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October 2006, Page 1.
Index of articles:
by subject,
by date.
In this issue:
(October 2006)
Morning Prayer,
I praise you Lord,
Hebrews.
Morning Prayer
Sunday Mornings at St Luke’s
HC = Holy Communion,
* also for Mothering Sunday & Easter Sunday.
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Our Church Council has agreed to a slight change to our pattern of services for an experimental period. The details are as set out in the box below, and the pattern will be reviewed on 2nd May 2007 with a view to asking the bishop for permission to make it permanent.
The change is on the 3rd Sunday of each month, when we’re introducing Morning Prayer on a regular basis and there won’t be a main service of Holy Communion. We’ve done this several times when the clergy have been on holiday, but only on an occasional basis. So why do this regularly? Three reasons:
1) There are no longer enough clergy to cover all churches for holidays, so lay people will be conducting services. Therefore we need to get used to forms of service which lay people are allowed to conduct. We all need exposure to non-Communion services. And it shouldn’t really be the visiting lay reader’s job to introduce the congregation to Morning Prayer - that should be the vicar’s job. So we need to build non-Communion services into our pattern of worship.
2) Although regulars are comfortable with Holy Communion services, visitors can find them threatening. (Go to a christening with Holy Communion and watch, if you don’t believe me!) We need to rediscover Morning Prayer for the sake of evangelism.
3) The Church of England tries to keep the best aspects of both Catholic and Reformed Christianity. So in the history of Anglicanism there always was regular Morning Prayer - the “ministry of the word” was just as important as the “ministry of the sacrament”. This only changed in the 1960’s when the “Parish Communion” movement took hold. We’re going back to our roots.
John Hartley