“DOING WHAT IS RIGHT IN ALL EYES”: COMBATTING ANGLICAN CONGREGATIONALISM

Photo by James Coleman on Unsplash.

Editor’s Note: This is the first in a two-part series on Anglican Congregationalism and liturgical reform. Check back on Friday to read Part II!

For the last five or so years, at various hearings of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church, on Twitter, or even in conversations about liturgical reform, I have hit two notes: the first, an observation from the New Zealand liturgical scholar Bosco Peters that Anglican common prayer is on the side of a pendulum “where all of us act according to our own desires (Deut 12:8), and all the people do what is right in their own eyes (Judges 17:6; 21:25),” (1) and that, on one Sunday in London in 2019, I went to three different services with two similar and one very different liturgical texts, and that I was worried that that could become the reality of the Episcopal Church. On the other side of the pendulum from that, everyone does the same thing every week with no variation whatsoever, and then that leads to the traditional Christian conundrum between complete freedom and complete obedience, neither of which is what we are called to.

The recent release of a report by the theologian Joshua Cockayne entitled The Communion Dilemma: The Challenges of Leading Eucharistic New Things, published by the Bede Centre for Church Planting Theology at Cranmer Hall, Durham, offered a distinct warning for the rest of the Anglican world. In looking specifically at 69 different new church communities across the Church of England, Cockayne found that of the 63 that regularly celebrated the Eucharist, 39 percent of them “regularly celebrated communion … using unauthorized or heavily adapted liturgies.” (2) As these occurrences happen, the church is placed “in the position of silently endorsing congregationalism,” allowing for new texts to come into being “without the theological support of the wider church.” (3)

The system in the Episcopal Church, where bishops can give authorization for new liturgies, might seem less congregational, but still reveals significant flaws. (4) A revised Ash Wednesday rite, authorized for use in the Diocese of Missouri in 2025, (5) changed the order of the service, moving the invitation to a holy Lent and the imposition of ashes to the beginning, which means that the most-well known liturgical acts of the day, the sequence of the invitation to the Holy Lent, the imposition of ashes, and the litany of penitence, is broken up and the most visible portion, that is, the imposition, is done without the catechetical portions of the service that are the Liturgy of the Word. Through the appointed lessons, which includes an instruction on fasting (from Joel or Isaiah), Paul’s letter to the Corinthians urging reconciliation to God, and Jesus’s warning in Matthew that God will not be impressed solely by our outward and visible signs of fasting, we are put in the right state of mind to receive that great “sign of our mortality and penitence,” knowing that in beginning our Lenten fast together, we follow in the paths that the people of God have trod for millennia preceding us.

Similarly, following their presence in the Exhibit Hall at the last General Convention, Trinity Press DC’s “Rite 4: An Experimental Liturgy for the Eucharist” was authorized for use at the parish of St. Stephen and the Incarnation in Washington, D.C, (6) and, following its announcement, made the rounds on Facebook and other social networking sites. To pinpoint only one example, the primary service in this proposed “Rite 4” includes significant changes to the Nicene Creed, which, amongst other things, replaces “Father” (Jesus’s own word for describing his relationship with God, see the Greek ‘πατήρ’ or ‘Patḗr’) with “Source” and “One” and “Son” with “Word,” creating a unique division between “Jesus of Nazareth” and “Christ the Messiah.” (7) These changes, the former of which is oddly reminiscent of Neo-Platonic terms, (8) have significant theological implications which we, let alone Anglicanism as a whole, cannot decide unilaterally. The Western church introduced the filioque (the belief that the Holy Spirit descends from both the Father and the Son) into the Nicene Creed over a millennia ago, and that division is still waiting to be fully healed.

So, what, then, are we to do? We have made a lot of positive progress in rewriting our Constitution and Canons to better allow for liturgical revision, but we continue to have this congregationalist (or diocesanist) impulse to try new things before other churches have had a chance to respond, which our Anglican predecessors have warned us about, from Antony Buller in number 61 of the Tracts for the Times (“The desire of novelty is restlessness; the maintenance of our own novelty is selfishness,”) (9) to Thomas Cranmer in his preface to the first Book of Common Prayer (“And where heretofore, there hath been great diversity in saying and singing in churches within this realm: some following Salisbury use, some Hereford use, some the use of Bangor, some of York, and some of Lincoln: now from henceforth, all the whole realm shall have but one use.”) (10) How can we find the right balance of faithful innovation and loving, critical reception of our shared traditions?

