Published Online: Dec 29, 2023
Page range: 106 - 112
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/holiness-2023-0016
© 2023 Robert Gribben, published by Sciendo
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
To be asked to devise and lead prayer for an international ‘congregation’ and in a time of pandemic is, of course, first a privilege, but also a daunting challenge. In recent years, the churches all over the world have been caught unprepared to provide congregational worship without a congregation present – in body. And what are we if we do not gather together (Heb.10:35)? Until now, no-one thought that seeing each other in small rectangles on a computer screen constituted what the New Testament calls
The centenary’s
Morning Prayer had been preserved in British Methodist service books along with other parts of the 1662
Morning (and Evening) Prayer had been preserved both for Anglicans and Methodists as the shape of a normal congregational service5, though for many Anglicans it also provided for the clergy’s private daily devotions. Cranmer had already incorporated parts of several offices for mornings and evenings into his reformed liturgies, so on several grounds, they are too long for the modern interest in forms of daily prayer. But in recent decades, ecumenical liturgical scholarship and creativity have provided the world church with beautiful daily offices, simple, short, thematic, not intended for full Sunday worship, and with freedom to adapt.6
The importance of this, in the face of the challenge of ‘virtual worship’ is that such an office is precisely intended to be prayed not only in community, but also by people who are located far apart, who nevertheless value the spiritual connection with others praying in the same way. This confirmed my choosing this prayer form for our centenary opening service.
It does not solve the challenges which worship on computer or mobile telephone gives rise to, and I will comment on those as they present in the liturgy. As one result, I decided that singing hymns online was so unsatisfying (at least, surely, to Methodists!) that I should abandon the idea; it just doesn’t work.
The service in outline was this:
Call to worship Collect Invocation First Scripture reading (1 Cor. 1: 26-31) Response: (A hymn of Ephrem the Syrian) Prayers of Thanksgiving Response (Hymn verse) Second Scripture reading (John 15:1-4) Response (Psalm/canticle) Prayers of Intercession The Lord’s Prayer Verse/response The Grace (2 Cor. 13:13), said together.
I now comment on each section in turn.
Let us worship God. Lord, open our lips, God of glory, by the raising of your Son you have broken the chains of death and hell: fill your Church with faith and hope; for a new day has dawned and the way to life stands open in our Saviour Jesus Christ.
Almost all offices begin with this simple invitation to pray, using Ps. 51: 15. It also establishes a community (‘Let us/we shall’). Collects are part of the ecumenical treasury, to which Thomas Cranmer’s English translations of the Latin (as well as his own verses) have an honoured place. After limping with poor substitutes for some years, a new library of modern collects is now available, which preserve their poetic form. Since it was the eve of a Sunday in the season of Easter, this one was chosen from the Church of England’s
An invocation is a common part of the opening of worship. We need the presence of the Spirit, who points us to Jesus, in order to pray. Ours took the form of the first verse of Charles Wesley’s Easter (and morning) hymn,
This is the heart of the office. Monastic communities, then and now, had time to indulge themselves by reciting the whole psalter and meditating on long scripture readings; citizens who had to work for their living had time to mark only a few simple themes in gatherings with their leader before dawn: the new day, the sunrise as a symbol of resurrection, some verses to ponder, and a few simple prayers, often drawing on the season of the Christian year.7
As I have just said, this kind of office was not a Sunday Service, but a short time of devotion at the start of a day8 (or a special week, in our case). The scripture readings often consisted of only one or two verses, but chosen to be memorable for use during work.
The first was 1 Cor. 1: 26-31, six verses, but such verses: surely Methodists recognize themselves in this description! And is this not the glory of our calling? It seemed also to remind us that even in our pride in our college and university, our boast lies elsewhere. In Melbourne at least, few congregations do not have members whose first language is not English. I wish I could say that we always accommodate them – on Easter Day, we might ask for ‘Christ is risen!’ in their own tongue and Pentecost may give a chance to hear several. But it is now a major element of what Wesley House is, so I asked for some volunteers to open our ears to other languages. St. Paul was read in Mandarin by Zhongya Shao, and the English text was on screen.
