During the season after Pentecost, the church is invited to live into our baptismal unity with our siblings across the globe. With a rich diversity of tongues, we are reminded that our local churches, dioceses, and provinces are all a part of a larger Body. As we gather in our myriad of ways across time and space, this long season invites us to be one in our common worship of the Triune God, three persons in unity of being. As Anglicans across the Communion gather for worship, we live into God’s expansive vision for the human family, recognizing that ultimately “all things are of God, who has reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:18). 

This year, to live into the season after Pentecost, my parish took on the practice of worshipping with eucharistic rites from around the Anglican Communion. Each month, we worship with a different eucharistic rite, learn about its province, and then debrief at the end of the month. Akin to travelling to another country to gain an appreciation of both another culture and one’s own, I hoped that worshiping with eucharistic rites from across the communion might help my parish both appreciate our place in the Communion and be more attentive to our own worship, including our use of eucharistic rites I and II from the Book of Common Prayer (1979). I also hoped that this practice would  celebrate the diversity within the Anglican Communion, deepen my parish’s Anglican identity, and  allow other province’s rites to shape our faith. 

After all, we are a church, that prides itself on lex orandi, lex credendi: the law of prayer is the law of belief. The flip side of this is that we are also a church that has specific canons and rubrics that define very clear boundaries concerning liturgy and music.

We are a tradition that keeps the faith of our flock by only using authorized texts, music, or prayers. It is, of course, General Convention––the triennial, representative gathering of The Episcopal Church (TEC)––that authorizes liturgical resources for common use, through a careful discernment process involving trial implementation and prayerful deliberation. We don’t just go at it on our own (and that’s one of the many things I love about being an Episcopalian).

TEC’s Constitution & Canons make clear which Book of Common Prayer is to be used in “this”––being TEC.  Title II, Canon 3, Sec. 1“Of the Standard Book of Common Prayer,” states: “The copy of the Book of Common Prayer accepted by the General Convention of this Church, in the year of our Lord 1979, and authenticated by the signatures of the Presiding Officers and Secretaries of the two Houses of the General Convention, is hereby declared to be the Standard Book of Common Prayer of this Church.” (1) Priests in TEC, vow to “be loyal to the doctrine, discipline, and worship of Christ as this Church has received them” and to be “in accordance with the canons of this Church, obey [our] bishop and other ministers who may have authority over [us] and [our] work.” (2)

Praying with eucharistic rites from outside TEC is a matter of some controversy. It can be constituted as “a special form of worship” (Constitution, Article X), which recognizes the authority of Bishops “to take such order as may be permitted by the Rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer or by the Canons of the General Convention for the use of special forms of worship.” So too does the 1979 Book of Common Prayer note that “in addition to these services and the other rites contained in this Book, other forms set forth by authority within this Church may be used” (BCP, p. 13).

Furthermore, there have been discussions at past General Conventions on whether or not TEC  could use rites from outside provinces. This practice was rejected precisely because of the diversity of theologies found in eucharistic rites outside of TEC.

With such considerations in mind, I sought permission from my diocesan bishop to use these alternative rites and was granted permission to do so for three months. My bishop was particularly interested in hearing what my congregation learned from this liturgical experiment, given that liturgy is a major way in that we form disciples in TEC. 

We took pains to avoid cultural appropriation and liturgical fetishism. We did not want to co-opt another culture’s worship simply for the novelty. We feared that this would ignore the sacredness and embeddedness of liturgical practice, exploiting instead of employing other liturgies to worship our universal God. Over the years, the global church has rightly become more sensitive to honoring different cultural practices within the worship of “the only true God” (John 17:3). We have sought to maintain a unity in diversity, humbly receiving our dissimilarities as mutually-shaping gifts––and this while endeavoring to avoid the imperial, colonial impulses of the past.

