In Tuneful Accord. Trevor Beeson

to order the worship of their churches as they thought best. Lacking liturgical skill and much imagination, most of them were happy to accept the limitations of the new, alternative book, and, although members of the travelling public sometimes complained that no two churches had the same forms of worship, everything on offer was clearly derived from the Book of Common Prayer, which was still regarded as the distinctive, unifying expression of the Church of England’s doctrine and devotion.

      There emerged, however, during the 1920s and 30s a small number of priests who were determined that the Holy Communion should become the chief act of Sunday worship in their churches, and this without turning to an 11 a.m. High Mass with no communicants – the standard practice of the extreme Anglo-Catholics. In several industrial parishes, often where the clergy were Christian Socialists, a celebration of Holy Communion was held at about 9.30 a.m., usually with the Prayer Book rite. Hymns were sung, Merbecke or the Martin Shaw Folk Mass was used as the setting, a sermon was preached, all the confirmed received communion, and families and young people were encouraged to attend. There was a strong corporate emphasis and in some places the congregations remained after the service to share breakfast in the church hall. ‘The Lord’s people, gather on the Lord’s day, for the Lord’s own service’, became a descriptive slogan.

      In 1935 Father Gabriel Hebert, a priest of the Society of the Sacred Mission, published Liturgy and Society, a seminal work which emphasized the vital importance of relating the Eucharist to the life of the secular world. At the same time, he advocated ‘The Parish Eucharist with the communion of the people as the central act of worship every Sunday’. The book was widely read and its liturgical emphasis proved to be influential. Two years later Hebert edited a volume of essays, The Parish Communion, in which several clergy explained how such a service might be introduced in town and country parishes. Essays demonstrating the links with the practice of the early church were also included, and in the dioceses of Chichester and Newcastle the number of parishes moving in this direction became significant.

      The 1939–45 war produced another generation of ex-service chaplains and ordination candidates who regarded the reformation of the church as an integral part of the creation of a better world and saw the Parish Communion as the key to the reform of worship. At a conference held in Birmingham in January 1948, an organization, ‘Parish and People’, was launched to promote the Parish Communion, along with the parish breakfast and the parish meeting. Its membership (mainly clergy) grew rapidly and during the next two decades the Parish Communion replaced Morning Prayer and High Mass as the chief Sunday service in most parishes.

      The speed of this development became a matter of concern to the leaders of Parish and People, who were in touch with a parallel liturgical movement in the Roman Catholic Church on the continent. The theological foundation of the change and its social implications were being ignored and the Parish Communion was being adopted as ‘a nice service at a convenient time’. This greatly worried Michael Ramsey who was at the time Bishop of Durham. Nevertheless the movement was powerful enough to stimulate a period of intense liturgical experiment and revision that began with the appointment by the archbishops in 1955 of a Liturgical Commission. During the next 25 years many different versions of all the services were produced in booklet form and tried out, and in 1980 what were deemed to be the best, or at least the most widely acceptable, forms of these were published in a 1,293-page Alternative Service Book. Some were in modern English, though the gain in intelligibility was offset for many lay users by the complexity of the range of choice on offer to those conducting the services. Again, the emphasis was on the experimental and it was explained that another 20 years would be needed for the creation of texts that could be regarded as fixed for a reasonably settled period of time.

      Change was, however, by no means confined to the structure and words of the liturgy; it extended to its ceremonial presentation. The insight that in the Eucharist priest and laity are engaged in a shared action, each with a distinctive role, required all to be in reasonably close proximity to the altar; preferably gathered around it. The same insight required the laity to have a more active role in the liturgy itself, expressed in the reading of the Bible, the leading of intercessions, the presentation of the bread and the wine at the Offertory, and the administration of communion. It led also to a reconsideration of the place of music and the function of a choir, with emphasis on congregational participation and sometimes the introduction of instruments to augment or even replace the organ. Back to the church band.

      Such a liturgical reformation could not easily be arranged in medieval buildings designed for eucharistic worship in which the priest alone had a significant part to play and the laity were banished to a nave distant from the altar, even screened from it. The 1960s therefore saw the beginning of what would become a widespread reordering of church interiors, including the many Victorian buildings erected on Gothic principles. Nave altars were installed and fixed pews replaced by mobile chairs. In order to create a more corporate atmosphere the priest faced the congregation across the altar and a number of laypeople were located close by in the sanctuary.

      Even with the most imaginative use of space and furnishings, however, this proved to be quite a long way from ideal, especially in large churches where many members of the congregation were, of necessity, still disposed in formal ranks and far from the focus of the eucharistic action. The need for a considerable number of new church buildings went some way to solving the problem in new housing developments where buildings of circular, octagonal and trapezoid shape began to appear.

      The establishing of an Institute for the Study of Worship and Religious Architecture at Birmingham University offered the church an opportunity to match its buildings with its worshipping needs. But unlike France, Germany and other continental European countries, Britain was lacking in first-class, innovative architects, as well as wealthy churches, and by the end of the century most of the new buildings seemed sad, shabby even. Nonetheless the worship offered in the overwhelming majority of parishes at about ten o’clock on Sunday mornings was significantly different from anything previously experienced in Britain and closer in pattern to that of the earliest Christian communities of the Mediterranean world.

      Meanwhile steps had been taken to ensure that there could be no repeat of the 1927/28 debacle. In 1970 Parliament accepted a Worship and Doctrine Measure which allowed the Church of England to make its own decisions in these areas without political approval. A change of outlook in liturgical studies also led to the abandonment of uniformity as an ideal and to the acceptance of a considerable degree of variety. Thus, in the sensitive area of eucharistic doctrine and its expression, both Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics were offered liturgies they could use. They were themselves also more open to change than ever before.

      The long period of experiment ended in 2000 with the publication and authorization of Common Worship, which included eight different eucharistic rites. This was followed by several more volumes which covered the remainder of the services – all attractively printed and costing in total about £75. The Rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill, in the City of London complained that a wheelbarrow was needed to carry them all to church. The policy enunciated in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, ‘And whereas heretofore there hath been great diversity in saying and singing in Churches within this Realm … now from henceforth all the whole Realm shall have but one use’, had been turned on its head.

      The revival of Evangelicalism, particularly in its charismatic form, had by this time, moreover, raised new and difficult issues. A Pentecostal movement, sweeping like fire through many parts of Latin America and Africa, eventually reached Britain, and immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa added their own spontaneous forms of worship – all far removed from the traditions of the long-established churches. Their style was not dissimilar to that of the nineteenth-century revivalist movements, with a strong emphasis on worship – hymns, songs and choruses – as a tool of evangelism and the saving of souls.

      The number of Anglican churches embracing the charismatic tradition in its fullness was, and remains, relatively small. But elements of it exist in a large number of fairly typical Evangelical congregations and the effect on their worship has often been sharply divisive. The introduction of songs and choruses of an exuberant sort, accompanied by guitars and percussion instruments, represents a radical change, both of form and underlying spirituality, for traditional churchgoers. Those attending only at the great festivals have often been surprised, and