Each of our readings was followed by silence, then a response. My eye fell on this song of Ephrem the Syrian, one of the many provisions for praise in
Behold: Fire and Spirit in the womb that bore you:
Behold: Fire and Spirit in the river where you were baptized.
Fire and Spirit in our baptism:
In the Bread and the Cup, Fire and Holy Spirit.
In your Bread is hidden a Spirit not to be eaten,
In your Wine dwells a Fire not to be drunk.
Spirit in your Bread, Fire in your Wine,
A wonder set apart, yet received by our lips.
How wonderful your footsteps, walking on the waters!
You subdued the great sea beneath your feet.
Yet to a little stream you subjected your head,
Bending down to be baptized in it.
The stream was like John who performed the baptism in it,
In their smallness each an image of the other.
To the stream so little, to the servant so weak,
The Lord of them both subjected himself.
The text is refreshingly unusual, being in the tradition of the Syrian Orthodox, yet it calls us to unity in two ways at least: first, a reminder of the whole ancient and eastern tradition of proclamation and praise, who were once foreigners in Western nations and are now neighbours. We count among our alumni the late and much beloved Archbishop Gregorios of Thyatira and Great Britain, head of the Greek community in the UK, and we hosted the Cambridge Institute of Orthodox Christian Studies for some years. It reminds us too of John Wesley’s great love for the Early Fathers, in which he expressed his affection for ‘Ephrem Syrus, that man of a broken heart’, on several occasions.10 But at another, deeper level, its subject is baptism, with the symbols of water and fire, and baptism is often called, in ecumenical circles, ‘the sacrament of unity’. It is not quite – yet – but recognizing our common baptism has already moved the churches closer to each other.11 I wish that an appeal to the significance of our baptism would be as natural to Methodists as it is to Lutherans and Catholics, for at least in my experience, we have not got far from a social rite (now irrelevant in society).
This is where I had to pay a liturgical price. This office was to serve as the opening worship of the centenary of nothing less than Wesley House, Cambridge. We needed a prayer of thanksgiving rather longer than anything which would find a place in the ‘cathedral office’. This is where a friend pointed out a possibility available in the computer programme we were using, ‘Zoom’. Rather than attempt to summarize everyone’s thanks, which, if mine are anything to go by, would be lifelong, all participants could register their gratitude in a few lines on the ‘chatline’ facility.12 We would have to attempt ‘multi-tasking’, said to be a challenge for males: I was assured that all House members are now familiar with this! As we thought and wrote, we were thereby at prayer and what is more, communal prayer. So, I called for their prayers, kept a brief silence (since the adding of them could continue), and began a kind of summary or covering prayer. This was its text:
‘Let us pray for the One Holy Catholic Church of our Lord Jesus Christ, that is, for the whole company of Christian people throughout the world, that it would please Almighty God to purge it from worldliness and respect of persons, from faintheartedness and indifference to the needs of mankind; that God may indue his Church with desire of holiness and Christian virtues, unite it in one bond of faith and love, and uphold it in its weakness and affliction, in the power of his Spirit.
‘[Let us give God thanks] especially for the People Called Methodists, in gratitude remembering those, living and departed, who broke to us the bread of life and manifested the light of God in their lives. More particularly, let us praise God for his servants John and Charles Wesley, and for the preachers raised up by God after them to the revival of the work and the renewal of his Church, asking that the Spirit who dwelt richly in them may also empower us, in our own time, to spread scriptural holiness throughout the world.’
So, let us thank God for our Founders and Benefactors, those who first dreamed of a Methodist College in this city and university - Michael Gutteridge, William Greenhalgh, the brothers Lamplough, John Finch and their companions, who gave generously and worked untiringly until Wesley House was established.
