Last night the community celebrated the licensing of our new warden, Trevor, by the Church of England.I know you're thinking - licensed to do what? Dr. Watson commented for weeks beforehand that she was sure we'd be able to sell liquor and spirits after 2 July. Honestly, I didn't understand at all what the license was for until the actual ceremony. I guessed it was a "license to preach" - or at least, to administer communion (you must be ordained in the Anglican church to give communion, no lay people allowed). I was partly right - Trevor was "licensed to" the Bishop of Kensington and basically runs Lee Abbey at the Bishop's pleasure and discretion. Even though the Bishop has really nothing to do with the Lee Abbey Movement.
For the first time, sitting through that service, I realized how Christians must have felt 500 years ago. When they attended church, the clergy spoke in a language they did not know (you can sometimes still feel that way in an Anglican church today :), and held all the power. The priests were the gateway to God - they held all the knowledge, all the privilege, and all the power of salvation, forgiveness, and opportunity. I did not realize how amazing blessed I have been to always know that God chose me, that He talks directly to me, and that I do not have to wear a white robe and red stole to receive all the benefits that Christ offers.
The service was an interesting opportunity to reflect on Anglicanism as I have experienced it in Britain. I reguarly attend an Anglican church - but it is a church on the cutting edge of evangelism, worship, discipleship, and community outreach in one of the most diverse cities in the world. It hardly represents the average Anglican experience. Every Anglican church I have visited in the cities around England have all been extremely old (think stone cathedral-ish) and small. You would never fit more than 150 people in most of them. From what I hear, the congregations are mostly old, and mostly declining. Church growth comes from established families having kids.
That being said, most of the members of the clergy I have met have been extremely devoted, sensitive, and dynamically growing Christians. But I constantly get the sense that they have to battle an increasingly irrelevant heirarchical church structure.
We use modified Anglican service forms for our communion services at Lee Abbey. I remember the first month I was here - about my third communion service, I realized that they ALWAYS use a set liturgy to do communion. There are slight adaptations here and there for different times of the year, but they all follow the same pattern. And my first reaction was, "How constraining!" It felt legalistic and binding, to be restricted to one form for worship.
However, as the year has gone by, I've come to really relax into the communion service and even find a lot of freedom in it. When I think about all the things I'll miss when I go home, one of the things that comes to my mind is that I probably won't hear the Eucharistic prayer which begins the service.
Imagine for a minute: you are worshipping together with all the people that you love. Your friends and your family, the people that you see everyday, that you work with and have fun with, people that may frustrate you constantly but that still make your world special. You have spent time praising Christ's name together, listening to Scripture read, and now you are preparing to share together in the bread and wine as Christ's disciples did so long ago. Whoever is leading the service announces:
The Lord is here!
You answer, in unison with everyone you love around you:
His Spirit is with us!
Leader: Lift up your hearts
You: We lift them to the Lord.
Leader: Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.
You: It is right to give thanks and praise.
I will miss how those words echo around and among us, the sense of Christ's presence filling the room, the reminder that He wants my heart to be lifted even more than my hands, and how right it is that we give him thanks and praise!
Living in community has really changed my attitude about taking communion. My experience with communion in the past has always been one that emphasized my personal relationship with Christ - always a private thing, even if done in a group. I still haven't quite processed it through, but where in the past I thought communion was just about me sharing in Christ's body and blood, now I find it is through Christ's body and blood that this community becomes the true Body of Christ. The blood and wine is merely a tangible picture of the fact that Christ is bodily present in us as a community - that our actions toward each other are the flow of his blood to cleanse and heal and redeem. So communion isn't one way - between me and God only. Because God is made manifest in the people I live and work with, so my relationship with them is intricately tied to my relationship with God. I cannot separate them. Which is why we use the same root for communion and community.I think that I still have a lot I can learn from the Anglican style of worship. But I also pray very fervently that they too would have the courage to seriously examine some of their entrenched practices and critically review whether they really serve the purpose of drawing people closer to God.
