Some Thoughts About the Sunday Service
The wardens and vestry have been working hard to find the best way to use our resources as we meet together at our main weekly service and at other times. I am hoping to have some exciting news for the first of the month newsletter, next week. There will be a lot to talk about when the vestry meets after church this Sunday. Please continue to pray for our parish, our community, and our lay leaders.
Last month, we began to employ a reusable booklet for the Holy Communion service, and to sing hymns from the hymnal. A booklet for Morning Prayer will also be created.
When we switched from a completely fresh, full printed service every week to a “standard” service that will not change, I made some changes you may have noticed. We had been using the Book of Common Prayer 2019, Ancient Renewed Text (BCP 2019, p. 123) or, previously, a similar service. We are now using the Anglican Standard Text (BCP 2019, p. 105). As the name implies, this service (rather than the other) conforms far more closely to the international standard of the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON). That standard is the continuing, legally established, prayer book of the Church of England, approved by the bishops and parliament in 1662. The language is modernized, though, and there are some other changes reflecting liturgical trends of the last 50 years.
There is one more big change. Our new service booklet does not display the 2019 service as you would find it in the printed version beginning on page 105.
Instead, we are using a diocese-approved, rubrically permitted, sequential order of the elements of the service. This authorized service conforms, not only to the contents, but to the sequence of the 1662 book. It is the most classically Anglican service you can have, while still keeping in step with our brothers and sisters in all dioceses throughout the province (ACNA), who have agreed to accept the 2019 Book as our “common” prayer.
In a future newsletter, I will explain some features which may seem odd to some younger Anglicans, who grew up with the 1979 American book. It is my hope that during our three month “trial period,” our parish will grow to appreciate the distinctive liturgical traditions of the ADLW formularies, within the family of the Anglican Church of North America, and in the whole of GAFCON, across the globe.
—Fr. Eric
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