Such things are perhaps easier to demonstrate than describe, so for your listening pleasure, the Choir of Westminster Abbey, singing Psalm 138 at Evensong (Sung Evening Prayer) during the Papal Visitation of September 2010:

The translation is from the Coverdale Psalter, which is part of the Book of Common Prayer 1662:

Psalm 138. Confitebor tibi
1. I will give thanks unto thee, O Lord, with my whole heart : even before the gods will I sing praise unto thee.
2. I will worship toward thy holy temple, and praise thy Name, because of thy loving-kindness and truth : for thou hast magnified thy Name and thy word above all things.
3. When I called upon thee, thou heardest me : and enduedst my soul with much strength.
4. All the kings of the earth shall praise thee, O Lord : for they have heard the words of thy mouth.
5. Yea, they shall sing in the ways of the Lord : that great is the glory of the Lord.
6. For though the Lord be high, yet hath he respect unto the lowly : as for the proud, he beholdeth them afar off.
7. Though I walk in the midst of trouble, yet shalt thou refresh me : thou shalt stretch forth thy hand upon the furiousness of mine enemies, and thy right hand shall save me.
8. The lord shall make good his loving-kindness toward me : yea, thy mercy, O Lord, endureth for ever; despise not then the works of thine own hands.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost : as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

In short, harmony and (some) meter, and a history different but not wholly unrelated to that of Gregorian Chant, makes “Anglican Chant” Anglican. That’s the short of it, and we have ample musicological types who can supplement the details if they wish.

I should add — believe it or not — that this complicated-sounding chant is eminently singable, even by congregations with little formal musical training, provided that the pointing of the text is clear.

Of course, Anglicans are capable (some would say ‘must needs be capable’) of poking fun at ourselves, our liturgy and our music. Here are the Master Singers, presenting the “Highway Code”:

We are now several hours into 2012—
Anno Domini: the year of our Lord 2012;
Anno Salutis: the year of Savlation 2012—
several hours into day of new beginnings,
a day of new opportunities.

Some of us have made resolutions for the coming 366;
(it’s a leap year, you know);
some of us have already broken our New Year’s resolutions;
some of us won’t have the opportunity to see
if they hold for some time yet;
and some of us—perhaps the bravest and wisest of all—
have resolved not to resolve.

In addition to today being the first of the new year,
it is the octave day, the eight day, of the celebration of Christmas.
The octave day of a feast is a privileged day,
and is often kept as a feast day itself.
Following the chronology of today’s gospel [Luke 2:15-21]
some Christians will keep today either as the feast
of the Holy Name of Jesus,
or as the feast of the Circumcision of Jesus,
or as a feast in honor of Mary, under the title Dei Genetrix, Mētēr Theou, Mother of God incarnate.

For Episcopalians, it’s the first: the Holy Name of Jesus.
Eight days past, we celebrated his birth;
the appearance of the Word made flesh:
now he receives the name “given by the angel before he was conceived.”

This naming is a very human moment,
one that will be bound up with his identity,
his history, his narrative, his life’s journey.

It is also a divine moment,
one that binds his identity with that of God.
We call him Jesus in English, by way of the Greek;
they named him Yeshuah,
or possibly Yehoshua,
a name meaning (more or less) “God Saves.”
His name derives in part from The Name—
the one given by God to Moses through the burning bush.
Ehyeh asher Ehyeh:
I AM who am;
I will be with you as who I am.
This child’s name carries within it
the power and promise of the very Name of God.

Certainly, it was a common enough name, in its day;
perhaps some saw the irony in it when he was nailed to the cross
and the placard was hung above his head:
“God Saves”— but apparently not this one (?!?)

With now-familiar words,
the Victorian poet Caroline Noel summarizes for us:

Humbled for a season to receive a [human] name,
From the lips of sinners unto whom he came:
Faithfully he bore it, spotless to the last,
Brought it back victorious when from death he passed.

The name of Jesus, Saint Paul tells us,
God has exalted above every other name, such that
“at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth” (Phil 2:10).

We may not bend the knee every time we invoke it;
perhaps, when we remember, we at least bow our heads.
Invoke it, nonetheless, we do:
in moments of ecstatic joy,
deep grief,
and profound frustration.

