Dialogue

A few miles away at Steepmoor they are in interregnum at the moment, and likely to remain so until the New Year. They will soon be losing the curate, too, who is heading off to look after three churches in the central wilderness of the Guildford Diocese. She’s on holiday so leaving Marion to do what she could at Swanvale Halt with the Feast of Our Lady of the Snows I zoomed down the A3 to Steepmoor to take their 10am service.

Except I didn’t really. I knew they had a preacher, which was fine; more than fine, in fact. I didn’t know they had a ‘Service Leader’ as well. He introduced the service, read the Collect, led the intercessions, and in fact was down to do everything until the Peace apart from the Scripture readings. I levered myself into leading the Confession and Absolution although I did spot from the order of service that it was in the permissive form meaning that a layperson could lead it (but in the presence of a priest, technically shouldn’t). I should have let them do everything in the way they expected, really, but was caught out.

It’s an entirely different way of thinking about the Eucharist. In the Catholic tradition (followed by most Anglican liturgical advice) the Eucharist is a single action from beginning to end, and so should be led by the same person. The whole thing constitutes a sort of dialogue, a dance in which priest and laypeople have prescribed roles to play. The representative nature of the ordained person means that they are the ones who speak the words of the Church as a whole, which is why the priest should top-and-tail the service, pronounce the absolution and read the collect, and why the deacon should read the Gospel.

At Steepmoor, which has an ‘open evangelical’ tradition, they have a lower view of ordination and a higher view of lay ministry. This sees the Eucharist as a collection of tasks of which ‘doing the magic’ (the phrase they used) over the bread and wine is only one. Anything else can be done by laypeople – including, at Steepmoor, reading the Gospel, which the preacher did; preaching a sermon and reading the words of Jesus are naturally linked, in this view. I’ve experienced this model of worship only once before, at St Aldate’s in Oxford, and don’t know how widespread it is. 

The instruction that, unless given special dispensation by the bishop, a priest can’t celebrate the Eucharist alone but must have a layperson present, has always expressed to me our mutual dependence on one another to carry out the work of God. The specific roles of ordained people in the liturgy, it seems to me, mark a step further in emphasising the fact that we human beings are not interchangeable. If anyone can perform any liturgical act, ultimately that sort of absolute dependence ceases to be signalled formally. It seems like a liberal and egalitarian approach, but I’m not sure it is: it devolves responsibility on specialists no less surely than relying on ordained people, with the difference that those specialists are locally and informally determined and appointed. They appear to be interchangeable people, and yet signal the importance of skills and aptitudes rather than role, and so aren’t really exchangeable one for the other at all. I’m not at all convinced this is completely to the good.