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Fresh Expressions in the Sacramental Tradition
Steven Croft and Ian Mobsby, editors
Canterbury Press £16.99
(978-1-85311-973-6)
Church Times Bookshop £15.30
THE challenge is everywhere. A Church of England bishop faces a group of confirmation candidates, prepared on something like the Alpha Course, with little understanding of the sacramental nature of the Church (including the holy communion, which they are just about to take for the first time) and its connection with what the incarnation means for the world.
Central African bishops struggle to maintain the Catholic tradition brought by the UMCA missionaries against demands for more Charismatic worship because the latter is either more “African” or more in keeping with the 24/7 American Pentecostalist evangelists as seen on TV.
In an English training college for ministers and missionaries, on the raised dais in the worship room, you find not a pulpit and an altar, but a stand mike and a large keyboard — no longer Word and Sacrament, just words and music.
No one doubts that for the Church to survive modern and post-modern culture it will need to express itself in new and fresh ways; but does this mean that the sacramental tradition is dead? The collected articles in this book say No, but with more aspiration than evidence.
The Archbishop of Canterbury’s theological introduction makes the connection between contemporary culture and the Catholic tradition, in that they both give priority to event rather than word, but then registers just how counter-cultural we can be in affirming the value of time rather than the immediate experience, the communal rather than the individual, andthe prime mover as being God rather than ourselves. And what about sacraments, which anchor what we’re doing with what God is doing?
Brian McLaren, recognising that the UK, unlike his native America, has reached the post-modern and post-colonial moment, believes — as he said at last year’s Lambeth Conference — that Anglicanism is ideally situated to draw from pre-Enlightenment sources for the new wineskins that will be needed. Richard Clarke, from Affirming Catholicism, puts it more philosophically in a deep and some-time rather dense contribution.
There are stories of liturgical experiment from York and Maine, Gloucester and Gosport, and new monasticism from London and Seattle. Interestingly, at least two of them are attached to cathedrals, whose resources should surely be more available to this movement.
As always, Richard Giles writes insightfully about liturgy and buildings.
Bishop Stephen Cottrell reminds us that mission, and liturgy that connected with where people were but often upset church leaders, was at the heart of Anglo-Catholicism. One of the editors, Bishop Steven Croft, advocates the Gamaliel principle, urging those of a more traditional Anglo-Catholic persuasion to wait and see whether the new expressions of church can be authentic carriers of the tradition; but he is soon telling Gamaliel to stop shilly-shallying and vote in favour!
Can the sacramental tradition find a place in the newly emerging expressions of church? The irony is that the culture that denies this tradition is in such desperate need of the depth and direction that it can bring. Can these bones live? If not, the Church and, more importantly, the world will be a much shallower place.
The Rt Revd Michael Doe is general secretary of USPG: Anglicans in World Mission.
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