Name him, Christians, name him, with love strong as death
And with awe and wonder, and with bated breath!
He is God the Savior, he is Christ the Lord,
Ever to be worshipped, trusted and adored.

Jesus: all that God has promised in the divine name,
all that I AM meant to the people
who waited for him ever so long
has become Emmanuel,
God-with-us,
promise fulfilled in Jesus.

And “Jesus” has become, as Charles Wesley reminds us,

The name that charms our fears,
That bids our sorrows cease:
‘Tis music in the sinner’s ears,
‘Tis life, and health, and peace.

Of course, we have another “name” for him—
the Hebrew title, “Messiah,”
rendered “Christos” in Greek: the Christ,
the anointed one of God.

Almost from the beginning,
his title was treated as a name;
as something of a surname, a last name:
thus we call him “Jesus Christ.”

We heard in the Epistle lesson [Gal 4:4-7]
just a few moments ago, that
“[w]hen the fullness of time had come,
God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law,
in order to redeem those who were under the law,
so that we might receive adoption as children” through him.

And, not unlike those adopted into our own families and communities,
God in Christ has bestowed upon us his name:
We are “Christians,”
those who, like Jesus himself,
have been anointed—quite literally in baptism;
we are christened: Christ-ened,
conformed to his own Sonship,
so that we might be “no longer a slave but a child,
and if a child then also an heir,” co-heirs of everlasting life,
co-heirs of the reign of God,
together with Jesus Christ our Lord.

Do we embrace that name that we have been given?
Have we learned to live every moment in and through that Spirit
by whom we cry out “Abba! Father!”?
Are we signs of the presence and promise;
do we make the Word-made-flesh real for those around us?
Are we living as those who have been “likened to Christ,”
untied to him as members of his body through baptism,
Christ-ened, anointed with his Spirit,
living by the power of the name of Jesus,
waiting with joy and hope,
ready to inherit with him the coming reign of God?

Ah! The stuff of New Years’ resolutions. . . .
and the day is still young—
besides, who ever said that resolutions had to be made right at midnight?

King James I

On 25 November this year Britain’s Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, announced that every state school in England would receive a new copy of the King James Bible of 1611, to which he was to add a foreword, marking the 400^th anniversary of this translation. The purpose of this was to “help every pupil access Britain’s cultural heritage”.

This may sound bizarre to American ears, but do not be fooled into thinking this has anything to do with the promotion of religion.

Although Britain’s National Secular Society decried this project as a waste of public money, as schools “were already awash with Bibles”, and urged the Education Minister to send out copies of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species instead, they needn’t have worried.

If one was to search for a way of inoculating young people against Christian faith, surely consigning them to study the sacred Scriptures in an archaic form, as “literature” instead of life-giving words, would work very well.  Parked in the school syllabus along Shakespeare and the other greats of the 17^th century, where it can be dismissed as ‘boring’, locked into language and thought-forms four centuries old, the Bible will be deemed an irrelevance, its insights buried in Jacobean-speak. Beautiful maybe, but also obscure, the force and potency of its message blunted by vocabulary and figures of speech no longer in currency.

The process by which the King James Bible is reclassified as ‘literature’ is well advanced. It is significant that whenever the Scriptures are quoted in the media, or in contemporary literature or film, it will be the King James version that is almost invariably used. There is scant regard for what the Church actually uses today. Rather, post-Christian society prefers its own nostalgic fantasy of things as they used to be, a picture in which the Church is tolerated as guardian of an almost-forgotten heritage.

This approach has been in evidence over the last 12 months in the various events organised in the UK by secular bodies to mark the 400^th anniversary. Here the Bible-as-literature has been celebrated, understandably enough, by a considerable number of people, at occasions in which the context of faith or worship plays no part.

What is harder to understand is the way in which many churches and religious organisations have used the King James Bible this year is a similar way, organising events at which the whole text of the Bible has been either read aloud continuously, or written out verse by verse, separated out from the context of public worship. It seems a strange way to treat Holy Scripture, albeit a version no longer in widespread use liturgically.

Have not all of us, both inside and outside the Church,  been missing the point?  1611 was a hugely significant year because it saw the launch of one of the most successful and widely loved translations of the ancient Biblical texts into the vernacular. It was not designed as a natural literary treasure (though it became one) but as a powerful means by which God’s people were to be edified and inspired, and the Church fired up with new vigour.