We bless God for all who have watched over the life of the House and taught therein, the first Principal, Maldwyn Hughes, for Newton Flew, W.F. Flemington, Gordon Rupp, Brian Beck, Ivor Jones and Jane Leach; for the College Tutors, for the Trustees, for those who planned and built the ‘new’ House. For all who taught us, prayed with us, guided us, befriended us, supported us (including spouses, children, parents and home congregations).
As we survey the Chat Room messages, let us remember in gratitude our own time and contexts at Wesley House; we remember faces, voices, places, times and seasons…’
At the opening I used part of a prayer composed by our second Principal, Dr. Robert Newton Flew. A great university man and a great ecumenist, he was invited – only the second non-Anglican to do so – to preach ‘a Sermon before the University’.13 These occasions in Great St. Mary’s Church traditionally begin with a lengthy Bidding Prayer read by the preacher. Dr. Flew wrote his own, removing the language of the Church of England, while maintaining proper dignity! I added some other significant contributors to the House’s life, some by name.
It concluded with all reading another hymn, Charles Wesleys’
For this I chose John 15: 1-4 and the lively image of the vine, reaching out along its supporting structures and always connected to the root. I will leave it to you to follow the image through. It was read in Kiswahili, by Stella Mwiti, from Kenya, the English text on screen.
The response here is the
The intercessions followed the same ‘Zoom’ method as the Thanksgiving, and my prayers were first for the Church, and in particular for Methodists across the world; then for the work of the ‘new’ Wesley House, and for all those with whom we work in universities around the globe.14 It seemed to me there were two other principal worldly concerns for prayer at this time: ‘for the welfare of all living creatures’ echoing the wide concern for the health of the complex ecology which gives us all life (perhaps best expressed in Pope Francis’s encyclical
The version of the Lord’s Prayer is from the English Language Liturgical Consultation. It is part of the final report of this body17, which brought together a wide representation of English-speaking churches across the globe through national ecumenical liturgical consultations. Its agreed texts are now used by more than sixty national churches and is often supplied as an alternative to the 1662
There is no need to take long to end this or any other liturgy! ‘Let us bless the Lord’/ ‘Thanks be to God!’ and’ the Grace’ (2 Cor. 13:14) said together, so familiar to all.
I am aware that some readers may wonder why I took such trouble with a liturgy. Why not just draw up a list of things we want to do and do them? At the simplest, I think it is part of ‘loving God with our minds’. The late Dr. James F. White described the Methodist tension between those who preferred worship ‘folksy and informal’ over against those favouring worship ‘dignified and formal’.18 I’m not sure about the American use of ‘folksy’, but I believe we can – and may – celebrate worship as both formal and friendly, that is, structured, keeping the old in the new (cf Matt. 13: 52), but finding the appropriate language in our culture to express the historic faith. Our greatest temptation in this process of finding the right faith language is reductionism, driven by sentiment or a desire not to offend. The difficulty with less formal services, and extempore prayer in general, is that after it is done, nothing is left for those not present. Nor are there forms and words which a stranger could diligently compare and contrast. They also give a basis for ecumenical dialogue, for
Horses for courses you might say? Well, online worship and communication is not capable of being done casually or off the cuff, any more than the reading of the evening TV news is. Not only knowledge of the technology but also of the effect the media themselves have on that communication needs to be recognised and worked with. It took a lot of work – across the world (on three continents) to finalise what we could and would do, what the screens at home would show, and especially who would undertake the different roles, what skills they needed, and who could and should be seen, what texts needed to be visible and how (many traps for young players as users of projectors in church know). This broadcast was one of those occasions when ‘formal and dignified’ was necessary, with no necessary criticisms of other tasks in other contexts.
All this underlines the importance of presiding at worship. One of the great faults of online worship is that it tends to be dominated by one face, usually clergy, on the screen. Covid has often meant that no one else is present, except the invisible camera and music operators. But this comes at great cost. Christian worship is offered by a congregation, of which its leaders are an integral part. Protestant worship with its doctrine of the priesthood of all believers is offered by a
This article is one modest way of communicating to those who could not be present the background and the purpose of this brief prayer service, celebrating a hundred years of the life of Wesley House, Cambridge.20