To find out, we start with John Wesley’s 1784 Sunday Service (which is effectively the Book of Common Prayer 1662, abridged). Standing in 1784 and with our Bible open, we look back to the work of Cranmer’s Common Prayer, Calvin’s Church Prayers, Luther’s Formulae Missae, the Sarum Use, the Roman Rite, Apostolic Constitutions, and the liturgies of Chrysostom, Basil, and James. Standing in 1784 and with our Bible open, we move forward through the doctrine, discipline, and hymnals of the MEC, MEC South, Methodist Protestant Church, the Methodist Church, the Evangelical United Brethren, and the UMC; all the while keeping an eye on parallel events with our Anglican kin.
Usually I write these essays in one sitting on an Android phone with a small keyboard and very little proofreading or editing. I offer general observations and meditations–not properly footnoted academic papers. This project is different. It is still not a formal academic paper, however it represents in[-depth research over the course of a year, has been thoroughly reviewed, includes citations, and I am convinced can withstand all challenges.
The rites will observe following standards for faithful liturgy.
*The liturgies spring forth from Scripture, referencing explicitly and implicitly their Biblical authority.
*The liturgies are informed by and include elements from the earliest available sources
*They avoid peculiar innovations of the last hundred years
*They maintain continuity with the worship of the Church in various times and places.
*They are in the vernacular (in this case, Standard American English)
*A proper liturgy retains unusual words when necessary—never sacrificing truth for simplicity nor clarity for brevity.
*In form, content, and syntax, they remind us that these words were not written yesterday. The sound and rhythm say, “This is a received faith.”
*They are catechetical.
*They maximize congregational participation.
Integrity demands a liturgy that speaks plainly about what God requires of us and makes those claims with a distinctively Methodist articulation. Theological vagueness is the bane of wearisome modern rites. Liturgists that set out for Winsome without the company of Gravitas find themselves lost in Frivolity. People notice. We must recover the Biblical narrative and not be afraid to speak honestly of the character of God and the nature of man.
Boring liturgy is not too long. It is too short. It has been abridged and neutered so that it is no longer what it purports to be. There is a problem with a Communion liturgy that reduces to five or six sentences the Exhortation for the Rite, Call to Introspection and Confession, Prayer of Confession, Words of Assurance and Pardon, and performs them in less than a minute. We are more likely to become bored and agitated with a brief rite that is pleasant but pointless than with a longer rite that conveys the biblical narrative, represents the character of God, and calls us to participate in a life of holiness.
There is also a problem with rituals that try to do too many things. A Baptism liturgy that tries to jam into one rite the baptism of infants, baptism of adults, confirmation, reception into the church, reaffirmation of faith, and reception into church membership begins to sound like IRS instructions with rubrics such as, “if the answer to question 5 is “none” then proceed to page 9, paragraph 3, and continue with question 7.”
In a proper liturgy we want to take time to hear each story and experience the meaning of each rite. Take time to baptize the children. When that is done, then we will call forward those for baptism on profession of faith; and so, we proceed deliberately with each rite in succession as it was in the Apostolic Tradition. Each of these rites tells a different part of a great story. Each involves different actors, different questions, different narratives. Each needs its own space. We need time to hear each one and not try to rush through in a jumble of activity.
This site will publish the following set of liturgies in January. They contain little to nothing that originates from me or anyone in the last two hundred years. Their release will be preceded by a series of short essays. They will expand on the assertions made here.
The Sacrament for Baptism for Infants and those Unable to Answer for Themselves
The Sacrament for Baptism on Profession of Faith
The Rite for Confirmation
The Rite for Reception into Church Membership.
A Rite for Reaffirmation of Faith
The Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper
Here’s the Easter egg. For those who are attracted to the Book of Common Prayer (either 2019 or 1662 International edition) you may find this download useful. It is a set of guidelines for adapting the BCP texts for use by a GMC parish.
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