The aim of the translators then was to produce a version of the Bible that could be understood in the language of the day (just as Thomas Cranmer had striven to produce in 1549 an English Prayer Book in 1549 that could be understood by the people). Is it not perverse to celebrate the authors of such a bold and ground-breaking translation by dwelling on past glories and turning aside from the continuing process they set before us?

Surely we uphold and honour the work of the translation of sacred texts, not by getting fixated on one revered version now severely compromised in comprehensibility, but by continuing this unending task with renewed dedication, that in every generation, whether 1611 or 2011, as on the first Pentecost, “in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power” (Acts 2:11).

The whole is worth a read, but perhaps some paragraphs towards the end are particularly significant:

Our part of the Church is not alone in having spent a great deal of effort on liturgical reform. At Advent, our brothers and sisters in the Roman Catholic Church will be required to use new liturgical texts. We can always learn from the example of other members of the Christian community and indeed our own liturgy has been reformed by reference to the testimony and practices of the Church of the first centuries.

In former times before the liturgies of our Church had fully recovered these early forms, some of our priests adopted the Roman rite as a sign of fidelity to the ancient common tradition and an expression of our unity in Christ. At best their intention was to contribute to the recovery of a tradition which is both Catholic and Reformed, while pointing the way to the liturgical convergence we now enjoy, not least through the work of the international English Language Liturgical Consultation. They also recognised the proper place in the liturgy of prayer for leaders in the world wide church in addition to our own Archbishop. This is especially true of the Pope, who is undeniably the Patriarch of the West and as head of the Roman Catholic Church is charged with awesome pastoral and missionary responsibilities.

Much has been achieved and the debates of previous generations have influenced the Church’s liturgical practice and contributed to a convergence of eucharistic doctrine and rites. So it is with some dismay that I have learned of the intentions of some clergy in the Diocese to follow instructions which have been addressed to the Roman Catholic Church and to adopt the new Roman eucharistic rites at Advent.

The Pope has recently issued an invitation to Anglicans to move into full communion with the See of Rome in the Ordinariate where it is possible to enjoy the “Anglican patrimony” as full members of the Roman Catholic Church. Three priests in the Diocese have taken this step. They have followed their consciences.

For those who remain there can be no logic in the claim to be offering the Eucharist in communion with the Roman Church which the adoption of the new rites would imply. In these rites there is not only a prayer for the Pope but the expression of a communion with him; a communion Pope Benedict XVI would certainly repudiate.

At the same time rather than building on the hard won convergence of liturgical texts, the new Roman rite varies considerably from its predecessor and thus from Common Worship as well. The rationale for the changes is that the revised texts represent a more faithful translation of the Latin originals and are a return to more traditional language.

Priests and parishes which do adopt the new rites – with their marked divergences from the ELLC texts and in the altered circumstances created by the Pope’s invitation to Anglicans to join the Ordinariate – are making a clear statement of their disassociation not only from the Church of England but from the Roman Communion as well. This is a pastoral unkindness to the laity and a serious canonical matter. The clergy involved have sworn oaths of canonical obedience as well as making their Declaration of Assent. I urge them not to create further disunity by adopting the new rites.

There will be no persecution and no creation of ritual martyrs but at the same time there will be no opportunity to claim that the Bishop’s directions have been unclear. All the bishops of the Diocese when visiting parishes will celebrate according to the rites of the Church of England allowing for permitted local variations under Canon B5.

They do things differently in that part of the Church. For a Catholic response, perhaps less careful theologically than it should be but broadly sympathetic, see here.

Its principal author, Charlotte Kroeker, is executive director of the Church Music Institute in Dallas, TX, and a pianist who has performed throughout the United States, Asia and England, frequently in the context of worship services. Her fellow researchers and co-authors include Annette Conklin (two chapters) and Linda J. Clark (one chapter). The research method is well articulated in the “Preface”: “Each pastor and musician [leader] was interviewed individually, with the researcher using the questions in appendix A. Then the researcher attended worship services to observe the liturgy in action. A second interview with pastor and musician followed, based on the questions in appendix B. We later returned to the interviewees to ask questions about congregational perspectives, listed in appendix C.” The three sets of questions printed in the appendices alone would make the book worth its price for those interested in systematic study of congregational music leadership.