To wit, I would like to offer two proposals that I hope can continue to move us closer to the unity of the church that Christ prayed for on the night before he died and that we commemorate in this 1,700th anniversary year of the Nicene Creed. A shorter proposal follows, and a longer proposal will be out as a second part of this article on Friday.

The Imprimatur, or a process of ensuring sound doctrine

For those of us who enjoy looking at liturgical books from different traditions, it is very noticeable that any major publication from the Roman Catholic Church includes the attestation of a prelate giving it an “imprimatur,” which is the Latin text for saying “let it be printed.” By this, their Bishops ensure that, as part of their duties to “guard the faith, unity, and discipline of the Church” (to use our language), (11) the faithful are not led to believe something that might disagree with what the Church teaches. We have an equivalent in the Episcopal Church of requiring the permission of one’s bishop or ecclesiastical authority for the usage of liturgical texts outside of the authorized canon.

However, because bishops are obviously very busy and may not be theologians, in the Roman tradition, these publications are given to a “censor librorum,” a person who knows enough theology to be able to point out when something would, if published, “harm correct faith,” (12) ensuring that nothing is released that would contradict the doctrine of the church, especially those, like the Nicene Creed, that are ecumenically and/or historically significant.

We have seen instances of this already happening in some dioceses, such as the Rev. Dr. Daniel Joslyn-Siemiatkoski’s work (13) in the Diocese of Texas with proposing an alternate Good Friday liturgy, and now in the Diocese of Massachusetts with an alternate Palm Sunday liturgy. Many dioceses have their own theologians-in-residence or Canon Theologians, to say nothing of theologians, liturgists, and historians trained by the academy for service to itself and to the church who are accountable, not just to their bishops and the church, but to the larger theological academy. When our theologians speak, the church listens. (14) Perhaps we should have built in mechanisms to ensure that we continue to maintain, both for ourselves and our ecumenical relationships, to “the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints.” (Jude 3)

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1. Bosco Peters, “The LORD’s song in a foreign land” in When We Pray: The future of Common Prayer, ed. Stephen Burns and Robert Gribben (Melbourne: Coventry Press, 2020), 148.

2. Joshua Cockayne, The Communion Dilemma: The Challenges of Leading Eucharistic New Things (Durham: Cranmer Hall, 2025), 8.

3. Ibid., 56.

4. In making these critiques, I do so out of love for all involved and a concern for our church’s tradition.

5. Episcopal Diocese of Missouri, “Ash Wednesday Revised for use within the Episcopal Diocese of Missouri,” 2025, https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/www.riteandmusical.org/atrm/2025+Ash+Wednesday+Liturgy+Revised.pdf.

6. David Paulsen, “‘Rite 4’? Not yet, but Episcopal Church encourages experimentation with new liturgies,” Episcopal News Service, September 18, 2025, https://episcopalnewsservice.org/2025/09/18/rite-4-not-yet-but-episcopal-church-encourages-experimentation-with-new-liturgies.

7. J.A. Frazer, The Holy Eucharist Rite 4: Service A, (Washington, D.C.: Trinity Press, 2025), https://static1.squarespace.com/static/6660712ccb04d078724d0734/t/68dc6d9074bef5635684ac6f/1759276432760/Rite-4-Service-A-2025-09.pdf.

8. I tip my hat to the Rev. Dr. Chris Corbin and the Rev. Ben Wyatt for pointing this out.

9. Antony Buller, “The Catholic Church A Witness Against Illiberality,” Tracts for the Times 61, May 1, 1835, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Tracts_for_the_Times/Tract_61.

10. Thomas Cranmer, “Preface,” The Book of Common Prayer 1549, http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/1549/front_matter_1549.htm.

11. Book of Common Prayer 1979, 517.

12. Code of Canon Law, Can. 823 §1.

13. For full disclosure, I have supported the Rev. Dr. Joslyn-Siemiatkoski’s work for a number of years, chiefly through introducing the alternate Good Friday liturgy at the 80th General Convention.

14. See: Egan Millard and David Paulsen, “Theologians’ statement on open Communion reignites debate among Episcopalians ahead of General Convention,” Episcopal News Service, June 3, 2022, https://episcopalnewsservice.org/2022/06/03/theologians-statement-on-open-communion-reignites-debate-among-episcopalians-ahead-of-general-convention.