I continue to wrestle with whether or not there ought to be any “Anglican allowances” for praying with, say, Welsh, New Zealand, or Kenyan eucharistic rites. To be sure, these are our full-communion siblings united––in agreement and disagreement––by bonds of affection. But does the fact that we are all members of a global communion permit us to utilize one another’s culturally-, contextually-determined prayers for communion? What of our other full-communion siblings? Where is the line between appreciation and appropriation? 

To be sure, no liturgical rite––or even the bedrock of Scripture itself––emerges outside of cultural context. The first eucharistic rites evolved from within multiethnic, multilingual, pluralistic communities of Jesus followers. The rites that we use today, across the Anglican Communion, evolved from and harken back to those first primary sources. And it is almost trite to acknowledge the cultural contexts in and through which Scripture, in its multiplicity, was “God-breathed” (2 Timothy 3:16).

I would like to think that, as ethnomusicologist Marissa Glynias Moore contends regarding “global song” in worship, such use of different liturgies from around the Anglican Communion can act “as a measure of hospitality, not only to literally welcome global Christians into the [worship] space, but also to open the hearts of current congregants to understanding their role as equal brothers and sisters in Christ.” (3)

What’s more, our hope was to imitate Saint Francis as he introduced the Stations of the Cross to Europe. During the middle ages, Christians were expected to make pilgrimage to the Promised Land during Holy Week. Christians without means could not afford such extravagant observances, so Saint Francis created a way to bring the Via Dolorosa––the footsteps of Jesus through Jerusalem to the cross at Calvary––to the local church. Could praying with liturgies from around the Anglican Communion be a way for local churches to make pilgrimage?

Throughout the process, I have been stunned by parishioners’ insights. I frequently heard, as one parishioner put it, “I had to listen and think more about the words that I was saying” while another added, “I had to reprocess the words being said,” because “I did not have the liturgy memorized.”

Others similarly found themselves engaging more critically with the liturgy. Some questioned the theological meaning of the ordering of the liturgy of the Word, asking, “what is the significance of the Confession of Sin appearing earlier on in some rites?” There were also critical engagement around manual acts, from my acolyte asking when he should ring the Sanctus bells, to my seminarian and I marking up the pages for the celebrant’s manual acts during The Great Thanksgiving, as I joked, “this is liturgical bootcamp!” 

During the past few months, most of my parishioners reflected on themes of culture, theology, and worship embedded in new rites as well as our own. Some parishioners noticed how the Prayers of the People reflected different contextual concerns, deepening and widening our intercessions and thanksgivings, and fostering, “a fresh way of experiencing communion.” Another remarked how the practice “broadened my thinking” and was “a gift of sharing in their culture and strong faith.”

All of this, in turn, led us to interrogate just how common is our worship––even within TEC?

While our experiment may be imperfect, I have come to realize how badly we need this long season after Pentecost. I need this long season to give me time to try to speak in new tongues and to listen to the diversity of God-created tongues. I need this long season to reflect on and recommit to the work of Jesus “to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross” (Colossians 1:20). For in our diversity of tongues, and in the imperfection of all our worship, we will continue to confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (Philippians 2:11).

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to the Reverend Paul Fromberg (Rector at Saint Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church, San Francisco) for offering feedback on this article and for information regarding General Convention’s discussions on whether or not TEC could regularly use rites from other communion partners. Special thanks to the Reverend Laura Osborne, Saint Gregory’s seminarian intern, for article suggestions on cultural appropriation.

1. The Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society of TEC. 2018. Constitution and canons for the government of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America: adopted in General Conventions 1789-2018, https://extranet.generalconvention.org/staff/files/download/239141.

2. Episcopal Church. 1979. The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church: Together with the Psalter or Psalms of David According to the Use of TEC. New York: Seabury Press, p. 526.

3. Marissa Glynias Moore, “Appropriation or activism? Reflections on ‘global song,’” The Center for Congregational Song, accessed 7/26/2021, https://congregationalsong.org/appropriation-activism-reflections-global-song/.