Preparing to Sell Out

My post-Christmas book-buying spree has included a range of items relating to the history of Anglo-Catholicism. I've already referred to Michael Yelton's More Empty Tabernacles; then there was Roy Tricker's Anglicans On High, about the hitherto-overlooked history of the Catholic Revival in Anglican churches in Suffolk; it contains stories of the vicar who had to cope with a Protestant-minded farmer who insisted on sitting in church with his back to the altar as a protest, the dreadful episode of the Akenham Burial Case, and the priest who required all boys confirmed in his parish to receive the additional name of Clement (his own), which is possibly taking paternalism a bit far. This photograph shows the aumbry at Barsham church, a rather fine devotional image in its own right.

A lot of the accounts in Anglicans On High describe the advance in parishes in terms of services; when they adopted communion services on saints' days, or as the main service on Sunday, or a daily mass (which didn't happen that often). My own investigations into what happened here in Swanvale Halt suggest that the ritual of the church began to advance from the late 1870s onwards, first to celebrating communion on alternate Sundays and Saints' Days, then every Sunday from the mid-1880s, and a daily mass in the 1920s. It took all the way till 1947 for there to be a mid-morning Parish Communion every Sunday, however, and even then it wasn't perceived as the 'main service' until the late 1960s.

When I see how my great predecessors, in this parish and elsewhere, battled for the act of Communion to be the centrepiece of the Church's worship and identity, I feel a certain sense of unease. Our Mission Planning process on which we are embarking might, conceivably if not probably, turn our worshipping life inside-out. How far can the Mass be used to evangelise, and how far are other forms of event or worship appropriate? The old Anglo-Catholics were arguing and educating for a more sacramental view of the life of the Christian disciple within a society already primed to accept it; now the world is different. I had rather hoped that, as others have said, mere prayerful and God-centred celebration of the sacraments will be enough to draw more souls; five years in the parish suggests that it doesn't seem to be, even if it makes the church itself, internally, happier and more prayerful. If we are to do more which is designed to bring new people into contact with God, do we have to do less of what we do now? There's only a limited amount of time, people and energy and a Sung Eucharist takes quite a lot of all three to provide. Yet I remain committed to the idea that only the Eucharist makes the Church, being the unique way Christ has chosen to express our relationship with him. Can you do Catholicism with less bread and wine? Am I about to be the one who betrays the legacy of my forebears?