From Dr L. Trent
Sir, - My work requires that on weekdays we live in a flat in
central London; so that is where our children attend school, but,
after the death of my father, my mother gave us the house in a
small Kent town where I was born; so that is where our family spend
every weekend.
We are Anglicans to the core. Yet every week we walk past the
town's parish church, where I was once a boy server, to worship at
the Roman Catholic church, where we also find a few other "Anglican
refugees", and several children of C of E families in the Sunday
school.
The situation has come about because of what has happened at the
parish church.
That church had a good all-age congregation with a sung parish
eucharist every Sunday, with its attached Sunday school. The
present vicar, however, has replaced that with informal
consumer-choice Baptist-style services conducted by an assortment
of lay people and himself in casual dress. Only once each month is
that service a eucharist, and then it is barely discernible as
such, since the Kyrie, Creed, Benedictus, and Agnus Dei have been
eliminated or replaced with other things.
Some of the few children present, even if not baptised, receive
holy communion, but with no preparation; and the vicar says "We
don't bother about confirmation here."
It is all so completely un-Anglican. The eucharist at the RC
church is very "middle Anglican" in style, and, when we attended
the Methodist church near by for a friend's baby's baptism, it was
in the context of an Anglican-style eucharist, and the minister
wore cassock-alb and stole.
On Easter Day and Pentecost Sunday, the priest at our (RC)
church invited us to receive the holy sacrament on the grounds that
we have been deprived of the sacrament in our own church.
This is not the only C of E church where the faith and order and
practice of the C of E has been replaced by Baptist-style teaching
and worship, but what are our bishops, the guardians of the faith,
doing about it? Precisely nothing, it seems.
L. TRENT
Flat C, Feeney House,
Bolsover Street
London W1W 5DE