After chapters devoted to each of the nine congregations researched, the work concludes with three chapters summarizing the findings (“Commonalities Across Denominations and Contexts”), dreaming about ideal environments for worship music (“Characteristics of Special Note”) and suggesting courses of action (“Implications for the Future”). As one might expect, there is a strong emphasis upon education: of clergy-musicians, of musician-theologians, and of life-long worship music learners in the congregation. Since so much of the acrimony of the discussion on the Pray Tell blog seems to arise from varying understandings of what “the best” worship is, I found the author’s five statements on striving for “the best” worship music in a particular place and time to be quite helpful:

1. Our best is the accumulated wisdom of the gifted people in our midst.
2. Our best is the accumulated wisdom from the fields of both theology and music.
3. Our best is a congregation equipped to fulfill its task in worship.
4. Our best is the development of a repertoire of music within a congregation that has lasting value over the years, music that provides nourishment for the Christian journey.
5. Our best is the development of leaders of music for the future.

I hope these few reflections will encourage readers of the Pray Tell blog, especially those involved in clerical and/or musical leadership, to put “The Sounds of our Offerings” on their “to read” list. I also hope that this research will encourage others to refine the method and continue the project.

TOPIC 1 (Initiation, Reformation):
Development of the Confirmation Rite between the 1549 and 1662 Books of Common Prayer

Between publication of the first English Book of Common Prayer in 1549 and its terminal, “as by law established” edition in 1662 (upon which all other provincial Books of Common Prayer in some degree depend), the Anglican Rite of Confirmation rite underwent a number of adjustments in response to changing views of the sacrament, criticism by Continental reformers and changing pastoral exigencies. This topic will explore differences in the various rites (1549, 1552, 1559, 1662) within the broader context of the sixteenth-century Reformation initiation practice, attending especially to the first two Prayer Books — between which are the most numerous and most obvious differences — and focusing on the motivating factors for the development of the Anglican Confirmation rite.
.

Primary Sources

The Book of Common Prayer (various editions). On-line at http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/england.htm.

Jagger, Peter J. Christian Initiation, 1552-1969: Rites of Baptism and Confirmation since the Reformation Period, Alcuin Club Collections 52, 3-33. London: SPCK, 1970.

Whitaker, E. C. Martin Bucer and the Book of Common Prayer, Alcuin Club Collections 55, 82-120. Great Wakering: Mayhew-McCrimmon, 1974.
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Secondary Sources

Buchannan, Colin. Anglican Confirmation, Grove Liturgical Study 48. Bramcote: Grove Books, 1986.

Fisher, J.D.C. Christian Initiation: The Reformation Period. Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications/Hillenbrand, 2007 (reprint).

_____. “Lutheran, Anglican and Reformed Rites,” 154-161. The Study of Liturgy, revised edn., ed. Cheslyn Jones, et al. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Jeanes, Gordon P. Signs of God’s Promise: Thomas Cranmer’s Sacramental Theology and the Book of Common Prayer. London: T. & T. Clark, 2008.

Johnson, Maxwell E. The Rites of Christian Initiation: Their Evolution and Interpretation, revised/expanded edn., 309-373. Collegeville: Liturgical Press/Pueblo, 2007.

Meyers, Ruth. Continuing the Reformation: Revisioning Baptism in the Episcopal Church. New York: Church Publishing, 1997.

Mitchell, Leonel L. “Christian Initiation: The Reformation Period,” 83-98. Made, Not Born: New Perspectives on Christian Initiation and the Catechumenate, ed. Murphy Center for Liturgical Research. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976.

Stevick, Daniel B. “Christian Initiation: Post-Reformation to the Present Era,” 99-117. Made, Not Born: New Perspectives on Christian Initiation and the Catechumenate, ed. Murphy Center for Liturgical Research. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976.

The Lord be with you.

And with your spirit.

Given that ACNA is, as I understand it, fairly evangelical, I can’t imagine this is Roman influence. But it is interesting to ponder what influence, if any, the new English translations of the Missal will have on other Christian communities as they revise their liturgies in the future.